Staff nurses often look to those in authority or those with the most degrees to provide leadership. Nurses need to stop looking to others to provide leadership and acknowledge their inner potential as leaders.
Leadership is a skill like any other that can be developed over time.
By sowing the proper seeds of knowledge and carefully tending them, nurses can cultivate the leader within. To be a leader, you have to make a commitment to learning, says Margaret Widner-Kolberg, RN, MA, BSN, CPN, a school nurse in Clarksville, MD, and Nursing Spectrum's 1999 Nurse of the Year. People are not born leaders. She envisions leadership as a journey of lifelong learning. Nurse leaders also possess an ability to effectively convey ideas in both the verbal and written form.