Nursing Profession and Leadership Leadership Succession The dean’s role has evolved through the years into a position that is multifaceted. Not just a scholar leader, the dean is expected to be an effective manager, visionary leader, keen businessman for new student markets, grant bearer, and university ambassador to off-campus organizations (Wolverton et al., 2001). The dean is also expected to mediate grievances, inspire faculty, and be the model scholar that faculty could emulate. Often times, the deanship position is considered a lifetime and final career position, although, there is evidence that it is increasingly becoming the springboard for other senior leadership positions for those aspiring to much higher positions (Green & Ridenour, 2004). Indeed, so much is constantly expected from the dean. Understandably, most deans find achieving balance between professional and personal life challenging. As in any job, career advancement is often rewarded to those who are willing to put in unconditional dedication to long hours of work and countless social activities for the university. These unrelenting demands make any deanship position challenging to an aging nursing faculty. Nevertheless, there are endless rewards of personal fulfillment when a dean attains a sense of balance between work and family demands. Especially for those who want to make an impact on others, another source of personal satisfaction is working on behalf of others. Thus, despite its many challenges, deanship has endless opportunities to make a bigger and lasting impact on many people and the profession. The nursing profession has numerous challenges to contend with, one of which is the shortage of future academic leaders. The copious research studies on the nursing
Telling stories about yourself requires retelling personal and social events that can only be made possible by recall and retrospection. Both the personal and social are always present when we start to explore our life stories. Thus, a highly personal experience could not just be examined as purely personal. Instead, to better understand human experience, the inclusion of the social context of the event is also critical. The participants’ stories were not just exclusively about them but also about their families, people, events, community, and society that impacted them. As the researcher, I was aware that I was always in the midst of the research process, not just along the dimensions of time, place, the personal, and the social, but also in the middle of the stories—theirs and mine (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). The standpoint I convey as a female nurse and aspiring leader have a potential impact on my interactions with the participants. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) elucidated further: “Researchers’ personal, private, and professional lives flow across the boundaries into the research site; likewise, though often not with the same intensity, participants’ lives flow the other way (p. 115).” Being in the field when conducting interviews brought me close enough to my participants’ experiences to generate a familiarity that could potentially cause tensions; yet, I made all efforts to remain within the ethical boundaries of conducting research. Narrative inquiry is highly relational. Close rapport and continuous collaboration with my participants throughout the study were essentially vital to avoid misinterpretations and inconsistencies (Creswell, 2012). Through close partnership, I was able to elicit relevant and interesting stories as I tried to make sense of their lived experiences pertinent to this study. Temporality
The interview began with him recalling his childhood, which according to him, was a happy one. His mom was a bank teller and his dad was an electrician. He grew up in a “very, very rural part” of Southwestern U.S. that had expansive farmlands and in a town of around 10,000 people. He said that no one in his family tree had graduated college. However, he fondly remembered how his grandmother, a woman with no formal education, was one of the founding women of the Democratic Women of the State. Aside from being politically active, she also published articles on the state’s history and mining communities but had to do so with men because, at that time, women were not permitted to publish on their own. He recalled his grandmother as someone who was ahead of her time. Because of growing up in that kind of environment, self-learning and taking charge of things came natural to him. No one in his family was the medical field. In fact, Dean Smith is a first-generation college graduate and the first RN in the family: When I was thinking about what I wanted to do, it wasn’t about gender; it was about what I was interested in. I think a lot of that came . . . My parents were very, you need to do what you love type of people. Because I don’t . . . They understood there was a value in education, but they didn’t understand what it meant. They did not push us. They pushed us to learn, but not necessarily to go in any particular direction. My sister had the same thing, so there hasn’t been so much difference between us in those choices. When asked how he got interested in nursing, because there was no role model in the family to emulate, he explained that as a child he was interested in anything related to biology, technology, and the fine arts. He is a second career RN. He had a degree in fine arts and owned a business as a technical designer before he went back to school to become a nurse. When his father got sick and later died from cancer, he witnessed the work that nurses do for patients like his dad. He became emotional when he began talking about his father; I could hear it in his voice as he explained:
The participants in this study often articulated profound unselfish concern for other people, particularly the marginalized segments in our society. They expressed repeatedly their desire to make a difference in the health care arena. For Dean George, becoming a nurse was just another avenue to serve the public and provide for his family after leaving his firefighting career. Like Dean George, Dean Roberts also wanted to make a difference when he witnessed how AIDS patients were treated in the 1980s because of the lack of understanding of this disease. Becoming a nurse researcher was a way for him to change that. He had, since that time, became one of the experts on this topic through his research studies, particularly on postnatal HIV infection. Similarly, the AIDS crisis was the driving force that motivated Dean Frank’s research. He became a nurse practitioner who was in the forefront in caring for these patients. As a researcher, he focused on HIV treatment and prevention. He became one of the world’s leading experts on HIV in men. He continued to be involved in research and, at the time of the interview, was conducting a study on pre-exposure prophylaxis for AIDS among Black men. All these men considered their nursing profession as a venue for their caring attitude towards others. Becoming a registered nurse was viewed by all of them as a venue through which they could serve others, make a difference, and provide for themselves and their families. Career Trajectories The participants in this study all made a conscientious choice to enroll in a nursing program. Two participants each had a relative who was a nurse. A third had prior experience in health care as an PCT. Two men, as a career option, initially
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