Leadership Lessons Top 5 skills every nurse must develop

Описание: Welcome to the Leadership Conversations segment of The Nurse Shark Academy Show, where Tina Baxter, your host, shares leadership topics of the day.

Tina M. Baxter has been a registered nurse for over twenty years and a nurse practitioner for 18 years. She is the founder of The Nurse Shark Academy® where she coaches nurses to launch and scale their businesses. She is a contributor to articles on electronic and print media such as Entrepreneur.com, The Minority Nurse, LinkedIn, as well as a guest on numerous podcasts.

Welcome back to The Nurse Shark Academy Show, where we empower nurses to lead boldly, build profitably, and impact their communities with confidence. I’m your host, Tina Baxter, and today we’re diving into a topic that every future—and current—nurse leader needs to hear.
Whether you’re supervising your first team, running a department, or stepping into entrepreneurship, the skills we’re about to explore are the backbone of effective leadership in nursing. These aren’t just nice-to-have abilities; they’re the difference between burnout and balance, chaos and clarity, surviving and scaling.
So let’s get into the top five skills every nursing leader must develop—and how you can start strengthening them today.
1. Emotional Intelligence: The Superpower of Leadership
Emotional intelligence, or EI, is the art of understanding emotions—your own and those of the people you lead. In nursing, this is especially important because clinical stress, trauma exposure, and fast-paced environments can amplify emotions on any given day.
Scenario:
Imagine a nurse who’s consistently running late. You could reprimand them immediately, but a leader with high emotional intelligence pauses and asks, “What’s really happening here?” After a quick conversation, you learn they’re caring for a sick child at home and experiencing caregiver fatigue. The solution shifts from discipline to support, scheduling flexibility, or resource referral.
EI doesn’t make you soft. It makes you strategic.
How to practice:
Notice emotional cues. Pause before reacting. Lead conversations with curiosity rather than conclusions.
2. Communication that Actually Lands
Nurse leaders communicate constantly—with staff, patients, administrators, and sometimes entire communities. The best leaders are translators: they take complex information and deliver it clearly, calmly, and with purpose.
Example:
Let’s say your facility changes the wound care documentation protocol… again. Your team is rolling their eyes before you even open your mouth. Strong communication sounds like:
“Here’s what’s changing, here’s why, and here’s how this helps us prevent errors and protect our patients.”
People don’t resist change; they resist confusion.
3. Critical Thinking: Beyond the Bedside
We talk a lot about critical thinking in clinical care, but nursing leadership requires a different flavor of it. Leaders think long-term. Leaders anticipate problems. Leaders respond rather than react.
Scenario:
You notice supply costs rising each month. Instead of blaming staff for “wasting supplies,” critical thinking invites deeper review. Is the inventory system outdated? Are vendors overcharging? Is there a workflow issue causing repeated dressing changes?
Critical thinking turns knee-jerk reactions into sustainable solutions.
4. Delegation: The Skill Nurses Avoid the Most
Delegation is not dumping tasks. Delegation is developing people.
A common trap for new nurse leaders is trying to “do it all.” The truth? When you hoard tasks, you also hoard opportunities for team growth—and fast-track yourself to burnout.
Example:
If you’re the only person who ever handles staff scheduling, your team remains dependent. But when you delegate parts of the process to charge nurses or administrative leads, you build competence and create more time to focus on leadership priorities—like staff retention, patient experience, or strategic planning.
Delegation is a gift, not a burden.
5. Business Acumen: Understanding the Big Picture
This may be the missing skill most nurses don’t even realize they need.
Leadership is not only clinical. It’s financial. It’s operational. It’s strategic.
Scenario:
Imagine you want to advocate for hiring two additional CNAs. A leader without business acumen says, “We’re short-staffed.” A leader with business acumen says:
“When patient-to-staff ratios increase, incidents rise. That leads to higher overtime costs, increased turnover, and lower patient satisfaction scores. Adding two CNAs reduces those risks and improves long-term financial stability.” That’s how you get a “yes.”
When nurses understand the business side of healthcare, we stop being unheard and start being unstoppable.
If you’re ready to grow as a leader, elevate your income, and build a career that actually aligns with your purpose, then The Nurse Shark Academy is where your next chapter begins.