Family nurse practitioners (FNPs) are an integral part of the care team with critical leadership roles. Regardless of their place of employment — medical office, community clinic, rehabilitation or long-term care facility, specialty clinic, home care, ambulatory care or correctional facility — all FNPs have leadership responsibilities. They often have some mix of patient-focused responsibilities and organization and system-focused tasks. Examples of their leadership activities include managing patient-centered care, improving the quality of care, mentoring, coaching, educating, advocating, facilitating collaboration and providing leadership on internal and external committees.
5 Key Leadership Skills for FNPs
There are five key leadership skills for FNPs to succeed regardless of employment environment, including communication, teamwork, time management, applying evidence-based practice (EBP) and lifelong learning. Learn more about each of these leadership skills and specific tips to develop them:
1. Communication
Effective communication is an essential leadership skill that nurses can refine. They must listen carefully to patient and caregiver concerns as patient outcomes depend on their active listening skills. Clear and direct instructions to patients or team members is critical to ensure that everyone knows what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and why it matters. FNP leaders clearly and succinctly articulate their expectations and constantly seek clarification.
Key tips. Ways to hone your communication skills are to practice active listening with particular attention to body language. Listen more than talk. Stay open to feedback, use teach-back with patients and check in with team members. Lead with the main point of your message and keep written communication clear and concise.
2. Teamwork
Collaborative teamwork among clinical and non-clinical staff can improve patient outcomes, reduce medical errors, enhance efficiency and increase patient satisfaction. FNPs need strong leadership skills to encourage teams to work together seamlessly and achieve greater goals.
Key tips. Each person is accountable for their own action and role in the care team, but the FNP leader must take responsibility for their team. Celebrate successes to create a positive work environment. Discuss lessons learned from a situation and opportunities for improvement.
3. Time Management
One of the most common struggles of any nurse, particularly healthcare leaders, is learning to manage time. There are so many responsibilities and limited time to do them. Identifying ways to manage time is critical to success and a sustainable career. An FNP with good time management skills will be more productive in accomplishing individual, team, department and organizational goals.
Key tips. A key tip to manage your time effectively is to take time at the beginning of each day to identify goals and tasks, and then at the end of the day, take a few minutes to reflect on your day and your leadership. Reflection allows the brain to pause in the healthcare chaos and sort through experiences and observations to consider possible meanings and interpretations. Research shows that reflection increases productivity.
4. Applying Evidence-Based Practice (EBP)
FNPs have the clinical expertise with intense training, experience and knowledge to appraise EBP or best practices that may improve patient care. FNPs must use the clearly defined levels of evidence from national guidelines to ensure that patients receive excellent care. As authority figures, FNPs not only uphold standards but also ensure that their organizational care guidelines meet or exceed those standards.
Key tips. Often, nurses do not have time to review all the journals, so following online news channels and signing up to receive e-mails with the table of contents from key journals is a great way to keep your knowledge up to date. Be sure to read FDA alerts for new drug approvals or indications. Join several nursing organizations, nationally and locally.
5. Lifelong Learning
Nursing requires lifelong learning. For FNPs, this means continuing to learn clinical content but also leadership, management, interpersonal and professional skills. Effective nursing leadership also requires FNPs to possess knowledge of current trends in healthcare and innovative technology such as real-time data and data analytics.
Key tips. Lifelong learning looks different for each person depending on knowledge deficits and type of learner — auditory, visual, reader, kinesthetic. Educational opportunities include conferences, tumor boards, certification, on-line webinars or videos, journal clubs, leadership training and committee involvement.
FNPs must develop leadership and communicate effectively using a collaborative team approach to improve patient care. They advocate for changes in healthcare policies to improve healthcare by applying EBP and understanding the current healthcare environment. Therefore, FNP leadership skills are critical to improving patient care and healthcare reform.
Learn more about William Paterson University’s Master of Science in Nursing – Family Nurse Practitioner online program.
