How Servant Leadership Can Be Applied When Going Through a Health Emergency

Thank you for your post. This is quite a good presentation of how servant leadership can be applied during a health emergency to inspire courage, self-sacrifice, and nobility in delivering patient care on the frontline. The COVID-19 pandemic period was a trying time for both nurses and nurse leaders. They were tasked as the forefront healthcare providers with the burden of restoring population and public health in environments that risked their health. Working during the COVID-19 period exposed nurses and other healthcare providers to greater health risks. Such healthcare delivery settings require the leadership to ensure the protection of the frontline care providers from any form of harm. The ability of servant leadership to manage and encourage nurses through such tough times is based on its approach to prioritizing the delivery of services for the greater good (Canavesi & Minelli, 2022).

The important part of servant leadership is that it leverages the leader’s self-efficacy in terms of their capabilities, attitudes, and willingness to inspire collaborative interprofessional practices to achieve excellent patient and health outcomes (Murphy et al., 2020). Servant leadership is focused on the wellness of the team and the organization rather than the leaders’ objectives. Its approach to allowing all healthcare staff to weigh in during decision-making makes them feel their input and efforts matter, therefore meeting their need to belong. It also makes the interprofessional team members have a shared responsibility; therefore, each individual feels they have a role to play. Employees in a servant leadership environment are more likely to feel that their voices are heard. This is a basic explanation of why servant leadership was so critical in the successes achieved in managing the pandemic and why it should be implemented across the entire healthcare system.

References

Canavesi, A., & Minelli, E. (2022). Servant Leadership: a Systematic Literature Review and Network Analysis. Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, 34(3), 267. https://doi.org/10.1007/S10672-021-09381-3