Evaluating and Embodying Exemplary Leadership

Abstract

Teamwork is essential for patient safety as highly functioning teams make fewer errors. In high acuity academic medical centers, care delivery is complex and ever-changing, creating a high-risk environment for safety concerns. These intricate settings demand a collaborative approach to care delivery, where structured methods of teamwork and communication are engrained in day-to-day practice. With teamwork being a critical component of patient safety and communication failures likened to preventable medical errors, hospitals are looking to bolster leadership training and improve team dynamics. TeamSTEPPS is a proven method shown to enhance teamwork, communication, leadership, and patient satisfaction. TeamSTEPPS provides an evidence-based framework to optimize patient outcomes by improving communication and teamwork skills among healthcare professionals. Current literature on teamwork and communication demonstrates that nurse practitioners are uniquely positioned to improve team performance through the use of the TeamSTEPPS framework. Leadership as a concept and framework has often been discussed in business and in academia from a top-down approach where managers, professors, or those who are already in leadership positions share what they have learned and experienced with men and women who are not in positions of leadership. This sharing of knowledge, wisdom, and experience is incredibly valuable to younger or more inexperienced generations and is one crucial way of developing future leaders in both business and the academic world. As a business educator and faculty member, I believe students need to also be reading about leadership while they are in school, studying leadership concepts through focused curriculum taught by faculty with leadership experience and training, and through experiential learning practicing relational leadership skills as they envision themselves as leaders in the