RN Skills and Management Skills: Are They the Same?

I walked into the nursing administrator’s office. There were stacks and stacks of papers all over her desk. She informed me that she only had a couple of minutes to talk because she had a union grievance that she needed to attend and she had never dealt with union issues before. She was frazzled, disorganized and obviously out of her element.

She had recently been promoted from the hospital’s nursing ranks into management. She let me know that she was the third RN be promoted into that position in the last 10 months. Her two predecessors had both quit their jobs after only a few months. Based on her workload and the lack of training and support she was receiving from the hospital’s executives, I knew that it was likely that she’d be leaving too. Why? Because neither she nor the managers who preceded her were qualified to hold management positions.

Harvard Business School’s ‘Working Knowledge’ website has a compelling article which tackles the question “Is Business Management a Profession?”. This is a must read article for hospital executives and administrators. Although it doesn’t deal specifically with healthcare management it cracks open the debate on whether management itself should be considered a profession. How you answer this question exposes your assumptions regarding how best to manage your organization or team.

Here’s my 2 cents. It is an erroneous assumption to believe that a great RN will make a great manager or administrator. RN skills are much different than management skills. In order to succeed in management people need training on managerial practices and strategies.