Is Your Leadership Style Making Employees Leave?

Delivering high quality care is crucial in senior care and it is dependent largely on care staff who are competent and satisfied with work. It is well known that direct care staff, including nurses and nursing assistants, have some of the highest turnover in the industry and that turnover is associated with negative outcomes such as poor care, higher rates of infection, and hospitalization. It is therefore critical that today’s administrators provide the right kind of leadership to keep quality of care high and turnover low.

Job Satisfaction Matters… A Lot

Numerous studies have examined factors that are most associated with direct care staff turnover in skilled nursing centers. Of them, the most important element is job satisfaction. Direct care staff want to do their job, get some attention and recognition, feel appreciated and supported. They want to believe they make a difference. The administrator’s role is to lead a culture of positivity and high satisfaction among all staff, but especially those providing hands-on care to residents. This may be easier said than done, due to restraints imposed by the organization which are beyond his or her control.

Low Satisfaction Leads to High Turnover

Studies have also found that care staff who experience low job satisfaction are most likely to quit their job and seek employment elsewhere. Elements of job satisfaction include their work schedule, high-quality training, and recognition. The administrator is capable of managing operations to enhance these areas as well as many others in order to increase job satisfaction.

Leadership Style Matters

In a recent study, researchers examined different styles of administrators and how they affect turnover of direct care staff. They labeled four different styles of leadership: consensus manager, consultative autocrat, autocrat and shareholder manager. The consensus manager is one who asks for input from care staff and allows their work to influence how decisions are made. The consultative autocrat seeks input but still makes decisions alone. The autocrat seeks no advice and makes every decision by him- or herself, and the shareholder manager fails to ask for advice or input and also fails to share important information to the team that would help them to make good decisions themselves.

Which Leadership Style is Best?

The study found that the consensus manager was related to the lowest amount of turnover because this type of leader permits a great amount of input and ideas from care staff that will be used to make decisions. These employees feel that their contributions matter and make a difference. The shareholder managers had the highest level of turnover because they failed to solicit input from their team and didn’t share information critical to perform their job or make day-to-day decisions in the workplace. They were left out of the decision-making process, had no opportunity to share their ideas and were left in the dark without important information to conduct their jobs.

What’s the Take-Away?

Regardless of what the style is called, administrators who lead by seeking their care staff’s advice, ideas and input have the lowest turnover. They allow their staff to share in decision-making and make changes as a team. They don’t make decisions alone and share important information so that everyone is on the same page at work. By leading this way, not only is turnover low, but job satisfaction is high which, in turn, positively affects quality of care.

(NOTE: Interested in CEUs for Nursing Home Administrators? Checkout my Nursing Home Administrator CEUs on CEU Academy and try a FREE CEU today!)