Regarding recognition and a sense of belonging, I am proud and privileged to work in the organization that I do. We are democratic, and my assessment would be that we as nurses, may it be in nursing leadership, we do a fairly good job of modelling this. Most of the departments are lead by women, our leadership team is mostly female, and our staff team is made up of more women than men. This could be due to working in a health care field in a Catholic missionary elderly residential care home and the majority of health care team comprises of nurses, health care workers that basically forms a huge female dominancy. Nugent, Pollock, & Travis (2016) in their Catalyst report states that employees, regardless of gender, who experience a sense of uniqueness and a sense of belonging, feel that they are being included within the organization.<\/p>\n
I could improve recognition and a sense of belonging for women in my organization is by encouraging staff to share about experiences when they felt intimidated as well as comfortable with their effort and discuss these experiences, and then use these experiences to help form a common vision of inclusion (Nugent, 2016, pg.no 7). As per this, we could make necessary changes in areas to make all staff feel encompassed. We could ask their opinions and additional ways for staff to give feedback. Allocate time for personal meeting with a leader to offer feedback, which perhaps would receive more honest feedback from staff who do not feel comfortable speaking up in public.<\/p>\n
Many organizations and non-health care fields don\u2019t always give the first priority to women for leadership roles, but I understand that in some instances there has been an effort to get more women involved in higher levels, unfortunately women aren\u2019t first option when compared to men. Some potential reasons for this could be due to the safety, amount of travel required, lack of childcare options provided for women who are mothers, or it could be due to gender bias against women in high levels of leadership regardless of the organization openly valuing women in leadership. This system could be eradicated by collecting data about why women who have been offered these leadership positions have turned them down and then revamp the positions to make them more inclusive (Nugent et al., 2016, p. 11). Another effort could be discussing with leaders about the lack of women in these positions because \u201ctalk leads to action\u201d (Catalyst, 2013). Moreover, having the current leaders take a test like the Implicit Association Test offered by Harvard University so that they can be ethical leaders who are honest with themselves and open with others (Northouse, 2016, p. 346) if an implicit bias does exist.<\/p>\n
References:<\/strong><\/p>\n Catalyst (2013, September 3). Talk Leads to Action<\/em>. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.catalyst.org\/knowledge\/talk-leads-action<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n