Taking the initiative: practical advice for nurse leaders and entrepreneurs

Q: I lead a nursing team and am finding that staff morale is currently very low, perhaps due to the time and cost-pressures in the NHS. Do you have any suggestions about how I could boost morale?

A: Poor 'morale' is like poor 'care' or 'poverty' in that it can be too large and abstract a concept to address practically. Translate the concept into specifics you can do something about. I use a technique I call the 'purge and prioritise' approach.

Call your team into a room and get members to write down everything that is harming morale on flipcharts. After 20 minutes, stop them and ask them, individually, to tick the three things that affect them most, personally.