Interpersonal Skills Needed for Nursing
Developing theinterpersonal skillsneeded for nursing will be a work in progress if you are a would-be nurse. In fact, it will remain a work in progress throughout your nursing career, as you reassess and hone your “people skills” on a daily basis.
Tolerance
One of the toughest things a nurse has to be able to do is to remain non-judgmental. Nurses take care of all sorts of people. Criminals, abusers, addicts, and the homeless are sometimes patients, too. So are people whose illness or pain makes them disrespectful or unpleasant, and so are those with backgrounds and beliefs different from your own.
Nurses don’t need tolerance only for their patients; nurses must also be tolerant of those who work with them, too. Certain healthcare environments can be especially stressful, and tense situations sometimes bring out the worst in people. Nurses must be prepared to cope with this constructively as they work alongside each other and other healthcare professionals, particularly in the highly diverse healthcare workforce.
Emotional Intelligence
Rudyard Kiplingsaid that “if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, and blaming it on you…you’ll be a man, my son.” He might also have said that you would make a good nurse. What Kipling was talking about is boundary-setting, one aspect of emotional intelligence.
In patient care areas such as operating rooms, intensive care units, and psychiatric floors, life-and-death situations can break pretty quickly. Absorbing panic from those around you is counterproductive in these situations. Being able to acknowledge and assuage the fears of others without taking them on yourself will make you a good nurse.
Horizontal violence, or workplace bullying, is a growing concern in the healthcare professions, and especially in nursing. Boundary-setting skills are critical for stopping this rot where it starts. Resist adopting negative, dismissive, or derisive behaviors against specific coworkers, even if such behavior is rife among your peers. Also, take appropriate steps to curtail bullying if you feel it is aimed at you. Do not underestimate the importance of this; student nurses and new nurses are the most frequent victims of horizontal violence.
The ability to set boundaries is also required to care for patients effectively. This is especially so for patients of whom you grow particularly fond. It's great to like your patients,but if you get too close, or too enmeshed with them, it can be difficult to care for them appropriately and professionally. In psychiatric settings, the ability to maintain professional distance is especially critical.
Affability
You might be thinking at this point that you have to be one tough cookie to be a nurse, but it’s equally important to be affable. Other words for affable are “gracious”, “good-natured”, “personable”, and, at its most basic, “nice”.
Patients may or may not like you, but they need to feel confident and comfortable enough around you to ask questions or make requests that may be difficult or embarrassing. Healthcare workers function best as a team, and your teammates need to feel that they can approach you as well. Just as importantly, there are times when you will be the one needing help or facing a difficult problem. Your coworkers will be much more forthcoming with help and support if you have been consistently affable with them.
Communication skills
Nurses give important, complex messages, and receive important, complex messages. They need to be able to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing (or data entry), and to be able to listen effectively and ask questions if in doubt.
Nurses also need to be able to recognize and evaluate non-verbal communication, which is also known as 'reading people'. This is especially important when assessing a patient's condition, or complaints of pain. Cultural sensitivity, the ability to correctly read and respond to people whose orientation is somehow different from your own, is an especially critical communication skill for nurses.
Common touch
Schmoozing your way up the food chain is the time-honored road to career success. If you want to survive as a nurse long enough to start up the chain, you need to also be able to schmooze your way down the food chain as well. The people who bring the food trays, maintain the building, and stock the shelves can make you or break you, and even if they couldn’t, it becomes you to give them consideration and respect at all times.
Sense of Humor
Nurses and most other health care professionals have agallows sense of humor. This is because they need it to get through the often painful situations they deal with on a day to day basis. Keeping the boundary-setting in mind—it is never okay to mock a patient or a co-worker—you will need to cultivate an ability to appreciate the ridiculous. It will help keep stress in check, and it will benefit your patients as well; sometimes, laughter really is the best medicine.
Compassion
You probably expected to see this interpersonal skill at the top of the list. Certainly, it is the most important characteristic for any nurse to have. For most nurses, though, compassion comes pretty naturally. Practicing the people skills you read about before you got to "compassion" will help you to keep that compassion bright and strong as you face the challenges and rewards of a career in nursing.
