C-Suite Strategies for Nurse Empowerment and Executive Accountability.

Objective: We examined C-suite executives' strategies to empower the nursing workforce and to ensure their own accountability for nursing empowerment.

Background: Leadership affects workforce empowerment. The literature provides little formal guidance on optimal strategies C-suite executives can adopt for improving nurse empowerment or ensuring leadership accountability for empowering the workforce.

Methods: A system's top 47 executives were invited to be panelists in a Delphi study. Two Delphi rounds revealed leadership strategies for embedding empowerment and strategies for assessing leadership performance in workforce empowerment.

Results: C-suite executives rated specific strategies higher for nursing workforce empowerment and for holding themselves accountable. Specific strategies were rated high as easier to implement and more likely to have a major impact.

Conclusions: C-suite executives implementing strategies with greater impact may accelerate nursing empowerment, especially when executives also adopt their own strategies for holding themselves accountable.