We’ve all had role models in our lives. Whether good or bad they tend to influence our development along the way, and sometimes there are special people who pass through our lives that have a more profound impact than others. I can think of a handful of professional role models who have shaped my career in a truly positive way. There are of course a handful who have had the opposite effect. It would be unfair not to talk about the negative role models because sometimes we learn our best lessons by observing the behaviors we don’t want to copy. There will be more about the unruly, difficult and toxic influences later.

Very early on in my nursing career I met a woman who both inspired and terrified me in equal measure. She appeared to many as though she had been in-charge of this particular ward for eons. In reality she was between middle age and retirement, so wasn’t as old as the image in my mind recalls. An imposing presence in her flawlessly styled uniform, highly polished shoes and permanently set hair she managed the ward with military precision and unwavering dominance. As she bustled through the ward, righting the wrongs of the nurses on the previous shift and greeting each patient by their name, it became obvious that there was something special about this small, quietly efficient Ward Sister.

As Nursing students, we had all heard about her reputation as a strict and unpleasant Ward Sister so would naturally dread our clinical rotation onto her ward. The time finally came when me and three of my semi-educated, minimally skilled student colleagues pulled the short straw and headed to Medical Ward for three weeks of torture……or so we thought.

There is a type of person we sometimes meet who for no discernable reason intimidates us and subsequently we can be lesser versions of ourselves each time we meet them. Of course, this was going to be one of those times and despite my best efforts I could not do a thing right when Sister was watching. One morning in an effort to impress, I completed the “observations” round with lightning speed and a clinical proficiency that Florence Nightingale would commend, I accidentally dropped an old-style Sphygmomanometer, the type filled with Mercury in the ward corridor. I scrabbled around on the floor desperate to clean it up as quickly as possible, unknowingly making the situation much worse in my hurry. On my hands and knees chasing silver balls of toxic heavy metal around the corridor sucking them into a syringe as though life itself depended on my success. After a few minutes, I seemed to be winning the battle, whilst also rapidly improving my mercury collecting skills (of this I was very proud). I was horribly mistaken, Mercury moves at a rapid pace and seems to randomly divide into more balls, evading capture at every turn. There was Mercury everywhere!

In that moment I felt more than saw her. Frozen to the spot I looked towards the nurse’s station and there she was staring at the performance unfolding before her.

My immediate thought was to bolt from the scene, hand in my notice and forget any aspirations of a career in Nursing. Fortunately, I didn’t give in to the terror and bravely owned up to my mistake, mostly on account of my legs deciding to stop working at that precise moment.

Instead of running me out of town, Sister did the most unexpected thing. She smiled and calmly came to my side. She got on the floor with me, talked me through the safety considerations and helped me clean the mess up that I had made. I looked at her differently from that day, I observed how she helped her staff, how she insisted that she served the patients meals making certain that everyone was well nourished. She chaperoned with the notoriously difficult Doctors, coached during emergency situations and at the end of the shift she thanked everyone for their work……even the students were thanked as part of the team. Rather than seeing her as a tyrant, I began to see a leader, an expert in her field and a woman of compassion.

I’s easy to judge people before we get to know them, gossip gets in the way, and we allow ourselves to go along with the crowd. I felt badly for the way I judged the Ward Sister and made unkind comments about her in the kitchen over tea and toast with my colleagues. Over the years I have developed a no-judgment rule, I committed to making my own assessment of colleagues and leaders as I worked with them.

Judge a leader by how they stand at someone’s side when they need help, stand Infront of them when they need protection and stand behind them when they need to grow.