**1. Introduction**

Managing the health needs of the populace in a lower middle-income country (LMIC) such as Ghana is an enigma, due to the many challenges confronting the health system, particularly, the varied professional groups, increased cost of delivering care, increased workload, and the continuous diminishing numbers of staff. Being the largest group of healthcare professionals, nurses and midwives are pivotal to these issues. Thus, nurse leaders are constantly searching for the "best" approach to facilitate both staff and patients' outcomes amid these challenges [1]. Encountering these challenges and other related healthcare issues, nurse leaders should exhibit practical leadership skills that would enable effective utilization of the capabilities of staff to achieve organizational goals and prominence in their environment.

To ensure the long-term viability and competitiveness of the healthcare system, nurse leaders need a set of guiding principles or search for strategies cost-effectively using organizational competencies taking advantage of the opportunities within the environment whilst avoiding environmental threats. Leadership, therefore, becomes very essential in this approach by initiating a vision that harnesses the potential of staff and stakeholders to this commitment. For an organization to withstand time and change, strategic leadership principles such as setting high standards of excellence, demonstrating exceptional performance, and constantly delivering value.

The administration of nursing staff thus becomes crucial to any healthcare system due to their numbers and essential roles [2]. The phrase "nursing administration" is used to denote a broad range of nursing professionals who are well-versed in the principles of effective leadership in the healthcare industry. It is the art and science of planning, organizing, leading, coordinating, controlling, policy-making and motivating human resources towards the achievement of organizational goals. Nursing administration promotes commitment, cohesiveness, coherence, and direction to the provision of nursing services by encouraging efficiency and comprehensiveness in accomplishing the purposes and goals of nursing. Strategic leadership is sensitive to taking advantage of the core competencies of nursing staff to deliver quality incomparable healthcare.

In today's healthcare market, nurse administrators can highly impact the need for lower prices and better treatment that becomes a daily headline through leading and dealing with a wide range of concerns, such as policy, administration, finances, culture, and human resources. Nurse administrators are multi-faceted professionals who establish objectives and strategies for the departments of nursing and maintain organizational structure and culture to achieve the objectives by the maintenance of stable staffing patterns, selecting and assigning nursing personnel and formulating policies that are indispensable aspects of nursing administration. Additionally, they maintain proper nursing records for clinical and administrative purposes as well as constantly evaluate and improving nursing care of patients with the established nursing standard.
