Kirra Moser: Combining an MBA with a career in nursing and bereavement care

Today on The Modern MBA podcast we speak to Kirra Moser, a registered nurse and clinical educator who is an expert in death, bereavement and dying. Kirra has recently completed a distance learning MBA with Warwick Business School and talks to us about her experience balancing this with family life, a healthcare career, and a number of other roles and side projects!

Many students come to an MBA from banking, consulting, or MNC backgrounds, but what about those that don’t? The Modern MBA podcast with Marie Kirwan and Kristen Rossi shares the stories of those transitioning from or using their MBAs in unorthodox MBA sectors including the arts, healthcare, not-for-profit, academia, and more.

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Transcript

The Modern MBA  0:09  
Welcome to the modern MBA podcast with Marie Kirwan and Kristin Rossi. Our mission is to help MBAs coming from going into or merely considering more unorthodox career paths. We're a community to find inspiration and share stories.

The Modern MBA  0:25  
Today on the modern MBA podcast, we're speaking with Kirra Moser  , originally from Australia. She moved to the UK 23 years ago. And since then, has enjoyed a successful career as a registered nurse, often working in hospice. She's a clinical educator and as of 2020, an MBA graduate from Warwick

Kirra Moser  0:43  
Business School. So my name is Kirra Moser  . I am originally from Australia, which you'll probably pick up from my accent. I moved while I came to the UK on a working holiday about 23 years ago, 23 years tomorrow. And I was only supposed to be here for a year. But I ended up staying and have worked here since then. And I started my MBA back in 2018, finished in September 2020. And I did it through work Business School out of the University of Warwick.

The Modern MBA  1:18  
So Kirra, you've enjoyed an interesting and very varied career in nursing. What was it then that made you want to do the MBA?

Kirra Moser    1:29  
So I think what what struck me was I was watching, and my whole career I've kind of watched, I've watched the leaders of the healthcare organisations, and I've watched business leaders lead from a business point of view. And I've watched clinical leaders lead from a clinical point of view. And I've kind of watched the decision making that they make and I thought some of those decisions, I thought were a little bit questionable. And, and it was it became very obvious to me that business people didn't really understand clinicians. And I'm not sure that clinicians really understood the business agenda either. And given that business, people are unlikely to train into clinician roles. I kind of felt like, the best way around this was to train the clinicians into a into a business, we will train them with business skills. I sort of felt like there's a bit of a dichotomy between particularly between a business leader without any kind of clinical knowledge. There was a dichotomy between patient care and fiscal care if you like or best recent use of resources,

The Modern MBA  2:41  
you've done the MBA, you've recently completed it. What was the experience like and and what challenges did you face?

Kirra Moser    2:50  
Blimey, I, I think the MBA for me, I think was the most exciting, challenging knowledge filled experience I think I've ever had in my life, I think the exposure to different, so many different people, I think as a start, so different industries, different sectors, just the different ways in which people think and approach a problem, I think was just for me, it was just insightful. Seeing how an engineer would tackle one problem versus me as a nurse and you know, somebody else's an accountant, three very different perspectives, but all very correct in their own way. So I think that, for me was probably one of the real highs. It's, it has opened my my mind, it's opened by network, it's opened opportunities, and I think it's opened most incredible amount of possibilities that really didn't think we're possible. So I couldn't for the for the course itself, I couldn't fault it. I love the the general approach of the MBA. So the fact that it touches on so many different aspects of running a business. I think as far as challenges are concerned, I think, much like probably most of us are going to say I think COVID probably been the biggest one at the moment. But I won't elaborate on that, because I think we're all we're all a bit talked out of COVID as a challenge.

The Modern MBA  4:23  
You're currently employed on a project basis to deliver end of life care. And you're also a school governor and currently serve as a vice chair to the governing body and chair to the teaching and learning committee. Are there any really specific skills in the MBA that you found helpful in these very significant roles?

Kirra Moser    4:42  
I think what the MBA did was it It gave me a confidence and a legitimacy to talk from a point of knowledge. I think the certainly the knowledge and the skills that I learned have given me a A theoretical basis and theoretical framework and an evidence base to attach to concepts that I already thought that intuitively made sense. So I think for it, for example, you know, reducing waste, even though that's quite a logical thought to go to, to hear the theory behind sort of operations management, I think has been really useful. So it's given me Yeah, it's given me a sort of a concrete evidence to to attach to something that I thought was intuitive, intuitively a good decision. And I think that's, that's affected me right across all areas of my work. So from from nursing to being a school governor, and actually even just to parenting loosely applied skills as to running my own house. Yeah, I think has been, has been really interesting.

The Modern MBA  5:55  
What skills do you feel are key in the healthcare industry, specifically a more sensitive areas, such as bereavement and end of life care?

Kirra Moser    6:07  
I think one of the I think just to, before I answer that question, I think one of the most surprising parts of the MBA was looking, sort of reflecting back over the two years of it was a lot of the skills that the MBA was teaching. And certainly the skills being sought by the sort of leaders of future leaders of today and tomorrow, are actually those that are possessed by nurses almost intrinsically. So that idea of emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence and compassion in parallel to all the academic theory. I think that took me a little bit by surprise, because I almost went into the MBA for more theory or more business theory. And I was surprised to find it quite heavily focused on this compassion and empathy and emotional intelligence side of things. And so I think, as far as your to your question about what what skills I think the healthcare industry needs, from a point of view of bereavement and end of life care, I think that sector already does this very, very well. So this idea of a growth mindset and emotional and spiritual intelligence, open innovation and knowledge sharing, certainly when I've worked within the hospice and the life care setting, they do that very well already. And I think there are lots of other sectors, both in healthcare and outside that can really learn from the way we do things. And I think, because we work with sort of death and dying, we're kind of left out part of society, because nobody really wants anything to do with us until, until they absolutely have to. But when you do have any kind of involvement in the death care sector, you'll see how how the communication and and the emotion and the empathy, how strong that is within the sector. So I guess it's, it's those those kinds of things. So growth, mindset, emotional, spiritual intelligence, and, and this idea of knowledge sharing, is probably one of probably the skills that I would think, could be learned from elsewhere. Certainly within what we're seeing, certainly in healthcare at the moment, with the sort of the COVID crisis going on, as we're seeing an impending mental health crisis, both with with staff, and, and with people from business point of view. So employees, we're seeing a lot of grief. And and I think it's those kinds of skills, those real people skills, there's personal and human skills that are going to be needed to get us through this.

The Modern MBA 9:04  
And so going back to your sort of story, and where do you go from here? What are your your kind of career plans career plans next?

Kirra Moser    9:14  
Wow. Oh, I've got I've probably got more ideas and plans than I have time. I think, I think what, what came out of my MBA, so my dissertation, unsurprisingly, looked at bereavement, and obviously, being a business, it had to have some links to business. So what I looked at was decision making by managers within within organisations and the kinds of factors that affected the outcomes for employees. And what I found was there's a positive correlation between the decisions made by managers and and the sort of the outcomes for employees and that was just a simple Part of what became at what was a very, very big issue, that whole idea of managing workplace bereavement. So I know there's a PhD somewhere in that in that dissertation. And so I am kind of looking at what that looks like whether that looks like a PhD, or whether it looks like a business to set up to support organisations to do that. So, so that's kind of one aspect, I'm also returning to the shop floor, as they said, and I have, I volunteered to help out with the COVID vaccination programme in our local area. So I hopefully I'll be I'll be jabbing people, you know, in our local town shortly. And I'm also looking at advancing my governor role. So I've been at school Gov now for nearly coming up to eight years. And that's a post I can only hold for eight years in one school. So and now that I'm kind of armed with an MBA, I'm looking at taking that role to another level. So some kind of a non executive director level in perhaps a different organisation.

The Modern MBA  11:12  
I was thinking, as we've been talking just how really how impressive it is that you've have all these you've had all these achievements. And you've also raised a family. And it's such a It's so nice, to be honest, because I think that's, I don't know, I think it's kind of like the dream, you're able to sort of have have both things be really successful in your work, have meaningful work, and also have your family.

Kirra Moser    11:34  
Yeah, I think it's funny, actually, somebody I heard a talk once and the lady who was presenting and she said, You just can't have it all. And I just I thought about that. And I thought, No, I think you're wrong, actually, I think you can have it all, you just can't have it all at once. So I think there really is, but you can do it all you can have a fulfilling and valuable career, you can have, you know, a, you know, fantastic academic qualifications, like an MBA, and you can still be a good parent and be a good role model to your children.

The Modern MBA  12:09  
 Any sort of last tip that you might have for individuals working in the healthcare industry, and whatever, whatever area that might be, who are considering doing an MBA.

Kirra Moser    12:24  
I mean, speaking as a nurse, I'm not going to speak on behalf of doctors, I'm not really speaking on behalf of nurses. But I think for myself, as a nurse, as I've kind of looked back over my career, I don't think nurses really good at offering our own career pathway. And I think that's something that I have picked up from during the MBA and the kind of push for career guidance and support that's come on the back of or sort of alongside of my MBA, I found the nursing banding really quite restrictive in the UK. So I think it does take an active decision to step away and beyond or beyond those nursing bands in order to excel beyond the kind of pre built ceilings that are currently in place for nursing through the sort of the banding system. So I think for nurses, really, MBAs don't tend to cross career part of our career paths like that we don't really, I personally, I never really had a career path, I kind of just moved from job to job based on either somebody saying there's a good opportunity or somebody being promoted, because there was a role and I might be good one, there was no real sort of active decision making in that. So I think what I would recommend, as is, is looking at taking more control of authorship of your career. And I think, I think MBAs are still really restricted access to nurses. I think I've been really lucky in doing that, but I think if I know there is kind of MBAs through the NHS that that that are available, but I think you've you've got to be exceptional, and you've got to have some kind of managerial role in order to access them. So I think there's a bigger there's a bigger question to raise there about how are we developing out the nurses and our health care professionals. And I think much as we were talking earlier about this kind of this mental health crisis that we're going to see in our healthcare staff that if they're burnt out for clinical roles, what do they do next? So we should really be looking at how, how we can use their skills because to be quite honest, if you packaged up a nurse and sold them back into the corporate sector, you'd be looking at paying them a lot more money than then we're currently paying on nursing salaries. So, but yeah, so I think definitely look at these kind of opportunities as a way to enhance that that hybrid role, which I talked about earlier about sort of that business understanding alongside the clinical understanding because they get will give you it much as it's given me is that confidence and legitimacy to talk with confidence about what you know.

The Modern MBA  15:30  
That's all for today's modern MBA podcast. I'm Kristen.

The Modern MBA  15:34  
And I'm Marie. If you like this episode, remember to hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts.

The Modern MBA  15:40  
And you can get access to articles and more great content by visiting our website, the modern MBA dot code at UK or you can follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. Until next time, bye bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai