Ask experienced nurses about their first year in practice and many can still tell you about their preceptor. Sometimes it's the nurse who gave them the confidence to ask questions, knew when to step in and when to let them figure something out, and somehow corrected mistakes without making them afraid to try again. Others remember a very different experience: feeling intimidated, unsupported, or like an inconvenience to the experienced nurse assigned to teach them.
Those experiences raise a question I've been thinking about: What makes someone a great preceptor?
We tend to approach that question by focusing on experience and training. Both clearly matter. But what if there is another layer we don't think about nearly as much? What if some clinicians have underlying personality characteristics that make the educator role particularly natural for them, and we could become better at identifying and nurturing that potential?
Being a Great Nurse Doesn't Automatically Make You a Great Teacher
There is an understandable assumption embedded in the way many organizations select preceptors. Experienced, clinically strong nurses are logical candidates to teach the next generation. But being highly competent at something doesn't necessarily mean you'll be equally good at helping someone else become competent at it.
Think about what an effective preceptor actually does. They have to explain complex decisions in ways another person can understand, adjust their approach when a learner is struggling, provide feedback without destroying confidence, recognize when to intervene and when to allow independence, and create enough psychological safety for a new nurse to admit when they don't know something. They are simultaneously clinician, teacher, coach, evaluator and, at times, emotional anchor.
Those responsibilities require clinical expertise, but they also draw heavily on how someone naturally communicates, responds to stress, relates to other people and approaches the development of others.
There is some evidence that those individual differences matter. A study of 116 clinical nursing preceptors examined personality characteristics alongside teaching self-efficacy and found that extraversion was associated with higher scores across several dimensions, including teaching self-efficacy, professional skill, teaching strategy effectiveness and objective teaching evaluation. The researchers concluded that personality characteristics may influence a nurse's success as a clinical preceptor.
Another study examined 41 preceptors and 44 newly graduated nurses and found relationships between preceptor personality characteristics and new nurses' turnover intention, job satisfaction, role conflict and role ambiguity. It's a small study, and it certainly doesn't establish a personality formula for the perfect preceptor. But it does raise an intriguing possibility: who the preceptor is may influence how a new nurse experiences not only their training, but the organization itself.
What If We Looked for Educator Potential Earlier?
Most hospitals don't have the luxury of discovering that they need more preceptors six months before they need them. A cohort of new graduates is coming, a unit needs additional capacity, and experienced nurses are asked—or sometimes simply expected—to take on the responsibility.
What if we started much earlier?
There are probably clinicians inside most organizations who already demonstrate educator tendencies without holding an educator title. They're the nurses colleagues naturally approach when they need something explained. They seem to enjoy helping someone understand the reasoning behind a clinical decision rather than simply telling them what to do. They adjust their communication depending on the person they're working with, remain relatively composed when someone is struggling, and appear to get genuine satisfaction from watching another clinician develop.
Some of those behaviors can absolutely be taught, and none should be interpreted as evidence that someone is automatically qualified to precept. But personality research raises the possibility that clinicians differ in their natural inclination toward these behaviors. Rather than waiting until someone is needed and then asking, Who is experienced enough to precept?, organizations might also begin asking, Who has the potential to become a great clinical educator?
That is a very different talent question.
Then Nurture It
Calling someone a “natural born preceptor” would obviously be an exaggeration. Even a nurse with strong interpersonal instincts, patience and a genuine orientation toward developing others can struggle if they're handed a full patient assignment, a new graduate, inadequate preparation and little support.
The research reinforces that distinction. Reviews of preceptorship and transition-to-practice programs consistently point not simply to the presence of a preceptor, but to the importance of preparing and supporting that person for the role. NCSBN's national Transition to Practice work similarly identified preceptorship with a preceptor educated for the role as one of the characteristics associated with better outcomes.
So perhaps this isn't a question of nature versus nurture at all. It's about identifying potential and then developing it.
A clinician may bring the communication style, patience, adaptability or developmental orientation that gives them a strong foundation for teaching. The organization can then build on that foundation through educator preparation, feedback skills, teaching frameworks, protected time and ongoing support. Over time, that creates something much more valuable than a list of nurses available to take an orientee: it creates a pipeline of clinicians who see developing other nurses as part of their professional identity.
The Retention Stakes Are Bigger Than They Look
This matters because the preceptor relationship occurs during one of the most vulnerable periods in a nurse's career.
NCSBN estimates that approximately one-quarter of new nurses leave a position during their first year of practice. Research examining interventions for early-career nurse retention repeatedly identifies structured transition-to-practice, residency, mentoring and preceptorship models among the more promising approaches. One systematic review of 53 studies found that successful interventions commonly included transition programs lasting approximately 27 to 52 weeks with teaching, preceptor and mentor components. Another review found particularly strong retention outcomes among programs using preceptor-based models lasting three to six months.
More recent evidence points in the same direction. An umbrella review of mentoring programs for newly graduated nurses found one-year retention rates ranging from 72% to 100% across the programs studied, with post-intervention turnover ranging from 3.5% to 20%, compared with pre-intervention turnover reported as high as 50%.
Those numbers need an important caveat. We cannot attribute those retention outcomes to the preceptor alone. Residency and transition programs often combine education, mentorship, organizational support, structured competency development and other interventions, making it difficult to isolate the independent effect of one person.
But that may actually reinforce the larger point. The preceptor is not a single retention intervention. They are part of the environment through which a new nurse experiences transition to practice.
During those first months, a new nurse isn't simply learning documentation, workflows and clinical procedures. They're discovering whether it's safe to ask for help, whether mistakes become opportunities to learn or reasons to be embarrassed, whether they belong on the unit and whether they're becoming the clinician they hoped they could become. Their preceptor can become one of the most visible representatives of the organization during that process.
Eventually, those experiences contribute to a much larger question: Do I want to stay here?
Maybe We Already Know Who They Are
The interesting possibility is that healthcare organizations may already have many of their future preceptors hiding in plain sight.
They're not necessarily the longest-tenured nurses or the people with the deepest technical expertise. They may be clinicians who have never considered themselves educators at all. But other nurses already seek them out. They explain rather than dismiss. They adapt rather than become frustrated when someone doesn't immediately understand. Most importantly, helping another clinician grow seems to give them energy rather than simply feeling like another responsibility added to the shift.
We shouldn't use personality to label someone a good or bad preceptor, and it certainly shouldn't become a gatekeeper for professional opportunity. But it could become another piece of information that helps organizations recognize educator potential earlier.
Perhaps the next opportunity in preceptor development isn't simply creating better training for the people who are already preceptors. It is becoming much better at identifying clinicians who could become exceptional ones, giving them opportunities to explore teaching, and intentionally developing that capability over time.
Because if preceptors help shape competence, confidence, belonging and a new nurse's experience of the organization during transition to practice, building a strong preceptor pipeline isn't just an education strategy.
It's a talent strategy.
And maybe some nurses have been showing us their educator potential all along.