This week on the podcast…
This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and practice management geek, Stephanie Goss, are deep in conversation after reading a mailbag question from a licensed veterinary technician who feels Cursed By Promotion! That's right, they became a practice manager and are wondering if they should go back on the floor because they feel like all they do is put out fires and chase their tail trying to keep up with things. They haven't been able to do any of the big things they dreamed about changing and setting up when they took the job and the worst part for them is that they feel like their fellow technicians are getting frustrated and angry with them for not being able to implement change. I think this is going to be an episode that leaves a lot of listeners going “Hey, I have felt like that too!” Let's get into this…
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December 7-9, 2023: Practice Leaders Summit
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Episode Transcript
Stephanie Goss:
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Hey everybody, I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of the Uncharted Podcast. This week on the podcast, Andy and I are back in the mailbag tackling a question from a licensed technician who happens to feel cursed by their promotion. That's right. They were promoted by necessity about a year ago and are really struggling with feeling like all they're doing is chasing their tail and putting out fires. I really loved having this conversation with Andy, least of all, because I immediately felt my heartstrings tugged when reading this email because so many of us, I think, feel promoted and then feel like we are learning trial by fire, and this technician asked some great questions and I had a blast talking this out. Let's get into it, shall we?
Speaker 2:
And now the Uncharted podcast.
Dr. Andy Roark:
We are back. It's me, Dr. Andy Roark and the one and only Stephanie, I want to go back but I can't go back, I know, Goss.
Stephanie Goss:
Hi, Andy Roark. How's it going?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, man, it's good. Things are crazy. Yeah, it's good. So I've been traveling. I went and traveled with my daughter, my oldest daughter, and she went to Youth Nationals for Olympic weightlifting in Colorado. She did great, but that was not the highlight of her trip. The highlight of her trip was we went hiking the day after she did her competition. So we went to this place in Colorado Springs called The Garden of the Gods, which was amazing. It's just this crazy rock formation and just absolutely beautiful red rocks spiking out of the ground. It's absolutely incredible. There's nothing like it on the East Coast, nothing remotely like it. It's like another planet.
So we were there and we were hiking, and you're like, “Oh, she enjoyed the hiking.” She did not enjoy the hiking. She's not a cardio person. She has short little legs like Stephanie Goss. So us hiking looks like you and me at a conference where I'm striding.
Stephanie Goss:
… and I'm running, and I'm running to keep up.
Dr. Andy Roark:
You're running. I'm a good three meters ahead of you just going and you're just coming along, trucking, jogging behind, and that's how Jacquelyn and I hike as well. So we're hiking.
Stephanie Goss:
I feel Jacquelyn's pain.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, yeah. She's five-one. She's a pocket titan is what I call her. So anyway, she's trucking along after me. I love dogs as you know, but I do not love dogs like Jacquelyn Roark loves dogs. She is so into dogs. She loves dogs. There on the trail is a beautiful, dorky, happy golden retriever. Jacquelyn sees her and goes, “Oh,” and then she says, “Can I pet?” and they said, “Sure.” They reached down and they took the dog off the leash and they said, “Get her, Moose,” and so Moose-
Stephanie Goss:
Oh, God.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes. Moose comes shooting towards her. It was like in the movies when the two people are running through the field arms spread towards each other, but it's Moose and it's Jacquelyn and they're running. I see her just swelling with joy as this dog approaches. Then as she goes to close her arms around this magnificent beast, he jukes to the right, goes right past her, and runs directly to me, who is not doing anything. I just want to be real clear here. I was not calling him. I wasn't like, “Ooh, I got treats in my pocket.” I did not do … I was 100% minding my business, watching the joy on my daughter's face. The funniest part was how close he got to letting her throw her arms around his neck before he bounced to the left.
Stephanie Goss:
Oh, poor Jacquelyn.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, her heart just broke into pieces on the trail, and I laughed so hard, and the owner was like, “Oh, he loves dudes. Sorry. He loves dudes.” She was devastated until she came over to where I was, but Moose was so into me. A couple life lessons there. First one is you can't want it too much. That's a rule in life is you can't want it too much. The second rule is Moose loves dudes, and the third lesson is I'm awesome. I'm clearly awesome. So that's what we did. That's what we did on our trip.
Stephanie Goss:
Poor Jacquelyn, but she's amazing and she's badass.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, she's amazing. Yeah, she's amazing.
Stephanie Goss:
She competed at the Nationals, which is a huge accomplishment.
Dr. Andy Roark:
She did. She did really well. It was one of those things. You know when you … I don't know. I'm sure you've had this experience. There are times when you're not proud of your kid's success, you're proud of the toughness they showed in getting there, and it was … So she got there, and I won't go into Olympic weightlifting too much other than to say it's real hard. You only get to go three times. So you have to walk up there and you have to pick this bar up and there's two different kinds of lifts and each time you only get to pick the bar up three times. So get to do … and that's it. That's it. If you fail to pick the bar up three times, you don't-
Stephanie Goss:
You're done.
Dr. Andy Roark:
You're disqualified. You've got nothing. If you mess up, sorry, you just messed up, and that's a big part of it. It's like, “Oh.” It's so mental, so mental. She dropped the first lift that she did and I thought, “Oh, no,” because I knew she had been stressing. As we were flying out there, imagine the pressure when you're 15 of, “My dad is taking me to Colorado to do this thing.” I did not say anything about it, but it was … You try to downplay it, but it's clearly a big deal, and she dropped the first one. I was sitting in the stands and I was like, “Oh, no. This is bad. This is where the wheels can fall off.”
Then to have her come back and she accomplished all of her goals that she set for herself, and I was like, “The fact that she did it after she dropped the very first lift, when it could have easily just gone into pieces,” like, “Nope, that's resilience, that's toughness.”
Stephanie Goss:
That's awesome.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm so much more proud of the fact that she pulled herself back together than I am of how she ultimately finished. That's been interesting for me to reflect on.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, that's awesome.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, how about you?
Stephanie Goss:
Oh, it's been busy. It's been busy. We had also kid sports happening, although nothing is as cool as Nationals, but Riley went to gymnastics camp this last week, which was totally awesome. They do a training camp at the university here and the gymnastics team helps with it. Let me tell you, Andy, it's funny because I think doing what we do, I look at other businesses and other industries and I've always looked … You go somewhere and you go to a restaurant and you have really good customer service and you're like, “Oh, that was great customer service,” and you can recognize it. I feel like doing what we do, I go other places and it particularly impresses me when I see young people being leaders just like outstanding leadership because it's such a learned skill and it's always really impressive to me when I see it in young people.
I was just so impressed with the vulnerability and the honesty that these college gymnasts share with these young girls who look up to them and who just … You can just see the adoration on their faces watching these college gymnasts. They're like celebrities to these girls and they're so humble and so kind and so honest with the girls about mistakes that they've made and falls that they've had. Somebody falls off the bars and it's like, “I've done that too and this is how I picked myself back up and you try it again.” I was just so inspired by that. They could have been like, “It's okay. Dust yourself off and try again and stayed up on the pedestal,” but they didn't. Every single one of them chose to come down to the girls' level and talk to them and engage with them in that place of everybody makes mistakes and everybody falls and everybody screws it up and it's about what you do next.
I was just so, so impressed, and I had to be that proud mom, but I went up to the coaches afterwards and I just said, “I have to tell you, I work on leadership development for a living,” and I said, “I was so impressed with your team. They were just so kind and so vulnerable and honest with the girls and just really, really, really impressed.” It was an amazing group of young women. So it was a great experience. It was fun to watch. It's fun. Like you said, it's really fun to watch your kid really set goals for themselves and go after them.
I knew that that was a thing that I was going to get to see eventually, but I didn't know that I would get to see it so young. I see it in both the kids in very different ways right now and it's just fun to watch, but it's summer, it's busy. We finally have sunshine in Washington and we've been soaking up every moment of the sunshine. Life is good right now, but I am super excited about today's episode.
We got a mailbag question that I just thought was fantastic because I think this is probably going to be one of those episodes where there's a bunch of people going, “Wait, are they talking about me?” because it's something that I think a lot of us have felt. Imposter syndrome is real.
So we got an ask from a technician who said, “I really am afraid that I suck as a manager, and I think I might want to go back out on the floor,” and they said, “I've been a licensed technician for years now, and about a year and a half ago, our manager left and I was promoted by our practice owner,” and they were like, “I really want to do a good job. I don't really know anything about leadership or management. So I've been reading and trying to learn everything that I can and listening to podcasts like this,” and they said, “but I still don't feel like I'm good at it at all. I feel like I'm just chasing my tail and chasing people and trying to get them to do what they're supposed to do. I feel like I spend all my time putting out fires and it's really disappointing because when I took the position, I was really excited to make some changes and I told the tech team, ‘These are some things that I want to tackle and that I'm really excited about changing.'”
It's been long enough now that this person has been enrolled that they feel like the rest of the team is starting to judge them and grumbling about how they haven't done any of the things that they said they were going to do, and they were just like, “I feel like I'm drowning. I don't think I'm good at this. I don't think I want to do it. I don't feel like I can just quit and go back to my old job, but there's a lot of days where that's what I want.” They were just like, “Help. What do I do?”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, this is a great question. I have heard a lot of people who were like, “I got promoted and I don't like it and I want to go back.” All right. Do you want to take it first? You've been a practice manager. You were a very good practice manager, but I'm sure there were days that you were like, “Why am I here?” You came off the floor and got promoted up into management as well. So why don't you open this up?
Stephanie Goss:
I did. No, I think, for me, definitely you're not alone. This is one of those ones where I think everybody doubts themselves. I think even people who choose it doubt themselves. So I think from a Headspace perspective, the biggest thing for me is just recognizing you are not alone. For me, that goes in two ways. One is doing the introspection and the work on yourself to just really look at how are you feeling and maybe why are you feeling the way that you're feeling, but the other goes to a solutions-based thing when it comes to headspace for me, which is you're not alone and it makes it easier to talk to other people.
So that's why I love this question because we should talk about this more because we are a field that promotes people who are really, really good at their jobs, but who are not equipped skill-wise for the job that we're promoting them into a lot of the time. So there are a lot of people out there who feel alone and isolated and feel like, “I am the only one who sucks,” and I think the headspace for me starting place-wise is you are not alone and you are not the only one who sucks and you probably don't suck as much as you think that you do.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, I like that a lot. It's easy to feel siloed away. It's very much easy. I'm going to tag onto that with another thing that I've been saying a lot recently, and I wrote about this in my newsletter. So if you like my rambling stories and stuff like what I'm going to say and you don't get the newsletter, you should go over to drandyroark.com and sign up for the newsletter. It's totally free. I write for it every week. Every week I write something. It's something I started months ago and I really love and I don't see me not doing it. It's a commitment in time, but I get a lot out of it. One of the things I get out of is sometimes I write stuff and then people will say words back to me that I know that that's where they came from and it means a lot.
So I had a friend two days ago reach out to me with a text and she said, “The middle of success feels like failure.” I know that she said that to me because that's what I wrote about a few weeks back is, “The middle of success feels like failure.” I think that whenever we take on something that's challenging, especially something that we're excited about, there's this excitement going in. There's planning because planning is just talk and we're writing things down and we're having ideas and there's this, “I haven't started yet, so I can't fail.” There's no objective measure of planning. You don't know if your plan is good until you try to run it. So you're just going to town and you're getting fired up and you're getting excited and that's super fun.
Then there's success when you're like, “I did it. I made the thing and it was wonderful and that feels great too,” but what we just skip over is the part where you go from the excited planning to the success and it is the sucky slog. I was thinking about this recently. In movies, we don't see the sucky slog because they just montage through it.
Stephanie Goss:
Cut to the happy ending.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. They montage. You know what I mean?
Stephanie Goss:
Yes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
You don't see the, I don't know, the super spy doing their stupid calisthenics training that lead … You don't see them going to yoga so that they can do the little poses to slide past the lasers. You get a clip of them doing some aerobics and then, bam, and then they montage past it. Rocky is the classic one, right? You've got this regular bum and he's going to fight the champ.
Stephanie Goss:
That's exactly what I had in my head.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Right, but it's the classic. You got this guy who's a street brawler who gets knocked out in his local little boxing bar, and then he's going to fight the champion of the world, and how do you get ready? You montage. He's chasing a chicken, he's pulling a sled, he's running and a bunch of kids are chasing him, and he's climbing the stairs, and he's doing … but they just montage through it and then big fight success, pull scene, end credits. We don't get to montage in life.
So this what seems like it should be a short sprint from planning to success is not, it's this huge slog and it sucks. The whole time you're like, “Why am I not getting better faster? Why am I not accomplishing my goals? Why are we not done yet? I never thought this would take so long.” God, if you're recognizing some of those thoughts as, “Oh, that feels like failure,” you're right. So the middle of success feels like failure. There's no way around that part. You have to go through the crappy part.
So part of this is when you move into a management role, oftentimes if you're in an individual practice, even if you're in a group practice, most of those practices don't talk to each other, so you feel alone, and then the middle of success feels like failure, which means you could be doing great, you're still going to feel like you're struggling for a long time.
I may really ruin your day. Here's the really sucky part is let's say that you pull it off and you're successful and everybody tells you that you're awesome, you're going to feel great for about three weeks, and then there's going to be another project that you're going to excitedly land and then you're going to be right back in the middle of the suck wondering if you're failing because you're working on the next project.
So I always thought that there was a place where I would be like, “Yeah, I'm so accomplished, I'm just going to plan it and then we're going to crush it, and then success,” and I can tell you, I've never found that. All that has happened to me is I have ended up back in the suck with more people around me, with more, I don't know, with bigger stakes and bigger projects and more people and resources, but it's still the same. There's the planning and there's success and in the middle it feels like failure, and I just think that that's true.
So anyway, but I wanted to get that out there because just because you feel like you're not a good manager, that doesn't mean that you're not crushing it. It doesn't. I'm not trying to talk … Some people are not good managers and that's okay. I think that's another part of it is that's not a mark on you as a person. I think a lot of times they wrap their self-identity up in it and it's like, “I'm not a good practice manager, so I'm a failure as a person.” No. I know I would not be a good practice manager. I know I would not be a good practice manager. I am just not detail-oriented. I'm a great vision guy, I'm a great cheerleader man. I can fire people up, but as far as the nuts and bolts of running the practice day, that's not my skillset.
We always say, “Don't ask a dolphin to climb a tree.” Man, I'm a dolphin. I'm creative and fun and can get people excited and things like that, but man, don't ask me to climb a tree. Don't ask me to put in the mundane org work that has to happen because I'm just not built for that. If I look at that, I can look at that and say, “Well, I'm not that good as a leader.” I go, “No, that's not true. That's just not who I am.” So anyway, that's two different ideas that sometimes you're great and it doesn't feel that way, and sometimes this is not for you and that's also fine.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, I think that's part of the headspace work for me in terms of the looking at yourself and doing some self-reflection is this is a person who clearly cares about their job and they want to do well. So when I look at what they sent us, they were concerned about not having gotten to do any of the big things and about the team grumbling about them not getting to do the things that they said they were going to do when they took the job. So I think part of the headspace is really looking at yourself because it is a hard question, and I agree with you. Not everybody can be a manager.
What the job actually is, I have yet, I have yet to see very many hospitals. I've seen a few, but it is very few and far between where they actually get it right when it comes to explaining to people what the job actually is. So I think that there are a lot of people who get, especially in this kind of situation, where they get promoted into the job, part of the job process is even figuring out what the hell the job is. So a lot of times, practice owners are like, “Hey, I need a manager and you're an amazing technician and everybody gets along really well with you, and so I'm going to promote you.” Well, what is the job actually? A lot of times the vision for what an owner wants and the vision that a manager has might not be the same thing. They might share some commonality.
So part of it is going through that headspace log of figuring out, “Okay. Have you been doing the job long enough? If you've been in it for a year, year and a half, you should know what is the job.” Then it's the self-work to look at it and say, “Can I actually do this? Do I like managing people? Do I like managing conflict? Do I like the day-to-day often mundane task-driven work that a manager has to do?” Is that your jam? If the answer is no, that's okay because it is not for everybody.
Some of it is about figuring that out for yourself, and some of it is figuring out for yourself if maybe you do want to do the job and maybe you are good at the job, and I would guess from the info that we have that this is a person who actually is in a position where it just hasn't gone according to plan, and so they're beating themselves up and feeling like a failure. That's a different plan of attack in terms of trying to address it. So I think from a headspace perspective, for me, part of it is sitting down and doing some of the self-reflection and figuring out what is actually bothering you.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, I think that's good.
Stephanie Goss:
Do you think that you're doing a bad job or is it that you're just feeling like you haven't accomplished the things? Because that's a different plan of attack.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, I still think that that's really hard because you never know. I say this from experience. There's so many times that I sit back and I go, “Am I …” I had this today talking to people who are good people and very smart and very capable, and I thought, “Am I not explaining myself well? Are they not hearing what I'm saying? Are they missing something? Am I not communicating this way?” I don't know. “Did I talk to a group of people that did not include these other people and I just assumed that they were … Did I have seven conversations with Stephanie Goss and assume that I had seven conversations with the rest of the team, but in reality I only talked to Goss again and again and again and thought I told everybody?” I could see that happening. Again, honestly, I trust these people and they're like, “Andy, this is news to us,” and there's more than one of them.
I'm like, “Okay. I know you guys and you are telling me I didn't communicate this,” but I don't know, and I'm like, “Did I not say it?” So I've been doing this a long time and I generally feel like I'm a pretty darn good communicator and I've gotten that feedback and yet still I go, “Is it me? Is it them? Is it some combination of the two?” I don't know. I don't think any of us … You never know. When you try to lead a group and you struggle, there's always this question of, “Is it them? Is it me? Is it communication between us? Is it unrealistic expectations, unclear expectations? What is this?” That uncertainty I really do think is a defining part of leading people. God, it makes it really hard to know, “I'm good at this,” or, “I'm not good at this,” because you'll always wrestle back and forth.
I was flying back right last night from Colorado and I was trying to change flights. So the guy was unloading one flight and he hadn't opened up the other flight that I was trying to get on. So I was trying to move me and J forward because we had a long layover and there was another flight and I was like, “Oh, we can get on that flight.” He was like, “Sir, I'm unloading this plane. I haven't opened up the other plane. I'll talk to you when I open up the other plane. It'll be about 12, 15 minutes.” I was like, “Great, no problem.”
So I stood there, and the number of times that I stood there and heard him say, “Connecting flights are on the board,” only to have two different people come up to him and say, “Do you know where my connection is?” He was like, “It's on the board right there.” It occurred to me how much of that guy's job was telling people something very clearly and then telling them again and telling them again. I don't think he was doing a bad job of making them aware that there were connections on the board, and there was signage and everything, and yet he still spent eight of the 12 minutes telling people about the board. I'm like, “I don't think there's anything wrong.” I think some of it is just what it means to work with human beings.
Stephanie Goss:
Yes. Well, it's like at Disney when somebody comes up and asks you, “What time is the noon parade?” “It's at 12:00 noon, ma'am, and it's going to happen right here,” and you say it with a smile on your face because that's just like … It is about communication and processing and being human beings and being overwhelmed and overstimulated. The airport's a great example of that where people are just they're overwhelmed and overstimulated and they're not thinking straight. Sometimes the things that come out of your mouth, there is a disconnect, and other times there's not.
So I think you hit on two things from a headspace perspective. For me, the communication piece is certainly part of it, but you brought up expectations, and I think that's really important because I think part of the headspace for this manager really needs to be looking at three sets of expectations. One is their expectations for themselves. I think a lot of disappointment can come from that. The other two are the expectations of their boss.
So for me, that goes back to what was the job. Are you on the same page? Does your boss think you're doing a wonderful job? Because their expectations of you are different from your expectations for yourself because there can be a lot of disconnect there. Then the third that they brought up in their email was the expectations of the team, and they were involved in that process because that goes back to your communication. So if they had conversations with their fellow techs, “Hey, I'm super excited because I really want us to be able to have regular flex … I want to be able to have flexible scheduling,” or, “I'm really excited to work on doing your staff schedules further out.” If they had those communications with their teammates, even if they didn't say, “This is a thing that I'm going to accomplish when I take the job,” having the conversation could have set expectations in the minds of their teammates, “Oh, hey, she's talking to us about this,” or, “He's talking to us about this. That must mean this is a thing that they're going to work on.”
We tell ourselves stories all the time. So it's entirely possible that their team is like, “Oh, she said this thing one time in conversation, and so if that doesn't happen in the first six months, she has failed to meet our expectations.” Well, did you actually set that expectation or was that a story that they told themselves in their head? So I think part of it is looking at what were the expectations that you set for yourself? What were the expectations that you set with your boss, and what were the expectations that you set for your team?
I think that one of the mistakes that I made over and over again as a leader was feeling like I started a thing and I set expectations, and lot of times I felt like I failed to meet those expectations and I would just slog through it and try and make up for it because nobody ever told me that this was a thing, but somewhere along the line, I told myself the story I couldn't possibly reset expectations. I don't know why that didn't occur to me, but there was just something in my brain that was like, “This is what you committed to doing, so this is what you've got to figure out how to deliver,” and it never occurred to me on multiple occasions to just say, “Oh, hey, wait a second. This has occurred. We're changing course, and let's reset the expectations.”
It's so silly because it's not hard to do, and I think for me it was a pride thing, I think, and also an integrity and a dedication and so much of my self-identity when I was managing was wrapped up in my work as a manager. So for me it was like, “I committed to this thing and if I don't deliver, I am failing.” That was the story that I was telling myself in my head when really I was setting the expectations in my head, they were not the same expectations necessarily as my boss or my teammate. If I had stopped and asked what was their expectation, I would've gotten a whole lot of clarity that would've saved myself a lot of heartbreak, but I didn't over and over and over again and I just bullheaded dove into it and was like, “I'm just going to fix this.”
I really wish that I had stopped on more than one occasion and said, “Wait a second. What were the expectations that were set here?” and said, “Okay. Hey, this was the expectation. Let's reset the expectation.” So I think that the expectation piece is a really important part of the headspace and asking that question, and if you don't know the answer, I think that's where the conversation starts is sit down and ask what their expectation is.
Dr. Andy Roark:
So I want to jump onto these because I really liked the way you broke this down, so expectations of yourself. The big things I would say is we just talked about sometimes you feel like you're struggling and it's because other people are hard to manage or you're not getting traction or whatever. I do think, and this is a screw job, the screw job is you cannot control other people. You can't.
Stephanie Goss:
True.
Dr. Andy Roark:
At the same time, if you really want to be good and you want to continue to grow, you should take as much ownership as you can, which means you are always saying, “Could I be better? Clearly, I did not communicate this.” I thought about that last night when I'm standing there and people are coming off the plane, I'm like, “What could they do?” because this guy's time is really being taken and it's not like the next flight's going to be better, it's going to be the exact same thing again. I'm like, “What could we do?”
So you should have those thoughts of, “What can I own here? What can I try to make better?” I think expectations of ourself is really important. I see again and again that people don't. They don't get clear expectations communicated to them from their boss, and that's sad. We only have limited control of that. So if you work with a medical director, say, you're a manager medical director team, and the medical director's like, “I don't know what you're supposed to be doing. I'm doing medicine with the doctors and you're running the techs and I don't know what you're supposed to do.” You go, “I can't work with that,” and there's nothing you can do there or your director's not giving you clear feedback or they're not there enough to give you that feedback. I see a lot of people there who are like, “I don't know what the expectations are.”
The truth is, the truth is the people who you're supposed to be answering to, they don't know what the expectations are for you either. They don't feel empowered to make them or they haven't put in the time to solidify them or whatever. So anyway, you end up in this place where you're saying, “What are my expectations for myself?” I go, “Well, the hard truth is you should always push yourself to get better.” A lot of us are going to have to figure out how to get intrinsically validated, meaning you have to figure out what it means to be a good manager and what is sustainable. Man, that takes some time. It takes some time to … You have to know what's realistic. So anyway, I really love your expectations of yourself, and I think a lot of people have to work on that.
The expectations of the bosses, I just want to validate you there as well is to say a lot of times we make assumptions of what people's expectations are. I've run into this many, many times in my career with people that have worked for me is that they make assumptions about what is important to me or what I want. These are good, hardworking people. Guys, a lot of times, sometimes their expectations are lower than mine. Sometimes they're like, “I thought you'd be cool with it.” That happens much less often than people who are like, “I thought you wanted this building built in gold in a week.” I'm like, “No, just wanted it done.”
I had a conversation with one of our teammates not long ago, a couple weeks ago, and she came to me and she was like, “I am failing,” and I was like, “What are you talking about? You're killing it. I'm not sure what metrics you're looking at, but you're employee of the month,” and she's like, “I failed you,” and I was like, “What?” She's like, “You make me self-conscious.” I'm like, “I wish I was as good as she is.”
It was just she had set these expectations of being all things to all people and doing superhuman work. I was like, “Good God, if I ever led you to believe that I expected you to be able to do all of these things in this short time, I'm so sorry. I've clearly failed you,” but I think the best thing she could do was come to me and say … I always said I pushed a lot of good people this way, and this is something I've screwed up is that I try to empower people and I expect a lot out of people I do and I'm like, “I expect you guys to work hard, do good work,” and I hire great people and try to give them the tools and support them, and I need people to push back sometimes because I can say I'm busy and I talk about what's important and you can get me excited about things that we could do and things like that.
I need you to come back to me and say, “Well, these are the things that I'm working on. What are your expectations? What are your priorities?” and have that conversation with me, but I have burned good employees out before, not by cracking the whip, but just by being excited about what they were doing and assuming that they would tell me when they were like, “Hey, look, I'm really at capacity,” or to say, “What do you want me to stop doing so that I can take this on?” I try to coach people to use that language like, “These are the things that I'm working on right now. Where does this fit into the priority list?” or, “What do you want me to put on pause in order to get this done?”
I expect people to do that, but I've had people who are great who did not do that, and I didn't realize how much they were doing or what they thought the expectations were until they were really burned out and then I kicked myself pretty hard about that and try to bring them back from the edge, but that's tough. So anyway, expectations of your boss, I think you're right.
The last is expectations of the team. There's that old saying that I really like, “I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to make everyone happy.” There's a lot of truth to that. So managing expectations of the team is a skill that we have to learn. I have seen really good people shoot themselves in the foot by talking about what was going to happen and what they were going to do and then the timeline isn't what it should be.
I have been that leader. I have 100% talked excitedly about what we were doing and where we were going, and then life happens and you get bogged down in details. I'll tell you an example of this. I was talking to my daughter when we were traveling, so we had a lot of car time and she asked me, she's like, “What happens in Game of Thrones?” and I was like, “Buckle up because we got a long drive.” So I gave her the … I basically narrated Game of Thrones as I remember it, and I don't have a good memory, but basically narrated Game of Thrones.
The way I told her about Daenerys Targaryen, I was like, “All right, so she's got these dragons and she's freeing slaves and making the world better,” and then she just gets bogged down with a bunch of knuckleheads that don't want to listen, and they've all got their own stuff and they whine and they underscore, and she's like … Basically, she's got a toxic employee in there. “Finally, all she wanted to do was free the slaves and make the world a better place to be,” and J was like, “What happened? She went crazy and killed everybody.”
Stephanie Goss:
Set the world on fire.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Set the world on fire. Basically, that's the story of many, many modern managers. There's a lot of people who are like, “This is terrible, but also I get it. I get where she's coming from.” So anyway, sorry, I just ruined Game of Thrones for a lot of people, but that's-
Stephanie Goss:
I've never seen it and you did not ruin it for me.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Now, you'll watch it with a different lens. You'll be like, “There she is as the young bright-eyed manager-
Stephanie Goss:
Burning the world down.
Dr. Andy Roark:
She's got big plans for her practice, and that's season two. Season one's not as happy, but season two.
Stephanie Goss:
Here's the thing. I love what you said about setting the expectations with your boss, and I think that that conversation is really important. The other thing that I want to throw out is I'll use you and I as an example. A, we've both been doing our independent jobs in leading for a long time, and we've been working together for a long time, and still, we have to have those conversations sometimes. In fact, just before you were getting ready to leave, I was like, “Oh, hey, hi. I feel like we just had this team meeting and now there's all these things we're excited about.” When we're recording this, I'm getting ready to go on vacation too and I was like, “I have a very limited window of time, and now I feel like I have six weeks worth of work that I'm trying to cram into two days. What would you like me to prioritize on this list because I'm not going to be able to get to it all?”
You guys, I'll tell you, I've been doing this a really long time and I think Andy and I communicate really well. It doesn't mean that my palms don't get sweaty. It doesn't mean that I don't get anxious about having the conversation, and it doesn't mean that we don't stumble our way through it. That's one of the things you and I both like to talk about is the fact that let's talk about this more because we do screw it up and people will say to me, “You managed for a really long time and you have all the things figured out.” I don't have it all figured out. When I saw this letter, I thought about my last practice that I was in before you and I started working together full-time, Andy, because it was a practice that I walked into, and the expectations piece really stood out to me here because I walked into it and it needed a lot of work. It had been a little neglected, a little abandoned, but I was like, “I have the skills. I feel confident that I can tackle this,” and in my mind I was like, “This is a two-year turnaround.”
So I was really upfront with them. I was like, “This is going to be … Rome was not built in a day. This is going to take me at least two years to turn this practice around, and here's the list of things that are going to need to happen.” I set expectations from the beginning and I thought I set really good expectations, and I got into that middle and I realized, “Oh, this is a five-year turnaround. This is not a two-year turnaround.” I'm uncovering things, I'm unburying the truth. I'm like, “It's a little bit of a dumpster fire. It can still be put out and it can be pretty, but this is going to take longer.”
What I didn't do was go back and reset those expectations and say, “Hey, hi, here's where we're at and this is going to lengthen the runway.” I pushed myself and my team to try and hit that original goal and I made a lot of mistakes in the process. So I think the thing to keep in mind is that this is not exclusive to a new manager. It is not exclusive to … As someone who's been managing for a really long time, everybody faces this. So I think the headspace piece of you aren't alone in this, and it doesn't matter that you've been a manager for a hot minute or for 15 years, it's about setting those expectations.
I think that piece of it really resonated with me is you can stop. You can go back and say, “Whoa, time out. We're going to pause and let's reset the expectations,” whether it's with yourself, whether it's with your boss or whether it's with the team as a whole. To your point that sometimes you have those conversations with your team and people read that to be commitments that you weren't necessarily making as commitments, and so it's like, “Okay. Hey, I know we had …” and a lot of people are like, “Okay, but how do you do that?”
So when we get to the how to part, I want to talk about that a little bit because it is hard, but it also is really easy at the same time. I think it's hard because we build it up in our head so much to be like, “Ooh, I have to have this hard conversation and take back these things that I said I was giving to my team.” You don't have to take anything back. You can still commit to them to doing the things. It's about setting expectations and whether that expectation is for the timeline or what it actually looks like, it's about changing those expectations, I think.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I agree. All right. Let's take a quick break and let's bust into some action steps here because there's a couple I just want to lay down.
Stephanie Goss:
Let's do it.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I think we've talked through a lot of the headspace. I think we got into how you handle this, but I'm want to try to lay down some extra steps.
Stephanie Goss:
All right. Let's do it.
Hey, friends, are you a veterinary practice owner? No? Well, are you a veterinary practice manager? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, I want you to keep listening. If it's not yes, you can take a quick pee break or get some water before we head back into the podcast because I've got something for my practice owners and my practice managers. We are hosting our first ever practice leader summit, and if you're not an owner, a manager, and you're still listening and you're thinking, “But I'm a practice leader,” don't worry, we've got you. We've got more events coming, but this first one is happening in December in Greenville, South Carolina. It will be decorated for the holidays. We are going to come together.
Now, we're going to come together, but we're going to be separate. What are you talking about, Stephanie? Well, Andy and I have planned a whole bunch of new content with our team, and we are excited to bring managers together to talk to other managers and owners together to talk to other practice owners, and then we're going to put everybody together and we are going to get to work. That's right. We are going to work on our practices. Our ideal hope would be that manager and owner combos can come together, but we recognize that won't work for some practices. So we have plans to hook you up with other owners and managers if you're coming solo on either side. So don't worry, but don't delay. Head over to the website at unchartedvet.com/events because we want to see you there and that means you have to sign up because this will sell out. Don't miss your chance to come work on your practice with your practice owner, with your practice manager. You can find out more information, including a letter that you can use to convince your boss if you are a practice manager or maybe practice owners, some reverse psychology to use on your manager, to get them to come to Greenville with you. Again, it's all up at the website at unchartedvet.com/events. Now, back to the podcast.
Dr. Andy Roark:
All right. Let's jump back in, and we've got a lot of irons in the fire here. We talked a little bit about internal validation, setting expectations for yourself. Clearly, there's some communications with the practice owner and with the team to try to set some expectations because the first thing we need to do is figure out, “Am I bad at this? Am I not bad at this? How am I actually doing?” If you don't have clear expectations, you don't even really know how to get help.
So the biggest thing is I think we need to make an action plan. So let's start with an action plan here of what are we going to do. There is nothing wrong with being a year or two into a job and being like, “Hey, I would like to set up a meeting with my direct manager to discuss expectations, and I want to do an expectation,” whatever your corporate lingo is, level set, recheck, check in, whatever, “I want to review expectations.” I think that you can always sort of do that. So I think you'd make an action plan.
When you're looking at this practice, and this person said that they were new when they were coming in and they wanted to make changes and they wanted to do things, the way that I have learned to do this that I really want to emphasize is, and we talked before about the team expectations, all those things, the most common thing that I see is people get excited. I think you told a great story, which really resonated with me of, “I thought this was a two-year turnaround and then I get into it and it's a five-year turnaround.” That's okay. Sometimes we start with a plan and then we reassess.
The best plans are built on when I am going to take what I learned in this step and then set the next part of the plan. People hate that. They want you to say, “This is the plan from number one all the way to the end,” and that's lunacy. I fight with people all the time about it when they're like, “Andy, lay down.” Don't laugh too hard, Goss. They're like, “Andy, we need a plan for this project,” and I'm like, “You cannot make a plan until you talk to the team and figure out what the problem that's causing this issue is, and I cannot give you a plan that's worth the paper it's written on until I know why is this happening. Then when I know why it's happening, then I can give you a plan, but it's probably there's going to be a stretch and we're going to do stuff, and then we're going to reassess and decide what the next phase is going to be based on what we've accomplished so far,” but people, God, they don't want that. They want you to lay down two years that are not going to waver or change, and it's lunacy.
So anyway, the way that I have approached this, that I teach people to approach it, that it's really been life-changing for me is when you go in and you're like, “I am the new manager here and these are the things that I want to accomplish,” my question to you is, what does done look like? Explain to me what this looks like when it's finished. Really, and I'm serious about that question, if you immediately gave me an answer, you probably have not thought enough about this. I want you to really sit down and write down for me what does done look like, not what does perfect look like, and I have to hammer that on people's minds too. They're like, “There'll be this amazing thing, and blah, blah, blah,” and I go, “Look, if you can get to perfect, that's awesome.” Most of us are never going to get to perfect. The push it takes to get from really good to perfect, the juice ain't worth the squeeze. Get really good and then go fix another significant problem.
One day, you'll go, “I can maybe go from really good to perfect.” Most of us, it's not even worth planning that. So just what does good look like? Then once we get good, let's deal with the other things that are on fire. Then ultimately, we'll come back and try to go from good to great. Anyway, what does done look like? So figure that out, and then think about where you are now and think about done and make me some action steps that are going to get you from where you are now to done, and then take those action steps and put them on the calendar, knowing that you're going to have to figure some things out and that's going to take time.
If you do this and this process of going through the steps and then putting the steps onto the calendar, it makes you look at how much time this is really going to take, and it is amazing how many projects you're like, “This will take six weeks.” When you figure out what done looks like and you break it up in steps and you put those steps on the calendar, and this one can't start until the last one is done, it ain't six weeks, it's six months and you go, “Wow.”
The truth is nobody cares. Nobody cares it's six months instead of six weeks. They want it done. The truth is, when you zoom out and you look at your practice and your life, the difference in six weeks and six months is nothing and nobody cares as long as you're making progress. If they don't see progress happening, they'll start to care. Again, this is another thing where we have communication and say, “Hey, these are the expectations. This is the timeline we're working on.”
You can talk to your team about what you want to get done, and they do not have any expectation of time. We are all children. We're like, “I want it now.” When you say, “This is the plan and this is on the calendar and you can see that a year from now we will have made these strides,” they will go, “Oh, a year? Nah,” and then they'll get over it and they'll leave you alone because there's a plan and the plan is going forward, but guys, I hope that doesn't sound too goofy for you, but it is absolutely true. Take the time, lay down the plan, say, “This is what we're going to do in the next year.”
People will grit their teeth and then they'll let it go. As long as they see you making progress and they know that there's a plan, they will be happy, but guys, the number one way that we screw ourselves over is we say we are going to do it, and we don't set a timeline so everyone assumes three months is we can make magic happen in three months or we set a way too aggressive timeline, and then it doesn't matter that we're making progress because everyone views it as failure. You can do amazing work, but your three months pass when this project was supposed to be done and everybody thinks you're awful.
It's the same thing as when we deal with clients, and I say the number one way that doctors screw themselves is they get on the phone and they're like, “I'll call you right back.” It's like, “No, you won't, dude. You'll call before you go home at the end of the day. Why are you saying it?” “I'll call you first thing in the morning with the blood work results,” and it's like, great, if everything goes perfect, you will meet expectations. Why did you do that? Tell them you'll call them in 72 hours and then call them tomorrow morning and you're amazing, but we want to make people happy so we just say to them what they want to hear, which is, “I will get this done immediately,” and it's like, “Stop trying to make them happy and just be honest about what you're up against and set realistic expectations.”
So anyway, that is my number one thing. I use that tool all the time, but my life got a lot better when I started working backwards and saying, “This is the timeline that I'm looking at,” and you can show it to people and when they look at the timeline, they'll go, “Yeah, I get it. That looks right.”
Stephanie Goss:
The other thing that I would add on to that because that was very similar to my process in the clinic as well, and I used a big, giant dry erase calendar so that I could literally see all 12 months on a big sheet and work my way backwards. The other thing that you have to keep in mind is you have to leave space for the fires because if you jam the whole plan into the calendar and you leave no wiggle room, the fact is we're dealing with human beings. There is always going to be a fire. Someone is always going to quit. You are going to have a client catastrophe.
Something is going to happen, and if you make the mistake of jamming it over and over and over again, as we have said a million times on the podcast, you've created a new business model, and it is that you're leaving no margin for error, and that is a big mistake that I made repeatedly as a manager, particularly when I was a young manager, is to overestimate, to your point, what I could accomplish and how fast I could accomplish it because me by myself with no outside challenges could probably sit down and bang this thing out in two hours, but me trying to help the front desk and handle the angry client and then putting out the patient fire that happens can't accomplish the thing in two hours.
Then everybody's like, “Wait, you said two hours ago you were going to finish this and it's 4:00. Why isn't it done yet?” Well, I've set myself up for that failure. So some of it is looking at what does done look like, put it all on the calendar, and then step back for a minute and really force yourself to look at that calendar and make space. It's a fine line because as we know with scheduling, we can gate keep the schedule too much and leave too much free space, but there needs to be a happy medium.
So I think for me, that last step in the process, once you've got it on the calendar and you've worked your way backwards and you've put in the action steps is where are the gaps because I'm happy. If we can accomplish something faster than we planned, we can think up another project. There's always something that you could work on with your team. So you will always be able to put that time to good use, but leave yourself the space because you're working with human beings and it will change. The plan will have to change.
So that's why I think what we talked about in the beginning, it's about setting those expectations, but did you set those expectations or did you tell yourself a story in your head? So I think it's about stepping back and looking at that and then saying to the team, “Okay. Here's what we're going to do,” and we've built some room in here. We all know that summer in the clinic is always going to be insanity. Don't try and say you're going to accomplish 10 projects in summer in the clinic. That's just lunacy. Give yourself a break. Give yourself a buffer.
Dr. Andy Roark:
In that same vein, one of the big things that was a game changer for me was breaking things up into phase one, phase two, and phase three because I said at the very beginning, I said it's ridiculous. There's things we don't know and we can't … Life happens to us. I also said what does done look like and work backwards, and you go, “Well, how do you square those things?” Phase one is say, “This is what we're going to accomplish in phase one, and then we're going to reassess and see what we learned and where we are, and then we're going to go into phase two, which is this general approach.” So anyway, all of that is set to extend your timelines, but I think, again, most of us are wildly unrealistic. So yeah, I really like your point about trying to be realistic about what we deal with.
The other thing is there's a lot of things outside of our control and new things occur that have to get dealt with. If we work in phases, yes, we'll fall behind, but it's not like this whole project is a year past date. There's a mental part to it. For a speed round to wrap up, the big things I would say is remember your why. Remember why you're here, what you care about, and I just think that it's easy to lose track of your why. So just think back on that.
The last part is if you get into this and you really decide you don't like it and you're struggling here, know that it's extremely hard for bosses, managers. They really don't want to have the conversation of demoting someone back down. If you are struggling and you're unhappy, don't wait for someone else to come and talk to you about it because it is an awkward conversation that they're going to hate to have. If you really do want to put it down, you might feel like you're letting people down a lot of times they're going to say, “Thank you. I totally understand,” and so that door can be open. I think if the person who said, “I did it, I tried it, I don't like it, I want to go back. I think that feels like failure. I think that that's ridiculous.” I don't think it is. You say, “I tried this. I didn't like it. I want to do something different.” That's it, but honestly, the easiest thing is for you to have that conversation and be honest about where you're at.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, because I think we think about it vertically. We go up, we can't come back down, and the reality is, I love what you just said, which is, “I tried something and I didn't like it,” or, “It wasn't a fit.” It's not up and down. It is okay to go sideways and kitty-corner. The career path is not a linear one. I think that's a mold we have to break in veterinary medicine, especially if we're going to continue to put people into positions that they don't necessarily have the skillset for. We have to recognize as leaders of leaders, I'm talking to my practice owners, to my medical directors, multi-site leaders, people who are in-charge of supervising other people, we have to recognize that it's not just the linear path, it's not just up, that there has to be space. If we're not equipping them ahead of time with the tools for somebody to do a job, try it, see if it fits, and if it's the wrong size, let them find the right size for them.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I completely agree. Good stuff. Well, that's all I got.
Stephanie Goss:
This was so fun. I enjoyed this one.
Dr. Andy Roark:
It's a good one.
Stephanie Goss:
I enjoyed this one. Take care, everybody. Have a wonderful week.
Dr. Andy Roark:
You guys, take care. Be well.
Stephanie Goss:
Well, everybody. That's a wrap on another episode of the podcast. Thanks so much for spending your time with us. We truly enjoy spending part of our week with you. As always, Andy and I enjoyed getting into this topic. I have a tiny little favor to ask. Actually, two of them. One is if you can go to wherever you source your podcast from and hit the review button and leave us a review, we love hearing your feedback and knowing what you think of the podcast. Number two, if you haven't already, hit the subscribe button. Thanks so much for listening, guys. We'll see you soon.