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behavior

Is it Venting, Decompressing or Gossiping?

This week on the podcast…

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and practice manager Stephanie Goss are answering a question from the mailbag being asked by one practice leader who has a problem with gossip and negativity on the team. They have been facing it head on and working on their culture. And they are still wondering how to help themselves and the team balance the “need” to talk about a situation and/or interaction that impacted you while still following the expectation that there is no gossiping allowed. How do you walk the line between the “need” to vent/decompress and commiseration/gossiping. This one is spicy, let's get into this…

Uncharted Veterinary Podcast · UVP – 223 – Is It Venting, Decompressing Or Gossiping?

You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.


Do you have something that you would love Andy and Stephanie to role-play on the podcast – a situation where you would love some examples of what someone else would say and how they would say it? If so, send us a message through the mailbag!

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Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag


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Episode Transcript

Stephanie Goss:
Hey, everybody, I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of the Uncharted Podcast. This week on the podcast, Andy and I are heading to the mailbag. Know that this was a really fun episode for us to record. Not super confident that Andy was bought into this question when we started, but by the end, I think we landed on the same page and we were in alignment, as we say, about how to tackle gossiping, negativity, negative talk, and the need for decompression in our practices. Let's get into this one.

Announcer:
And now, the Uncharted Podcast.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And we are back. It's me, Dr. Andy Roark, and the one and only, Stephanie, let's give them something to talk about, Goss. Oh, man.

Stephanie Goss:
Aren't you going to sing it for me?

Dr. Andy Roark:
(singing)

Stephanie Goss:
I love it so much.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No, very nice.

Stephanie Goss:
How's it going?

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's crazy. It is crazy. Spring is springing here. I know it's not where you are, but-

Stephanie Goss:
It is not. That is a true story.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But yeah, I got tulips coming up. It's Friday, I got a dump-truck load of mulch dumped in my driveway, and I am psyched about it. I am going to spend the week, the weekend just wheelbarrowing mulch around. When we get done with this, I got one more meeting to do, and then I'm going to pump up the tire on the wheelbarrow for maximum mulch efficiency. I got pitchforks, I got some of the vet assistants at Traveler's Rest Animal Hospital. We're like… I told them, I was like, “Ah, man, shoveling mulch. I really wish I could find some guys that would…”

Stephanie Goss:
[inaudible 00:01:45].

Dr. Andy Roark:
Guys, people, not gendered, of course. “I wish I could find some strong backs to come and-

Stephanie Goss:
To come and help?

Dr. Andy Roark:
… and help me. And Bryant just looks at me and then he goes, “Is this like a goodness-of-our-heart thing?” And I was like, “I'll buy you Subway sandwiches.” And he was like, “No.”

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, that's really, really funny.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Going to try to tempt him and David. I'm going to send them pictures of the mulch pile and then maybe like… I think I may… I'm either going to have to pony up some cash and be like, “You guys can come and…” or I'm going to text them a picture of me holding my back and looking really old and broken, like, “I don't know how I'll finish this job.”

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my gosh.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And see if I can play… I don't think it's going to work, though. They rather… They're dead inside. They're tenured-

Stephanie Goss:
You're so ridiculous. Wait, wait, wait.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… vet assistance, they are dead inside.

Stephanie Goss:
I highly doubt that they are dead inside. But don't you have two kids that you can put to work? Like, what's up with not using the readily-available-

Dr. Andy Roark:
The Roark girls?

Stephanie Goss:
… child labor at the Roark house?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. No. Well, I've got one of them. Jacqueline has already said… She was like… She's so smart. She was like, “I'll be there, Dad.” And I was like, “That's great. You are going to be there anyway, but the fact that you stepped up and said it before I told you it was going to happen, like, good politicking there, kiddo.” You know what I mean?

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my gosh.

Dr. Andy Roark:
She read the room, she saw where this was going, and she was like, “I'm going to volunteer and take credit for volunteering.” And like, bam, Daddy's girl.

Stephanie Goss:
That's funny.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Hannah, meanwhile, is home from school sick. She's laid out on the couch, and I'm like, “You know, you just stay on the couch.”

Stephanie Goss:
“You just keep your germs away from the rest of us.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Totally. Exactly.

Stephanie Goss:
That's my house too. Well, Riley called me yesterday afternoon, and she is at the gymnastics gym, and she is like… She would live at the gym if I let her. And she texts me at like 3:45, and she was just like, “I have chills and my whole body hurts.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, no.

Stephanie Goss:
She's like, “Can you come get me?” And I was like, “Oh, God. Yeah, okay.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, I hate hearing… Oh, man.

Stephanie Goss:
I know. And it just… She is tough, and she is just like, “I feel crummy.” And I picked her up, and I just took one look at her and I was like, “Oh, she does not feel good.” And so-

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, I hate that feeling.

Stephanie Goss:
… I feel you.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, they're so pitiful too.

Stephanie Goss:
I know.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Like, all of this gets right at you.

Stephanie Goss:
It makes me so sad. So she is here and she's really bummed, because they had their… It's funny because my kids love their school. Like, they actually ask to go to school on breaks, like Christmas vacation and summer break. All of the kids, not just mine. But they love their school. And so, today was book report day, and they've been working on these book reports for the last six weeks. And so, she was really bummed she didn't get to go and present her book report, so. But she's going to do it over their class Zoom, so she's-

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, well, that's good.

Stephanie Goss:
… in her room. I'm like, “Keep your germs in here, please. But also, don't forget to get on your Zoom.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I do wonder about my parenting. And I feel like I have a great relationship with my kids, and also, when they're sick, I do not go near them. I do not go near them. I'm like… And then they're like, “You guys are welcome to stay home from school. I'll be in the basement working on stuff, except when I've gone to the vet clinic for the first half of the day, and then I'll be in the basement, but…”

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, that is their dad's MO. He is definitely not the sick caregiver. And when we were in… So we're recording this, and we had just got back from Western Vet Conference in Vegas, and I got a text while we were in Vegas that Jackson barfed in the middle of the night, one of the nights we were gone. And I was like, “Oh, no,” because their dad is not the…

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And he especially doesn't do puking. And so, it was just like… You know, as a parent, all the thoughts that are going through my mind are, “Okay, I hope Jackson feels good, and I hope he's being nurturing and not like, ‘Keep your germs away from me,'” but also, all the thoughts are going in my head, like, “Did the laundry actually get started then, or is there going to be a pile of-“

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
“… vomit sheets waiting for me when I get home?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
That's what Alison says to me. She's like, “You need to be nurturing.” And I'm like, “Look, I'm just… Look, it's time to look at cold hard numbers here.”

Stephanie Goss:
Kids are Petri dishes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's like, “We're past nurturing. We're down to survival, and it's me or them, and let's-“

Stephanie Goss:
“And I choose me.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
“Let's do a cost benefit analysis here, Alison. What's the benefit of me hugging that child? Really? Really? What's the cost of me going down for three days? It's significant. You need to harden your heart, make the… That's why I run the business and you're in academia.”

Stephanie Goss:
And just in case anyone is wondering this, this parenting style extends to his relationship with his employees too, because… Well, I will say that we went to Vegas, and I did not try and kill you this year. Every time we go to Vegas now, Andy's like, “Okay, we made it through a year, and you didn't try and kill me with COVID.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
You are… Well, you're just like… You're like that snotty kid that just has sticky hands, and whenever they're around, you're like, “That kid's carrying-“

Stephanie Goss:
10-foot pole.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly right. You're like, “Don't… Just don't let that kid touch my face.”

Stephanie Goss:
“Stay out of my space bubble.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
“If that kid touches my food, I'm going to go hungry. And I don't go hungry.”

Stephanie Goss:
I'm like, “Hey, Andy, let's take a selfie,” and he's leaning.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, totally. I'm like, “Yeah, just-“

Stephanie Goss:
Leaning away.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Why don't you take a picture of you and then take a picture of me and then we'll-

Stephanie Goss:
And put them together.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… Photoshop them together. How's that?

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, man.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, it's true, all right?

Stephanie Goss:
Like, “Yeah.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
I do have a cold, pragmatic streak. It's not that I don't care about you, it's just that I don't feel the need to care about you while you're sick. There's 360 other days out of the year that I can care about you and you can have my love.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, God.

Dr. Andy Roark:
All right, let's do this. Let's do this episode.

Stephanie Goss:
All right. I love this one. So we got a mailbag question that is, I think, fantastic. So they don't actually know what their position is. I assume that it's someone in practice management, but the questions that we're working on, we're constantly working on our practice culture and areas of improvement for us. And two of the big challenges that we have been tackling have been gossiping and negative talk amongst the team, like talking negatively about their co-workers or talking negatively about clients or patients. And so, they said they recognize that the negativity and the negative talk kind of goes hand in hand with gossiping. And so, “We've talked about it as a team, and we've set the expectation that those two things are not going to be tolerated,” which is great. The question comes from, “How do you balance the need to talk about something that happened to you or an interaction that you experienced that affected you?” So like, how do you have something happen and talk about it while still following the expectation that you're not going to gossip and you're not going to talk negatively? How do you walk that thin line between needing decompression and commiseration versus it actually turning into gossip? And this was a great question.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I thought this is an interesting question. I thought this is interesting.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I had to really sit and roll this around.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I wonder… It feels to me… This feels to me like a position that my children put me in when they get me to agree that something is true, and they get me to agree that something else is true, and they get me to agree that something else is true, and every step is a little bit more of a stretch until ultimately they end up at a ridiculous position. They were like, “And that's why I need to have a candy jar in the bathroom.” I'm like, “What?” Like, you heard them-

Stephanie Goss:
“How did I agree to this?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. You're like, “What?” And so, I do… I have that experience when people are like, “But Andy, sometimes we need to talk (censored) about a (censored).” And like, they'll… We need to bleep that out. But they'll say things to me that are that off the wall, and I'm like, “What did you say?” And they're like, “We have to say bad things about these people.”

Stephanie Goss:
Sometimes you just need to.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, like, “We need to serve the tea.”

Stephanie Goss:
Sometimes you just have a doodle that's so bad that you just need to talk smack about doodles.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly. They're like, “And some people just need to be judged by us.” And I'm like, “What?”

Stephanie Goss:
I'm reserving all my judgment for you, Andy Roark.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I could… I'm interested in your thoughts on this too, and when we need to have negative talk.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And I am being honest when I say I'm struggling a little bit with this need to have negative talk.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And I do wonder how much truth there is to it. I think I understand what they're saying, in all seriousness. I think I understand what they're saying.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But I just… I need to work through it a little bit. I wonder if there's not other ways to approach the situation that don't involve us having this negative talk, but still making sure everybody feels heard and supported.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, I'm with you. It's funny because I read this and I immediately was able to put myself in their shoes in a specific context, and so I'm… I could be totally in the wrong context, but I read it and I was like, “Oh, I know those moments.” And for me, there was a very clear definition on what it is and how it manifests. And so, yeah, let's talk about it.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. All right, cool. So let's start with some sort of headspace here. So the first thing, I just… I always have to throw out, whenever we have negative talk, we have gossip, we have things like that, I've always got to get… And just, headspace for me is, “Just remember, remember, remember that you got to check your diagnostics here. Like, make sure that you know what this problem is.” And I just say that because a million times I have seen people wrestling with a gossip problem, a negativity problem, and the truth is they had a toxic team member problem, they had a bully problem-

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… they had some sort of a engagement buy-in problem, and the negative talk was coming out of frustration or out of bad behaviors from some other problem. And it's funny, I have seen a lot of, lot of, lot of practices say, “How do we fix the gossip? How do we fix the gossip? We're talking to the team about the gossip. We're coming together about the gossip. We've got a workflow on the gossip. We had a vision session about what a practice without gossip looks like.” And it's like, “How did it end?” “Well, we fired Donna, and it went away.” “Oh, okay. I got it. I see that.” And a lot of times-

Stephanie Goss:
So you didn't really have a gossip problem.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… that's how it goes. You didn't.

Stephanie Goss:
You had a Donna problem.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It was like, “Ah, turns out it was just Donna.” And I do see that. So in all seriousness, the first part of this is, make sure you run your diagnostics, root cause analysis. Where is this negativity coming from?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Are we really having this many negative client interactions, like over-the-top client interactions that require negativity? You know, are people… Is it all different people and everybody's responsible for this, or are there chronic offenders that are driving it and who are not changing their behavior because they're not getting that feedback or just because they don't want to?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes. So I think that what you just put your finger on is this, and when you said, “Is this chronic people or chronic behaviors?”, that was a fundamental difference-maker for me in the conversation. So my question when I read this was, “Okay, are we gossiping? Are we talking directly about another person to other people? Are we venting, like a situation happened, a thing occurred?” And this is where I could easily put myself in their shoes that like, you know, you have a client who comes in who is super rude or who is really hurtful to a member of the team or to yourself. It is human nature to want to let that out, because bottling up the frustration or the emotions is also not good, and so I recognize that. And the third piece of it for me is this, “Is this is a one-and-done, like, I need to vent because I'm frustrated or I'm angry, I have emotions about this situation, or is this complaining? Is this a constant chronic thing that is happening with one or two people?”
And so, to your point, like, is this a Donna problem or Donna is having repeated behaviors that are complaining or gossiping or other that is impacting it? And so, for me, the headspace starts with some self-reflection and analysis of the situation to try and figure out, to your point, like what is actually happening here, and then be able to do the root cause analysis on the problem itself.

Dr. Andy Roark:
There was a definition of a toxic person that I saw a long, not long time ago, but a little while ago, and I really liked it. And basically it was something along the lines of, “A toxic person is a person who participates in negative activities and has no interest in improving them.”

Stephanie Goss:
Mm-hmm, okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Like, something along the lines of, if a person switches from just being a regular person who has a problem to a toxic person, a regular person who has a problem wants to fix that problem.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
A toxic person does not want to fix that problem.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
They are happy to make the problem persist or even to grow, even to spread, to have more people involved with it. That's what a toxic person wants.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
They want to light the fire, and they don't want to put it out. They want it to grow and they want it to spread. And I've thought a bit about that as well. And so, anyway, when we start thinking about these types of behaviors, I'm always going like, “Just root cause analysis, make sure we understand the diagnosis here. Where is this coming from? Make sure that we don't have a toxic individual or a small group of people who are just driving these behaviors. And if we do, we need to manage them, manage them, manage them, and possibly manage them out if it continues on.”
So anyway, that's kind of my opening place. My opening place here is that. So it sounds like… Let's take this letter at face value and say, “Hey, they work a lot on culture. We don't think it's a toxic person. We just continue to have this sort of negativity.” And the question is really about, what do you do about keeping a positive communication culture while still recognizing that sometimes we need to have an outlet for negative thoughts, emotions, frustrations, things like that?

Stephanie Goss:
Sure. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. All right. So I think that that's an okay question to ask, and we'll sort of get into it. So I don't know, just in general headspace, seek first to understand, “Where is this coming from? Am I understanding the problem that I think I'm understanding?” And then, “Where are we going to go from here?” is the next sort of question philosophically that I like to talk about. I think it's important when you start to look at problems like this, is, “What does done look like? What does the end look like?” So in a headspace, they go, “Okay, well, if we want to make our practice into a good, wholesome, positive practice, what does that look like when it's finished? Where does that go? Does that mean that people don't say negative things, or does it mean that they say them in a certain way?”

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
“What is that way?” And once we have that kind of figured out, of what a healthy practice looks like, then we can put steps into place to get there.

Stephanie Goss:
Yep. Yeah, I love that. And I think that is super… To me, it has always been an indicator of a really healthy culture when the team understands what that looks like and what done is. Because for me, part of having a code of conduct that the team has agreed to… And I'm assuming that no gossiping or no negative speech that was talked about here is part of a code of conduct. Everybody has to understand not only what does that mean, like really, truly, “What is the definition of that for us and the team?” But also like, to your point, “What does done look like? What is not? What is the end? What is not tolerated?” And what is the expectation for how you handle the negative interactions or the conflict when it arises or the frustration that happens. You know, “How are we going to handle that?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. So you said you had an idea in your mind of kind of what this looks like of having some negativity that sort of needed to come out. Can you give me more of a clearer context of what that looks like in your mind?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, totally. So for me, the question was, “Okay, decompression and the commiseration gives me pause, for sure.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
All right.

Stephanie Goss:
Because those two things are very different. Needing to have an outlet, get something out, not bottling up the emotions. And this is years of my own therapy coming out here. So as humans, it is far healthier, at least for me, it is far healthier to deal with emotions and get them out than to stuff them down and not deal with them, right? So, a long time ago, I recognized that there are situations where I need an outlet and I need to express those emotions safely. And that can look a bunch of different ways. That, to me, is decompression, like, that letting off the steam.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Goss:
Commiseration, to me, falls into the line of negative talking, gossiping. Because when you are… To me, commiserating means finding someone who is going to agree with you and participate in what you're doing. That feels radically different than, “This thing happened, and I'm insert-whatever-emotion-here, angry, sad, frustrated, whatever, I just need to get it off my chest,” right? That feels very different to me. Gossiping, to me, feels like saying something about someone else, when there are other people present, that you are not saying straight to their face.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, I think, for me, I could totally see situations in the practice when a team member maybe has not interacted with me in the best way possible, or I interpreted how they interacted with me in a way that frustrated me or triggered me in some way. And before I'm ready to have a conversation with them, I need to get out those emotions and process, right? That, to me, feels like the decompression, versus commiserating, like, “Oh, hey. Oh, God, I was just in room B with Mrs. Jones, and she's so snotty, she always comes in and treats us like we're her hired help. And don't you hate having to do appointments with her?” Right? That feels like commiserating, where I'm looking for somebody else to get into that space with me and join me in that negativity. And then the gossiping would be like, “Oh, hey, Andy, did you see what Jamie brought for lunch today? There was so much junk food in her lunch,” right? Something like that, where you're talking about somebody or you're saying, “Hey, did you hear how drunk Sarah was at the bar this weekend?” Those kind of things, where you're talking specifically about another person to another person.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
Do those illustrations kind of help?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And you can imagine those things happening, I think, in a practice, right?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I think the thing for me, I don't… I still struggle a little bit with the idea that we have to do negativity, but I'll flesh it out a little bit. And I guess maybe this is the part I should put into headspace right here, at the front.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So, to me, communication should be intentional. Professional communication should be intentional.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Which means you should know what you are trying to accomplish. And when you seek commiseration, that's not intentional usually. What that really is, that's code speak for, “I'm angry, and I need to vent anger out into the world.”

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And even when we talk about decompression, guys, the research is pretty clear. Venting, it does not help you. It really… It helps you maybe feel more satisfied, but venting and putting negativity out in the world actually does not make you better able to handle problems. It just ends up sort of perpetuating negativity. And so, you can look at happiness and satisfaction and outcomes when we talk about venting and we say… This sort of spewing of negativity, it genuinely does not make us more effective, I think. So this is where I push into intentionality. And so, what I would say to people really when I start talking about headspace as negativity is, “Communication should be intentional,” which means, if you're angry and frustrated, I think that you can say, “I'm really angry and frustrated about this thing,” and then we need to state our intention. “I need help processing this,” or, “I am seeking validation of the scenery,” or, “Can you tell me if I'm off base?”

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And guys, that's just an evolution of how we communicate. And I think a lot of times we get mad or we get angry, and we open our mouths, and we don't really know what we're trying to do. And I would say the evolution of these communication issues is to say, “Before I vent, I need to understand, what am I trying to accomplish?” And if I'm not trying to accomplish anything other than to hurt somebody or to take the anger or the pain that I feel and try to make someone else feel pain, that's not something that I want to actually do. And it's not healthy as much as we want to think that it is.It's just not.
And so, anyway, I think that that's just the big thing for me as we start to look at this, is, the rollover here, and honestly, this is a big part of professional communication as you move up into corporations and companies, this is corporate training, we don't vent. You don't make angry statements, you speak intentionally. And I will tell you that if you stop and process it, you can generally be much more productive and also expressive of the problem that you're facing without negative talk. You can 100% say, “This client who came in earlier was really nasty, and he said these things that I thought were very hurtful. And my question is, what do I do about this? Is there a way that I can escalate it? What steps can I take? Am I supposed to shake this off?I'm feeling vulnerable. Have other people had these experiences?” Those are the sort types of ways that I can talk about this thing in a way that I'm not client-bashing. I'm being honest about, “This person came in, and what they said was really… It seemed to me to be very out of line, and I'm looking for validation here. Has this person acted this way in the past?” And anyway, I can still 100% turn and get support and also not just lean into the negativity on the issue. Do you agree with that?

Stephanie Goss:
I do. And I also… And maybe this is just because I have a temper, and I am by no means perfect when it comes to communicating. And I will also say that there have been plenty of times where I have, in the heat of the moment, said things or done things that, if I had stepped away and taken the time to get the clarity that you're talking about, it would've been way better off, right? And also, I'm human, and we don't always do that. And so, I think what you were talking about, for me, has been a very healthy guardrail to recognize that, in order for processing emotions… Because I used to… There was a long period in my life where, especially as a leader, I just stuffed it down and I didn't process, and I would get mad or I'd get frustrated, and I just wouldn't say anything, and it would build up, build up, build up, and then I would explode.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Goss:
And going to therapy, I recognized how unhealthy that is and how much I need to process things more in real time.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Sure.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, for me, what that turned into was, “Okay,” going in the direction that you're talking about, recognizing that there are going to be times where I trip up. Nobody is perfect. And having a system like you're talking about, having someone, and I think this is really, really important, especially from a leader perspective, having people who are the right people for you to be able to have that conversation and do that processing with is really, really important.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, it has… But that isn't a natural… I don't think it's a natural inclination. Our natural human-nature, caveman brains, it is far easier to be like, “Oh, hey, Andy, did you… Like, this happened, and I'm super irritated about it,” right? Because you're right in front of me and it's easy to commiserate with you versus to take the time and intentionality to be like, “I need to step away, and I'm going to go outside of the building so nobody else can hear me, and I'm going to call someone who is not immediately involved in this situation,” right?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
That takes intentionality, it takes self-awareness. And I think a lot of us have to learn how to do that. And so, I'm all-in with you on that being a healthy process, and it is certainly one that I have adopted now, but it took me a long time to get there. And I also think it's really important to recognize that we're all human, and no matter how-

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, of course.

Stephanie Goss:
… good we get at it, you're going to screw it up, and you're going to have to…

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And there are things like… Immediately, when I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking about times where I was like, “Oh, dude, we have a straight-up no gossip rule in my teams, and I really try really hard to adhere to it. And also, I can think immediately of times where I broke that rule.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes.

Stephanie Goss:
And do I feel good about it? No. And so, you know, but how we deal with it and what we do also matters.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, I think creating that goal… I think, good on this team for working on trying to create the culture to change the expectation. I think having the expectation that this will never happen just because you have the rules and systems in place is unrealistic, because we're people, and there's going to be slip-ups. I think having the expectation of what comes next is the really healthy part, and that's the part that I would love to see more teams get to.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. So yeah, I agree with that. And I also think that you're right about being human. This is hard. It is a real challenge, and we all get it wrong. And I'm not going to be like, “Oh, no, I don't get mad.” Of course I do.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But the hard professional truth, though, is that getting angry or getting nasty feels good, and it's generally self-damaging.

Stephanie Goss:
For sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Like, think about a time that you got angry or you got nasty and it turned out great, and that was the exact right move-

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, no.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… and it opened doors for you, and good things happened. You might have a time, I assure you there's a lot of times that you got angry, you got nasty, and you did damage that you don't even remember or know about, but other people remember it.

Stephanie Goss:
For sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I mean, it's one of those things about being the better person, about being the leader, is carry this. There's the old saying too, and this is kind of a Buddhist meditative thing, is, “Between every action and a reaction, there's a pause,” you know? And I was reading an article recently about this guy who had gone to anger management, and he talked about anger management. One of the big keys in anger and anger management was taking ownership of how he would communicate and being intentional. And so, he said that one of the big things that happened for them is he switched the way of his thinking from thinking things like, “Man, that guy made me mad,” to, “That guy behaved in this way, and I got mad.”

Stephanie Goss:
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And that gave him so much more ownership of like, “Oh, I got mad. He did this thing, and I got mad.”

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
“And it's understandable that I would get mad, but getting mad was a choice that I made.” And that can be extremely hard, but it is what I think that we should aspire to.

Stephanie Goss:
For sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Cool.

Stephanie Goss:
For sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Let's take a break and come back and get into some action steps in kind of how we start to lay these things out, and how we can set ourselves and our team up to be successful in this regard.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, sounds good.
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Dr. Andy Roark:
All right. You said in the first half, Stephanie, you talked about having leaders that can help you process or are willing to process with you was really important. I really like that a lot. If we want to get to the place where we get this negative culture, and we're not talking about gossiping, we've done episodes on that stuff before, but really talking about how do we support people who have legitimate complaints, problems, things they're working through, while still trying to keep our clinic positive, I think there's a number of things that we need to do. First of all, culture comes from the top, you know?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And that's really… Our leadership needs to behave in a professional way and communicate in a professional way. It's funny how often the doctors talk to me about negativity of the staff, and the truth is they're showing that behavior, that they do it just as much and it trickles down from them. But a big part of it is to say, “Okay, we know that people are going to get frustrated. We know they're going to have problems. We know they're going to be angry.” Have you given them appropriate avenues to communicate-

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… those frustrations through?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And so, if you say, “Yeah, you know what? Sometimes the clients come in and they're horrible, and we don't want to feel alone. We want support,” I think that's totally understandable. Do we have avenues for people who have had those experiences? Do they know that they can come and talk to someone? Do they know that they can go to the head technician and say, “Hey, I need a minute. This happened, and I'm really upset about it.” And what's funny is the difference in coming and saying, “This happened, this guy behaved this way, and I'm really hurt, or I'm really upset about it, or I'm really angry, and I need a moment,” that's an entirely different experience from walking out of the room and going-

Stephanie Goss:
“That guy's a dick.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
… “This a-hole over here…” You know?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It is.

Stephanie Goss:
100%. 100%.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's an entirely different experience, but the feelings are the same. And I think you get better support in the first example, where you say, “I'm really hurt by this, and I need need a moment.”

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I think you get better long-term outcome and support if you go that way. But people should know, if the staff feels like a client was abusive to them, do they feel like there's a place they can go?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Is there an open door? Do they know that they can come right into the practice owner's office, or the medical director, or the practice manager, or the head CSR, that they can come straight to her and say, “I want you to come and tell me if this happens. I want you to come and tell me what happened, and let me support you.” But do they have appropriate avenues for bringing these things up?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, I love that. And I think that goes to what this mailbag letter started with, which was like, “Hey, this is a thing we're working on, and we have talked about it.” And so, when I first read it, I was like, “What does ‘talked about it' mean?” Because I think that it could mean, “Hey, we said this thing is happening, it can't continue to happen, full stop,” and that was the conversation, which feels very different from, “We've come together as a group and we've talked about, ‘Hey, we want to have a code of conduct, and we want to have a set of rules that we hold each other accountable to. And one of those things is we care about each other, and so, therefore, we don't want to talk about each other. We also don't want to talk about our clients.' And so, here's what that looks like, good and bad, right?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
Examples. And also, “When the situation occurs,” to your point, “here's what we can do about it instead,” right? Those two things feel very different. So I'm all-in on having a code of conduct. I think it's super, super important. And I think, for me, the only way that I've had it truly be successful in my teams has been for the team to be a part of it, because if they're not bought into it, it won't work, it won't be successful.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And the best way to get them bought in is to have them be a part of that process.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You know, our friend Maria Pirita, who works with us and who is magical and amazing, she has an exercise that she uses with teams. And so, it's the high-performing team exercise, where she would work with her teams and she would say, “Okay, guys, I want to talk about and I want a list from you guys about what a high-performing team looks like, what they sound like, and what they feel like.” And she would have the team make a list of what a high-performing, happy team looks like, sounds like, and feels like. And then, from them, she would write down the things that they thought that a high-performing team would do, and say, and act like, and how it'd feel to be a part of that. And then, once she made the list from them, she would ask them, “How do we achieve this? What are the things that we want to change to do this?” But they're creating the vision of what it feels like to be on a great team or have a great place to work.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And then Maria just ties them to their aspirational goal that they created there together. And I just… I've always thought that that was really… I thought that that was really good, and so I… But I completely agree with you as far as like, they need to be a part of what this future looks like.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And it also is funny when you say, “Stop doing this.” I know we're talking a lot about kids today. I don't exactly know why. Probably because Hannah's here sick, and I'm acting… Because I have a glass wall, and she's on the other side of it, and I've sealed myself. She's beating on the glass. I'm podcasting. Go lay down.
See, but I was talking a lot about kids, but it's like when you start to turn around, you yell at your kids, like, “Stop fighting!” But you don't actually give them a mechanism to resolve the complaint-

Stephanie Goss:
Right, the conflict.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… which is maybe a genuine problem they have-

Stephanie Goss:
Right, right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
… and they don't have the tools to not come to blows. And you're like, “Just stop fighting!” And they're like, “Okay, Dad. But how, then, shall we resolve the issue of Roark vs. Roark in the case of the missing hair clip?”

Stephanie Goss:
Right. Yeah, no, it's totally true that we have to give our kids the tools, we have to teach them the tools, and we also have to give our teams the tools, because we don't… These are learned things, and we don't often… We don't focus on it enough. And I love the idea of the exercise that you shared for Maria. And I think the other piece of that for me is that I want the team also to define what great looks like and feels like.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Goss:
I want them to define what it doesn't look like and feel like to help us figure out some guardrails and some things that we want to steer away from. And then the last piece of it for me is that they have to be a part of, “Then what does accountability look like?” Because accountability cannot look like me, as the manager, momming everybody all the time and doling out the punishments, because that's not how I want my team to work. I want it to be something that they're bought into, and I want them to be able to solve their own problems. And the only way that you get there is to teach them, and give them those tools, and equip them to solve those problems themselves. And that is not an easy thing. It's not a one-and-done conversation. That's a journey.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I completely agree. And so, taking exactly what you said, because I agree with every word of it, and dial it down more tightly to what we got through the mailbag where they say, “well, you know, it sounds like we've got gossip and stuff under control, but what about these specific circumstances when we need to be negative?” I think, to… The way I go with this is, it sounds like we feel like we've addressed the gossip thing pretty darn well, and so I suspect they… And they said they're always working on their culture. I suspect they've done a lot of these things.

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And so now it's like, “Great, you've got the tools, and you've taken care of these big pieces. Now it's time to dial in on these little pieces.” And the way that I would do that is, if it's a consistent enough problem that you're writing to Andy and Stephanie and saying, “What do we do about these specific little things?”, what I would say is, the tools that got rid of gossip will help you get rid of these things. Put them under the microscope, which means go to your team and say, “Guys, I recognize that we have this tendency, or these are the trends. And what I want to do is talk with you guys about how we would handle different circumstances and what it looks like for a high-performing, positive team to handle these circumstances. So last week, we had a case where a client behaved this way…”
Or I would change it up and say, “Let's just pretend that we have a client who comes in and they do this thing, and it's really awful. Guys, how does a high-performing team handle this? What do we say, and how do we say it?” And then… And this may sound silly. I promise you there's nothing more powerful than some role play like that to get them to talk about, “What is a positive way to process this? What is a way to get support or get the help that you need, and feel good about it, and not resort to, ‘The client was mean to me, and so I'm going to put meanness out into the void around me.'?”
And that's the definition of toxicity, is that someone is in a bad spot, and they radiate this darkness out of them that then infects other people and spreads. That's why it's toxic. And so, they don't want to be in a toxic place either. And I think that this is a great collaborative way that we can give them the tools they need and say, “Hey, I've paid attention to times that we've had problems. I'm not going to maybe use those exact problems, because I don't want people who were there to feel judged, but I'm going to recreate those problems in a different way, and then ask the team to break into teams and to figure out what they would say, or what they would do, or how a high-performing team handles these problems or processes them without turning it into a toxic dump.”

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Or without allowing… And again, I wouldn't put it on them and say… And this is really important. I would not be like, “You guys are screwing up, and you are making it toxic.” I would say instead, “You guys are working hard, and I know how much you want to have a really positive place to work. And I feel like we're a really positive team.”

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
“When people bring this negativity into our practice, I want us to talk about how we can handle it so that we don't become that negative team.”

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And so, then we're not doing this because it's punitive.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
We're not doing this because they messed up and they failed.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
We're doing this because I want us to have the tools to handle adversity when it comes to us.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. I love that. And I think part of… I agree with everything that you just said, especially the part about making it forward-facing and not punitive, right? It's disconnected from them, because the reality is we all have bad days. Even the sunniest, most positive person sometimes has interactions that really make you feel things, right? And so, for me, it was about talking to the team about, “Okay, what does safe space look like?” And recognizing that we're all going to have bad days, and we're all going to have moments where we maybe need some support from each other as a team. And so, my team was like, “Okay, what are our safe spaces within the practice?” And so, one of the rules that we agreed on as a team was that we needed a way for anybody to take a timeout. Like, whatever it was, whether you're having a bad day at home, or you're getting super frustrated with a difficult patient or a client or whatever, that there was a way for us to recognize, “Hey, I need a timeout,” and then we defined what are those safe spaces in the practice, like, “Can we go for a walk? Like, go in…” We had a backyard in the clinic. And so, that outside was a great safe space.
We also had a team bathroom that was in a part of the building. This is going to sound crazy, but we had a team bathroom that was in a part of the building that the clients didn't access. And so, we kind of made it into half rage room, half positive space. So we had all of these memes and positive quotes that the team had brought and stuck up on the wall, like things that made them happy. And then that was also the dark room that you could just go in there and scream if you needed to scream into the void for a minute. Look, it worked for us. It's not going to work for every practice, but it worked for us. And then the third space was the office space.
And so, it was… The conversation was, “Look, my door is always open, except when it's closed, but it is always open, and it is a safe space. And you can come in here, you can just sit and have a moment. You can say, ‘Hey, I just need five minutes to myself.' Totally fine. I'm going to ignore you. I'm going to keep working. You also can come in and say, ‘I'm feeling feels, and I need to talk, but I need to process it.'” And so, my golden role for the team was, “You can come in my office and you can say whatever it is that you need to say. You're going to have to deal with it, and I'm going to ask you what your plan is for making it actionable before you walk out the door. You don't get to just come in and go off without there being a forward-facing, ‘What is the plan and how are we going to deal with this?'”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, if you were not ready to get to that stage where you could talk about it with somebody else, maybe going and screaming into the void was the good choice, or going and taking a walk out in the backyard, but it allowed everybody to be met where they were in that moment, right? Because we created the safety as a team to say, “Okay, I need to take a timeout.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, I think that that's really important, figuring out, as a team, what are those safe spaces? What does it look like? And I love your example from Maria. What does it look like? What does it feel like?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Goss:
And making them be able to see and recognize, “This is the expectation.” So to your point, when a client comes in and somebody is really struggling with the way that they interacted with that client, instead of being like, “God, Mrs. Smith was such a jerk in room two,” they have the ability to be like, “Hey, that was a really hard appointment for me, I need to take five,” right?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And then they can go and do with it whatever it is that they need, because sometimes you just need a moment.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Sure.

Stephanie Goss:
And sometimes I can go take a moment, and I can come back and be like, “Okay, I'm good now.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And other times, I need to go have a moment and be like, “Hey, this is… I actually need help with this, because it's more than a moment, and I need to deal with it,” right? And so that is the second part of it for me, is setting the expectation honestly for myself of… One of my hard and fast personal rules is like, “I need to deal with the emotion and let the emotion out in a safe space, in a safe way.” And then the second piece of that is, “What do I need to do with this?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And sometimes the answer is, “I'm going to let it go.” If I'm going to let it go, I'm really going to let it go.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Mm-hmm.

Stephanie Goss:
And the accountability piece is, for me, with my bosses, was, “Hey, if I tell you that I'm choosing to let something go, and then I bring it back up again, I need you to hold me accountable and be like, ‘Hey, you told me yesterday you were going to let this go, and now we're having a follow-up conversation about it. This sounds like you need to do something about it, so I'm holding you accountable. Let's have the conversation about what you're going to do about it.'” Right?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, figuring out, are you actually going to let it go, or are you going to action it and figure out how do you deal with it? And then, if so, the safe space continues. I will totally help you. We can talk it out, I will role play with you, I will just listen while you talk out loud if that's what you need. Everybody processes those things differently. But my role as a manager, as a leader in the practice is not to be a therapist.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I agree.

Stephanie Goss:
I want to give professional support to all of my team to have access to, because counseling should be something that everybody on our team can access. And at the same time, my role is to listen, but then I also want to help you grow. And so, as a leader, creating that safe space, helping them create that safe space, but also setting the expectations for, “How do we deal with it?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I agree. I think there's a couple good leadership phrases that push people this way. And I'm just going to warn you, if you use these people, they'll stop venting to you, which is real good for you, but if they just take it somewhere else, it cannot be good. But the basic soft things, I agree, to Stephanie's point, is again, it's about intentionality, right? And so, if I assume intentionality on the other person's part and they go, “Ah, this thing is happening, and God, I hate it so much,” the most productive thing you can do is say to them, “How can I support you in this?” or, “What is your plan for addressing this and going forward?”

Stephanie Goss:
Yep.

Dr. Andy Roark:
“What are you going to do with this?” But the big, like, “How can I support you?”, that's the one that I use a lot, is, “How can I support you?” And they'll look at you like you're dumb, and then they'll go, “I just… No, I was just… No, I mean…”

Stephanie Goss:
“I just wanted to bitch.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
“I was just mad.” And you're like, “Oh, okay, okay. So you don't want to take action on this?” And I'm really honestly not trying to say this in a jerk way.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm not doing it in a condescending way. But generally the real truth is, if you come and you tell me that something is terrible, my honest, well, question to you is, “Okay, how can I support you? What can we do to either correct this or try to address this situation, or at least to make you feel like you can accept the situation and go on in a good place?”

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
“What is our plan?”

Stephanie Goss:
Yep.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You know, it's that, “Can we change it, or can we accept it? Those are sort of our options.” And so, anyway, I put that stuff forward. I think the last thing I want to make clear here is, I think you already pointed it out pretty well, but when I do the role play and things like that, I really do like making this forward-facing about, “What are we going to do in the future? How we can we handle this? What should we do?” Not about what we should have done last week or how we didn't handle it well.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And the reason I say that, one is, that's just a good growth mindset position, but number two, how many times have you been angry, and then your spouse criticizes you because you're angry? And how did that go? You know what I mean? Like, it's like, when you are like… Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm like rage cleaning the kitchen, and my wife is like, “Look, if you don't stop banging those dishes around, they're going to break.” And I'm like, “I'm rage cleaning, and you are critiquing my rage cleaning, and it's terrible.” And so, all that to say, giving feedback to someone who's having an angry, negative response, is something you should do at your own peril. It's much, much easier to do things that are forward-facing and encouraging about where we're going. And I'm joking, but if people continue to have these reactions, we're definitely going to have to talk about them.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Like, we're going to have to give feedback, and we're going to have to coach them out of that.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But it's a whole lot nicer to try to give them the tools in a forward-facing away, not in a, “Hey, you got really angry, and that was the wrong thing to do, and now I'm going to make you embarrassed about the thing that you did or said when you were angry.” I'd like to avoid that if possible.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. I think the last thing for me is just sharing one of the most impactful rules, honestly, for code of conduct with my team that I ever learned, and I learned it at my very first practice. But there's the golden rule of “Do unto others,” right? But for us, the golden rule really became, “Take it to the person who can do something about it.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I like that.

Stephanie Goss:
And what that meant was different things in different times, but when it came to gossiping, or it came to talking about other people, when it came to negativity, because we had that rule, it enabled us to listen, because, look, if I am mad at Maria, and I'm having a conversation with you, Andy, about how I'm mad at Maria, if we have the rule to take it to the person who can do something about it, me talking to you about Maria does nothing, because you can't do anything about the situation. You weren't there, you weren't a part of it.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Right.

Stephanie Goss:
You can help me, you can listen to me, you can ask me what my plan is, but you ultimately can't solve the problem.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Right.

Stephanie Goss:
And so, part of that rule was, “Hey, look, I can't do anything about this. I can help you practice this conversation, but ultimately you need to go have that conversation with Maria, because the two of you are the only ones who can work this out.” And it applies with clients, it applies with the team, it applies with our bosses. And so, setting that role and then really deciding, as a team, who are those people on the team? And it's going to look different for everybody, but this goes back to your defining what the expectation is, right? Like, who are those people on the team that are going to shoot you straight, who are going to help you identify what is happening in this situation, who are going to help you brainstorm ideas, and then who are going to ask you what the next move is to encourage you to go back and talk to that other person who can actually do something about it?
And as a leader, a lot of the times you have positional power. And so, sometimes talking to your manager, your floor lead, your practice manager, whatever the situation is, sometimes talking to your leader is still talking to the person who could do something about it, because maybe you've already had that conversation. Maybe Maria and I have been beefing, and I have had that conversation with her, and I'm like, “Okay, I don't like the way you're talking to me, and it's really hurtful to me when you use this tone of voice. Can we figure out how to make our communications go better? Because this is not feeling good for me, right?” Maybe I've had that conversation with her, but it's continuing to happen, and now there's that kind of toxicity happening between the two of us. If I have had that conversation once, twice, three times, then it makes sense that I would say, “Hey, Andy, I've had this conversation with Maria three times, and just today, this was another situation that occurred. I'm at the point where I need help, because I don't know what to do next. I've already tried talking to her as the person who can do something about it. It's not working, I need your help.” Right? So it still allows them the space to go to someone who maybe can do something about it.
But that golden rule made the biggest impact for me probably in my entire career in terms of team communication and how we eliminate a lot of the talking about each other, the gossiping, the negativity, because it was something that we all came up with as a team. Someone suggested it, but we all got on board and bought into it, and then we bought into, what does that look like accountability-wise? And it made the biggest difference.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I love that. I think that's great. I think that's all I got. You got anything else?

Stephanie Goss:
No. I think this is… Now that we're at the end of it, do you see why I thought this would be a fun one?

Dr. Andy Roark:
It is a fun one. It is a fun one. Yeah, it is a fun one. Again, I'm not saying that people shouldn't get mad. We're human beings and we do get mad. I really do think that there might be a problem with the idea that everyone has to get negative and angry in public, and so we should give them an outlet for that. I think that we need to figure out what the intention is and what people need, and give them avenues to get what they need so that sort of negativity out into the team is not necessary. So anyway, I think that that's how… I think this has been a really… It's been a really interesting one for me.

Stephanie Goss:
I want to know, after people listen to this episode, what is safe space? What does the timeout look like in your practice? I cannot be the only practice who had the rage room. I have peers who have giant coloring things up on the wall, and you need to take a timeout and go color, right? I'm super curious, what are people doing to give their teams that outlet? Because there are times where we all just need to take a timeout, whether it's someone on the team is frustrating us, or there's a bad client interaction, and I think creating that safe space is really important, and I'm super curious. I always love when we get messages after the fact. So if you're listening to this and you're like, “Ooh, this is what we do” in your practice, I would love to hear from you in the mailbag, because I think that's a fun part of making our practices unique.

Dr. Andy Roark:
All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

Stephanie Goss:
Take care, everybody. Have a great week.
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 favorite 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. And number two, if you haven't already, hit the Subscribe button. Thanks so much for listening, guys. We'll see you soon.

Conflicting Team Members Who Won’t Talk To Each Other

This week on the podcast…

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and practice manager Stephanie Goss are answering a question you asked in the mailbag! That's right, this is going to be one of those episodes where everyone is asking “Are they talking about my practice? Are they talking about my front desk team? We had a manager reach out and ask us some questions about front desk team members who are butting heads and seem to be at each other's throats. They both have been coming to the manager or the practice owner or both and complaining about the behaviours from their teammate. Both of these team members fully admit they are horrible about talking to each other about the issues first. This manager is at their wits end and wanting to know “do we mediate, do we let them talk it out themselves?” Andy and Stephanie loved these questions. Let's get into this…

Uncharted Veterinary Podcast · UVP – 221 – Conflicting Team Members Who Won't Talk To Each Other

You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.


Do you have something that you would love Andy and Stephanie to role-play on the podcast – a situation where you would love some examples of what someone else would say and how they would say it? If so, send us a message through the mailbag!

We want to hear about your challenges and would love to feature your scenario on the podcast.

Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag


Upcoming Events

Calling All Practice Managers – The Uncharted Practice Manager Summit is ALMOST HERE!

We know you are unique. Managing the business. Fielding never-ending questions from the team. Fixing broken printers, again. You wear more hats than anyone else in the practice. All of these look great on you, of course. But do you ever wonder “Am I actually in charge if I don’t own the practice? How do I manage the endless responsibilities of this job with limited power and resources? How can I keep growing professionally?”

If you’re itching to talk to people who really get what it means to be a manager, this is the event for you!

It’s time to connect with your fellow practice managers to share what gets you excited about your role, find solutions for what needs your focus now, and discover new ways to shine even brighter as a manager.

While Uncharted Membership is always encouraged, it is not required for event attendance! Non-members, here’s your chance to see what all the buzz is about and get a taste of the Uncharted experience. 

This 1-day virtual event on March 22, 2023 – don't miss your chance to join us!


Episode Transcript

Stephanie Goss:
Hey everybody, I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of the Uncharted Podcast. This week on the podcast, Andy and I are continuing a conversation that started in our Uncharted community where a manager was asking for some help dealing with two team members who are butting heads. And they keep coming to this person as the manager or it's the practice owner and complaining about each other.
And this manager was like, “How do I deal with this? Do I mediate it? Do I make them talk it out? What do I do?”
And Andy and I had a lot of fun talking about this. I admitted some of my own greatest mistakes as a practice manager when it came to dealing with this in my-not so-recent path actually. We talk a little bit about my lack of poker face and we have a lot of fun. So let's get into this one.

Meg:
And now the Uncharted podcast.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And we are back. It's me, Dr. Andy Roark and Stephanie I'm way too fine to feel this stressed Goss.

Stephanie Goss:
I don't even know what song that comes from, but I appreciate it very much.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's from your anthem that you didn't know you had called “It's About Damn Time” by Lizzo. “It's About Damn Time.”

Stephanie Goss:
That's fantastic.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's funny, my kids play it. And I refuse to admit that there's bad words in songs, even though it's obvious. And so I just sing really loudly, it's about that time. And they're like, “That's not the words.” And I was like, “I'm certain those are the words.” But the name of the song is “It's About Damn Time”.

Stephanie Goss:
So clearly this episode needs an explicit warning right off the bat.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, we come honestly, right off the bat.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, it's so funny, because we had some community members this week who had the stories of their clinics get published. A friend of mine, Robin Brockton, was writing an article for today's Veterinary Business and was featuring some independent practices and some of the things that they're doing differently to live their truth and be their own people in our field, which is becoming increasingly consolidated in some ways.
And so we had two Uncharted community members who had their clinics featured as part of it, or three of them, excuse me. And one of the doctors, I shouted her out in the community because she's new and she just joined.
And she was like, “Oh yeah, there was a lot of listening to the Uncharted podcast to get to the place where I am and where we filled this culture.”
And I was like, “Uh-oh.” She's like, “I listened in the car with my kids a lot.”
And so I was like, “Oh, I'm really sorry for any swearing we did without a warning on it.” And she was like, “Oh, that's okay. They've heard far worse when I'm gardening at the house.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
We've talked about that before. We're pretty darn clean in our nature. So then people are like, “Sure, the kids can listen to this.”
And then every and now, and there's one bad word an episode, and I'm like, “We're probably in the worst place. We probably swear just enough to bother people who are listening with kids, but not enough to be cool for people who are really hardcore like us.”

Stephanie Goss:
Because let's be clear, when we're not recording podcasts.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So hardcore.

Stephanie Goss:
I definitely, yeah, I'm a swearer. And I told her the story. I said, “I'm that mom. My kids learned swear words from Broadway albums in the car when they were toddlers.” And I would sing the bad words and Jackson would go, “Mama, that's a word you shouldn't say.”
He was that kid though who would refuse to repeat them. He wasn't the kid who heard it, learned it, and went to school and was using the words. He was the kid who was like, “Oh, that's a bad word. You shouldn't use that word.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
I am not that way at all. I am the closet smoker of bad words. I sneak outside. I'll be on the phone outside and I'll be swearing, like, “Oh, you got to be kidding me.” But then in the house it's like, “Nope.”

Stephanie Goss:
It does. It sneaks out and you're just like, “Oh, Andy's on fire.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
I do, when I get fired up, there's something about a couple of bad words to really carry some weight. But I don't know. I keep going. I should just stop. I should be done with profanity altogether. But I don't know, I never quite do it. I wax and wain too. I'll get really good and then I'll just get really bad.

Stephanie Goss:
It makes my world a more colorful place.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I'll tell you why I had bad words just starting this episode off, because I talked to the credit card company today. And of course they're just jerking me around with like, “Oh, you have to provide this information.” I'm like, “No, I don't. What are you talking about?”

Stephanie Goss:
You're like I am me. It's been a very Monday, for a Friday.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And they're like, “We don't believe you.” They were like, “You have to fax us this documentation.” And I laughed. I was like, “Where am I going to get a fax machine?”

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, who faxes?

Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm sorry.

Stephanie Goss:
Hi, it's 2023.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm just going to head down to 1990 and then I'll be reaching out to you. Anyway.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh man. It has been a Monday. It has been a Monday on a Friday, that is for sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's been a Monday on a Friday, I agree.

Stephanie Goss:
But I'm excited because we had some conversation happening in, speaking of the community, they're awesome and doing amazing things. And we had some conversation about someone was struggling because they have some team members who are really struggling to communicate well and butting heads a lot. And both have independently come to their department leads or the practice manager or the practice owner and voiced concerns about the other person and working with them.
But they are not talking to each other. And they both admit it. They both admit like, no, I haven't had the conversation with them. They have different styles of just in general personality styles. One is really upfront and vocal, and the other one tends to be more passive and afraid of conflict. And gets really easily flustered when there is conflict.
And so the community member was asking like, Hey, how do we help this? Do we mediate between the two of them? Do we let them talk it out themselves and figure it out? Do we just hope that it resolves itself?
And they were like, I feel like maybe you guys did a podcast on this that I should listen to. And you and I both went, “That is a great podcast that we have not done yet.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I looked for it. I went back and looked. I'm like, surely we've done this? And I literally went back, and I was like, I don't think we have, I never found anything that looked like it.

Stephanie Goss:
No, I love it. So I'm excited. I'm excited.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, yeah, I am too. We get a lot of questions like this.
All right, cool. So let's go ahead and start to lay this thing down. We've got two people not getting along. They're both tattling on each other up to the leadership, and we got to figure out what to do with this. So as we do, let's start with headspace.
Where's your head at when you're looking at this?

Stephanie Goss:
My head immediately went to empathy in two ways. One is I have been this team member, I was this team member early on in my career and in a practice. And then also empathy on the leadership side, because oh boy, I have been there. And I think it is really common, this is the episode where everybody goes, “They're talking about my team, they're talking about my practice.”
And so I think that it's one of those things that we can easily recognize the emotions in. The frustration, the irritation, all of the emotions. I read the question and was like, oh yeah, I recognize this. I recognize this tree. I've seen it before.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I went immediately to frustration. This immediately frustrates the heck out of me. Because I'll just tell you, my emotional reaction immediately is “why can't you just grow up and fix it? Talk to each other like you're not six-year-olds.” And that is the crotchety, immediate frustration [inaudible 00:08:33].

Stephanie Goss:
Old man, “Get off my lawn.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly right. Figure it out like you are not infants. And go on. And that is, I'm just being totally honest, with the emotional reaction I have, because I'm a human being and I have dealt with this many times. But it is wildly frustrating. And that's why it's worth talking about because it's easy to blow this up. And that's why headspace is so important.
And so when we talk about headspace guys, I want you guys to know I like to lay down headspace. It is not because I live in a zen world, it's because I do not live in a zen world and I need to get my head straight so that I don't blow my face off when I load into this.

Stephanie Goss:
So you don't come down the crotchety Clint Eastwood and yell, “get off my lawn.” Because that's how you're feeling in your head.

Dr. Andy Roark:
That's exactly what's in my head, is figure this out. What are you, seven? But that's not fair. It's not fair.

Stephanie Goss:
But it's human.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, to empathize with the leader you've got… Here's the thing, here's where this blows me up. This is where I get blown up as a leader, is I have 87 things on my plate. And I have some real fires burning, like real things that need to get fixed. And then I've got Donna and Dave and they're like, “Dave is not talking to me.” And Dave's like, “Donna's just being a nag.”
And I'm like, “Look at my face. What on my face says I'm excited to handle this and I have time for it? Do you see that on my face? Would you look at me, because it's not there. Because I don't.”
And it always gets dropped on top of things that are actively burning. And so the self-control part of this is so important because it really does. It really does needle. It really does needle me.

Stephanie Goss:
It is huge, and I'm going to tell you guys a story. At one point in the not so distant past as a manager, I hit a place where I was feeling really burned out and I was not my best manager self. And I was doing a lot of things very, very wrong. And I was having some conflict amongst my team. And like you Andy, I was like… I'm laughing so hard because I can picture my face, and you have given me the feedback that I have a very expressive face.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You do have it, an overly expressive face.

Stephanie Goss:
I do not have a poker face.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You need to tone down your transparency a little bit sometimes.

Stephanie Goss:
I do not have a poker face. And I will tell you. So I was really struggling with my team and I was really struggling with some of the tattling. And to your point, it would always be when there was fires flaming. And I could not control my face and I could not control the epic eye roll that wanted to happen the second somebody opened their mouth to start tattling on somebody else.
And so I rearranged my office so that my desk, my back was to the door. So that when they came to the door and started to tell me about the thing, I had a few moments to pull my face together so that they wouldn't see my face, which was not, definitely not my best manager moment. And at the same time I get it, and I empathize so hard with that.

Dr. Andy Roark:
First of all, sometimes we need a crutch. It's like if you can't control your face, then maybe you should face away from the door. Just at some point you have to accept that me trying to control my face is not working. I need help.
The other thing is when you said that, I imagined you doing that so that when they come in and go, “Dave is really is being a jerk.” You could slowly turn your chair around.

Stephanie Goss:
That was the other thing that I learned.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Like a high back Dr. Evil chair and you could just slowly turn it around and say, “What did you say?”
Anyway.

Stephanie Goss:
The ultimate passive aggressive physical behavior right there, but I will admit, I leaned into it because it's hard. It's really hard not to be frustrated by that. So I empathize with your statement of immediately going to frustration.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I think that's hilarious. I wouldn't do it. But the idea of your employees coming to you and saying, “Donna is making me crazy.” And then you just slowly turn your chair around away from them so that the high back chair is hiding you. That's funny.
Also, Stephanie's [inaudible laughter 00:13:07], is shaking.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my God. We're off the rails.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay, so hold on. We are and we're not. Let me pull this back around to make the point. What happens is we're busy and everybody's busy, and things are stressful and tensions are high. And that is when the interpersonal relationships break.
So you're not imagining that these things happen when other fires are burning, it's because other fires are burning that these things are happening. It's the overall tension and hustle and pace that cause breakdowns in communication. It's easy to communicate when nobody cares and nothing is at stake, and we're largely bored and got more time than things to do. That's an easy time to communicate.
It's like getting along with your significant other on vacation. That's not super hard. It's getting along with your significant other when you're both trying to go to work and the kids are doing things and the bills are coming due, that's a different beast.
Same thing. And so anyway, I know that felt like a fun tangent, but it also is meant to make the point of that frustration is very real. And that's when people blow themselves up, is because generally the leader is stressed by the hustle and bustle. And the same things that are stressing these people who are communicating are also sitting on our shoulders, so now this feels like a new problem.
And unlike the fact of, I don't know how to get all these pet owners in, I don't know how to get people the raises that they want. You complaining to me about Dave is a very tangible problem, and there's someone who's responsible for it and they're standing in my office right in front of me. And so it's easy to take frustration out on this situation, and I've seen a lot of people get in trouble when they do it.
So the first part of headspace is recognize that this is going to come at an inconvenient time. It always comes at an inconvenient time. And it's just part of the actual underlying drama. First thing is recognize that frustration is a real problem that blows this thing up.
And it's not going to be like, oh, they're going to come to me when I have lots of free time and I'm in a good headspace and I'll deal with it then. Know that that's probably not going to happen. They're going to come to you this time. Okay, so that's it.
All right. Now, there's a significant headspace question that we really need to parse through that I think cause a lot of people problems. And it's separating out two similar but different things. So let me go ahead and put some pieces on the board.
So the first thing, whenever I have two people that are not getting along in the practice and they come to me, we have to talk about the Karpman drama triangle. And so Karpman drama triangle is one of my favorite things. But it's this dynamic, it's called the hero-villain-victim triangle.
And so whenever you have conflict in your practice, look, and you'll see three roles being played. There is a victim who is the person who is being wronged, and there's a villain who is the person who is doing the thing that they're not supposed to do. And there's a hero, which is the person who comes in and saves the victim.
Now, you need to know this if you're a leader, because people will try to graph you into that hierarchy. And you don't want to be there.
What happens often is the victim comes to you, the manager, the doctor, the owner, the medical director, and they say, “There's a villain.” And they want you to go vanquish the villain and save the victim. And that makes you the hero. And so you want to do it because we all like to be the hero. Don't do it. Don't do it.
Because what happens is you train people to be victims and you train them that you are going to be the hero who solves their problem. The answer to the Karpman drama triangle is it to make it a drama line, which is the victim is also the hero who advocates for themselves and works it out with the quote unquote villain. Who also believes that they're the victim and that the other victim is actually the villain. And you know how it goes.
But I don't want to be in this drama triangle and I need to be very wary about getting sucked in. And a lot of people are listening and just putting their hand on their forehead and going, “I am the hero. I am the hero all day long, every day.”
And what I'm saying to you right now is that's never going to end. That's your life. That's your job. Because you have trained people that you'll be the hero, like Batman. How tired does Batman get of that stupid bat signal getting turned on? How often is he like, “Why can't you people just solve problems for yourself?”
It's got to be every night. He's been going on call for years.
And I joke, but think about it for a second. Like, don't worry about it, Batman will show up. You are Batman. I'm Batman. But it's not as cool as you thought it would be. It's exhausting.

Stephanie Goss:
It's true. And I would actually say that I definitely put myself in that space in that instance that I was talking about, because I trained the team. So my thought process in the moment talking about headspace was, okay, if I solve this problem, if I play the mediator, if I help them figure this out, this will go away and I can do the 25 things that were sitting in front of me that I need to do.
But to your point, I just was training them that they didn't have the tools to do it themselves. And so then there was never not a problem. There was always something. And it was a very, very painful lesson for me to learn as a leader, to recognize this is my life and I have created this life. And now how the hell do I get out of this life because I don't want it anymore?
I do not want to be Batman. I do not want to wear a cape. I do not want to have to solve their problems. I want you all to be grownups and solve your own problems.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So clearly this is where the episode ends and we just say the answer is they have to figure out themselves, don't get involved. Right. Wrong. And that is the distinction that I'm talking about making.
Now, there is a distinction between going to people and sorting out their problems and being the hero that fixes the issue. There's a difference between being that and being the coach who works with people on how exactly to solve their own problems because they don't have the tools to solve them.
But I'm going to coach you on how to solve this problem so that I can then step away and you have the tools. It's like if someone comes to you and says, “I'm hungry,” and you say, “Don't worry, I'll go catch you a fish.” As opposed to saying, “Okay, I'm going to go with you and teach you how to fish and then you're going to catch your own fish.”
But you have to go with them. You can't just be like, “Just go find food for yourself.” That doesn't help them. But there is a difference. You can be the person who coaches on how to find food without being the person who goes and finds food every day for these people who are not fighting for themselves.
And so anyway, that's the subtle distinction. I think a lot of people, and myself included, when this happens and I get frustrated, I'm like, I'm not fixing this problem for you, fix it for yourself. Because I don't want to continually be involved in “Dave won't tell me where he put the toilet paper and it's not where it's supposed to be.” Whatever the issue is.

Stephanie Goss:
How about “Dave didn't put the toilet paper roll on the roll holder.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
That's what it was, okay. But here's the thing. For headspace, you have got to frame this problem correctly. The problem cannot be, “Dave didn't do what he was supposed to do with the toilet paper and I need to fix it.” The problem has to be “Carol and Dave are not communicating, and I'm going to fix the Carol and Dave communicating problem.” And then the toilet paper, which is not a real problem, it's a symptom of the other problem which is communication, that's going to go away. And all the future symptoms are going to away.
Because if you keep focusing on what they're complaining about, you're playing whack-a-mole with symptoms that keep popping up again and again and again. And they will never end until you recognize the real problem is not that Dave parked in Carol's favorite parking space, it is that they don't know how to talk to each other and there's no end to the conflict they're going to have until they figure out how to talk to each other.
And that, my friends, that is a finite problem that you can involve yourself in, that you can set deliverables and timelines and metrics on. And you can attack it like a project, and you can do it and you can have it done, and then you can make it clear that the project has moved beyond your hands and they now have the skills to solve their own issues. And you can be out, but you have to recognize the distinction between those things or this is going to feel like a hopeless, frustrating thing.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes, and I think part of it from a headspace perspective is recognizing… I liken it a little bit to being a parent and that your job is never done. And I think one of the mistakes that I made from a headspace perspective was thinking, okay, if I teach them all these skills, then at some point I can brush my hands and walk away and I won't have to deal with the problems.
And you're spot on, that when we teach them how to communicate, then the job becomes significantly easier. And I think that need to be a coach sometimes is never going to go away.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No, never.

Stephanie Goss:
And I think that there are a lot of people who lean into, oh well, if I teach them these things, then I won't have to do this part of the job. It'll take care of itself. And the reality is that's part of your job. It will always be there. There will always be the need to be the guardrails and be a support system. And there will be times where you will have to say, what are your tools? Let's review them. Let's go through this. Because it's like being a parent. It never stops. It's always there. Even when they grow up and leave the house, you're still worried about it.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, when we were talking earlier, so you and I started off this podcast and we were talking about having a potty mouth. And how sometimes it gets bad and sometimes it's not so bad. And then we talked about the frustration that you feel when people come and they're like, they're having this problem, and it's really easy to not be kind or to be really angry.
And sometimes we're in a good headspace and we just handle it. And I was really thinking, you know what's true? And I was trying to be really honest at the beginning and say, “I have 100% screwed this up.” And I do these headspace things because I have to get into this headspace. The analogy now that I'm thinking about it is a lot of management, a lot of people management, a lot of leadership, a lot of communication, it's like eating healthy.
Where you can get into the habit of it and it's good and you can know all the things, but eating healthy every day all day is really, really hard.
And most of us, we have times when we're doing a good job and we're eating healthy, and then we have other times when we're not eating, we fall off the wagon a bit. I think that that's leadership and I think that's honest. And the idea that we're going to do this and then we're not going to have to manage anymore, that's like saying I'm going to eat healthy and then I'm not going to have to worry about it anymore.
It's like, no, it's an ongoing constant thing that you're going to have to pay attention to and you're going to have to have some discipline. And you're going to fail sometimes, and you're going to have to not beat yourself up. And get back up and just say, “Hey, I'm going to get back on to eating a little bit better.”
Same thing with our patients and our people. It really never goes away. And I think that's good in setting expectations so that we can be kind to ourselves.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. And I think the other piece of that from a bright light perspective as a leader is that the good news is is that when we actually take the time to tend and nurture this and we teach the team the skills and they become over time masters at those skills themselves, you create that cultural foundation where now instead of you being the person who has to do all the teaching, now you have multiple teachers who can help bring new people into the fold and teach them those same skills. And now it's not all on your shoulders.
And so for me, that was the driving force for me. It's like I don't want to have to be the only one to do this anymore or feel this way. I want to be able to teach them, not only these two who might be having the problem right here, right now, I want to teach them those skills, but I want to create a foundation where the expectation from within the team is we are going to use these skills and they are going to help create and drive that culture moving forward.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, and that is the positive. I don't want anyone to think that I'm saying you're on a hamster wheel, and you're going to work really hard at being a good leader and good communicator and a good listener, but ultimately it doesn't go anywhere and it never gets easier. And you're always going to be struggling.
You're always going to be working hard. I heard this thing recently that I really like, where life is uncertainty, pain, and hard work. And it just is, and it never goes away. And that's always part of it. And I do think that that's important for just to recognize that that's what it means to be alive. And at the same time, when you do a good job in these regards, when you eat healthy, if you will, ultimately you build healthy habits in your team and people around you. And you train other people how to treat each other.
And so when you fall off the wagon, it's not that big a deal cause other people didn't. You know what I mean? It's not systemic. If you have good relationships with your people and you've trained them to be autonomous and you've trained them to be responsible and good communicators, and then you have a bad day, the wheels aren't going to fall off. You have a bad month, you have a bad quarter, you have a tough year, which some of us have tough years. If you have manifested your values for long enough and you've got good people, and got them to buy into how we treat each other and our values, you can have a bad year.
And that doesn't mean you're a jerk every day, but it means you have hard days. Things won't fall apart. But you have to build that and you build that with a consistency.
So anyway, that's where I want to try to get my head in this is I don't want to blow my face off by getting really frustrated. This is probably going to happen when other things are happening and when I'm already stressed, it just is. That's not imaginary, that's how it is. And I need to accept that this is not the Karpman drama triangle, because I'm not going to fix their problem. I'm going to figure out what the underlying issue is, which is communication.
And I'm going to coach them and help them solve their own problems. But my part, I'm going to go in, I want to fix this issue, and I'm hoping that it's going to stay fixed. And I know that there's going to be breakdowns, there's going to be setbacks, there's going to be times that we may still need some attention on this problem, but for the most part I really want to try to address this as teaching them how to fish for themselves as opposed to me showing up every day and fixing problems and feeding them.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, I love that.

Dr. Andy Roark:
There's a lot of food metaphors going on right now, and they're mixed. There's some fishing.

Stephanie Goss:
My stomach is healthy growling. You're making me hungry.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I know. It's like you go, “Oh, is fish health food? Is that what he's talking about?”
It's not that deep. I'm mixing metaphors. I'm sorry.
Okay, let's take a break here, and then we're going to come back and let's talk about how we actually do this.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, sounds good.
Have you done it yet? Have you headed over to the Uncharted website? The one that's at unchartedvet.com/events, and have you clicked on that link for the April conference?
If you haven't, friends, you need to head over and click on that link, and then you need to hit the register button. Because I want to see you with us in sunny Greenville, South Carolina.
In less than 80 days, we are going to be diving deep into tackling internal communications this spring. We want to talk about how do we improve our communications amongst our teams in a whole myriad of ways. How do we set boundaries? How do we have conversations about affordability of pet care and communications outwardly towards our clients as a result? How do we use language and maybe think about changing some of the language we're using to have better communication as a team?
Just previews of some of the awesome stuff that we're going to be talking about. So if you haven't done the thing, if you haven't put your fingers to your keyboard and typed unchartedvet.com/events, go do it now. Because I have hugs waiting for you in Greenville and you should not miss out on this.
And now back to the podcast.

Dr. Andy Roark:
All right, so let's go back and let's get into having this conversation. So we need to help these guys communicate with each other.
And you do this really well, Stephanie, as far as setting ourselves up for success and having conversations that are going to work with people. The first thing that you need to do, and this is where a lot of people get it wrong, be intentional about the time and the place that you do this. And it is really easy for, Dave comes in and goes, “Brad's doing the thing again and he won't stop.”
And I go, “Damn it, Brad.” And I jump up, I spin around in my chair, then I hop up, I charge out. And I go, “We're doing this now.”
And of course, Brad's trying to actively do something and this is no time to have this conversation. And it's a delicate conversation and I'm defusing a bomb with a hammer and then I make it worse. And then somebody's feelings are hurt and they feel unappreciated and unheard.
And then I got to sort that out before I actually get into trying to fix this going forward. I've literally made another problem for myself. And anyway, if this sounds like the voice of experience, totally not, I've never done anything like this. Never had an issue or a setback like this at all.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh man. Okay, so I love where you're going with this. I would love to take one step back from a starting point perspective and say, so the question was do we mediate? Do we let them talk it out themselves?
And I think where you're going is how do we teach them tools while mediating to get them to communicate with each other?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes.

Stephanie Goss:
And I would say, I think one of the most powerful lessons that I ever learned about coaching and being a leader was the value in stopping, what you were saying, taking not right now, but still engaging with them. And so now the most useful tool for me is when someone comes in, I give them my attention.
So it is an interruption to me, but I'm going to give them my attention and then I'm going to ask them, did they have the conversation with the other person?
And now our colleague from the community said they've acknowledged that they're not talking to each other. But it is very powerful and impactful for me to be able to ask my team, “did you talk to the other person already?”
Because when they say, “No, I did not,” or, “No, I'm really mad and I can't talk to them about it right now.” Cool, let's talk through what you might want to say and how you might want to say it so that you feel prepared to have that conversation.
Because I think that for me, jumping into the mediating didn't remove me enough from the Karpman drama triangle. I was still jumping into hero mode because I was jumping in to help them solve the problem. And yes, I was doing the thing and teaching them the communication tools and ultimately making it better, but the road was significantly longer to get there because I was still trying to jump into that hero role and solve their problems.
And so I think one of the most powerful tools is recognizing that this can be a coaching opportunity one-on-one before it moves into a coaching opportunity you with the two of them together.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, interesting. Okay, I have to think about that. I hear what you're saying. I think my take would be, so the two options given were, do you let them work it out? Do you mediate the issue? And the answer to that is neither. It's neither.
You don't just let them go and work it out, because if they don't have the tools.

Stephanie Goss:
They won't work it out.

Dr. Andy Roark:
They're just going to damage each other more and it's going to get worse.
Mediating the issue of Brad parked in my parking spot, that's not of interest to me either. So in my experience, and you're not wrong. I guess it's probably your personal style. I have to think about it a little bit. I think for me, my take would be I'm going to bring them together and lay the foundation of trust. And I'm going to work on trust and start with ways of working, and then follow those with individual coaching as opposed to doing individual coaching and then bringing them together.
I don't think you're wrong. I think it's what you want to do. Let's explore this a little bit more and I want to figure out where our ideas differ here.
So for me, I want to bring them together and work on them. They're going to have to have this conversation. And so for me, time and place. I want to make sure that when we have this conversation of how are we working… It's a ways of working conversation. But when we have our ways of working conversation, do we have enough time? It should not be in between appointments. It should not be 15 minutes before the start. There should be some time.
And then also it's the place. I want to set them up for success, which means I really don't want other people walking in. I don't want other people coming into the conversation asking what's going on, things like that. This is an awkward conversation to have in a break room. You don't want to have it at the front desk and other people are walking up. The manager's office feels intense to me. I would get them out of there.
I would send them to Starbucks. Our friend Brian Conrad always did that. He would just send employees who are having problems together, he would send them, he'd give them a gift card and send them to Starbucks together. And tell them not to come back until you got this figured out.
And so I do think that there's value in get them offsite, get them out of there. They can be punched in because they're working through issues, but make sure they have time and make sure that they're in a place where they can focus and talk and not feel stressed out.
So that's the first thing that I would lay down to start getting my head straight.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think that you want to lower the stakes. They're already frustrated with each other, that's the reason that they came to vent or tattle or however it felt in your mind. That's the reason that they came to you in the first place is because they're frustrated. And so being intentional about giving space to be human and whatever that looks like, but lowering the stakes for them.
Like nobody's in trouble, we're just going to have a conversation. Because you guys need to figure out how to work together, because the reality is you're both employees and I value you both. And I want you to both be here, and we've got to figure out out a way to make this easier for both of you because you're frustrated, you're frustrated. I don't want to be frustrated, so I'm willing to help you. And we have to change this.

Dr. Andy Roark:
As I think about setting this thing up and going in and what I would say, I think I changed my position. I think that I do agree with you. I think what I would say to them before they had this meeting, I think my intention before this meeting would not be to coach them necessarily, but to try to get them to empathize with the other person.
And I would say, “How do you think Carol feels about this?” Or, “If I brought her in, what do you think she would say? How do you think she's feeling? What would her frustrations be?”
And I think that those are really valuable questions to ask one-on-one separately, because if they go into this meeting in a more empathetic headspace, I do think that you're loading the deck to be more successful.
And so when we first started talking about it, I'm like, how would I coach them before they talk to each other? Now, I think you're right, but I wouldn't aim for this is what we need to do. But I think my thrust ahead of time would be to talk to both of them and try to help them empathize with each other. And then if I can get them to empathize, then I say, “Let's get together and let's talk this out.”
And if I can bring them together in an open mind frame instead of having them come together with their arms crossed, I do think that that probably sets it up as successful. I think that you're probably exactly right, that that's a worthwhile investment of time before the meeting. I think that's a good call.

Stephanie Goss:
So part of it is in what you asked them to talk about. And so I think part of it for me is yes, what is bothering you? And getting to the root of it and figuring out, what are you actually upset about? Because a lot of the times the thing, it's a symptom, like you were saying. It's not actually the thing that you're frustrated about or upset about. And so getting them to ask themselves some questions, one of which I love what you said, one of which is what else could this possibly mean? What else could possibly be going on?
Is it possible that Carol lost her keys when she was trying to get out the door this morning and then she had a flat tire, and she has had a horrible morning and she is just in a really horrible mood? And so her response to you had nothing to do with you at all, but just was a byproduct of how horrible her morning was.
Can we get them into the empathy place? And the best question for that is what else could be going on? But also the secondary question to that is what story have I told myself in my head? And I think that's a big part of the communication toolkit for me, is recognizing, because we talk a lot about assuming good intent. And I think you can't assume good intent until you ask yourself, what am I actually thinking? What story am I telling myself here?
Because usually it's not one that starts with assuming good intent. Usually we're assuming wrong on behalf of the other person. And so getting them to think about what are they actually upset about, but also is it possible that there's something else going on here?
Could they hallucinate a place where there is an alternate reality, where it is happening and it has nothing to do with them? Because that's going to get them into a head space where they are more open-minded and they are more willing to empathize with the other person. And you can't problem solve with somebody until they have the capacity to get past the emotions that they're feeling.
And so sometimes it's having that conversation with them and sometimes it's like, oh, okay, you're really upset about this. And I'm here, we can totally vent about… This is a safe space. I want to listen to you and I want to actually help you solve this problem. And so if you need to call a timeout and you need to walk away from this, especially when team members are really angry at each other, there have definitely been times where I'm like, let's take a break and let's come back to this afternoon or tomorrow morning.
It's okay that you're mad. And this has to actually become actionable, so I want to help you do that. And you can't do that when you're amped up and you're in your feelings. And so I think getting them to think about that, to move them eventually towards the place of coaching in terms of what do you actually want to get out of this? How do you want to solve the problem?
And I think that kind of conversation, especially in the beginning when you're teaching everybody these skills, I think that's where it really has to start. Because it's so much more of an uphill climb to try and make that journey together in a group of three or a group of four than it is one-on-one. Even though you're repeating the process with them each individually, it's more time on your part as the leader. That has just been easier for me to do that kind of one-on-one with them.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So to restate this point maybe a different way, make sure we're on the same page. So I am on board 100% with having the conversation ahead of time. My goal in this conversation is not to convince them that they're wrong. It is to make them question if there's more to the story and to think about how the other person… They might not be a ruthless villain, they might also have a point. They might have a perception of the events, because they don't know things or maybe because they see things differently or how their experience is.
And so my point is not to make this person say, “Yeah, it's probably my fault.” It's like, nope, I just need to introduce the doubt, and make them say maybe this person isn't bad and maybe you guys just aren't communicating well.
And then that's where I would take it into a come together point. And so the way that I would do this in my mind is that encouraging, almost demanding that we assume good intent about people.
And say, “Hey, it doesn't sound like you're allowing good intentions on their part. You're assuming the worst in some ways. And how might this be a noble intention that's being misunderstood?”
And then I would set the time and the place, and say, “Let's go ahead and do this.”
So coming into this meeting, and I would bring them together. And then what I would probably do again, I'm saying this is a nagging problem. These people are not getting along. I'm assuming they've exhausted basic work it out strategies. For me, this meeting has the following agenda. And this is not something I would share with them necessarily, but for me it is.
I'm going in, the first thing is I want to state clear objectives. This is not a hangout session, it's not a therapy session. This is about us coming together to talk about how we're working. And I want us to figure out how to work together effectively and get along. And the way that I talk is going to be future facing. I'm not going to talk about what happened yesterday. I'm not going to talk about Brad and the toilet paper incident from two weeks ago.
My goal is not to be the judge of the case from last week. I'm not interested in that. I want to come along and talk about going forward, how do we communicate with each other? What's causing these issues so that we can not have them in the future. I'm not interested in guilt, I'm not interested in a fault, I'm not interested in justice.
And that's it. And I will be upfront about that. I'm going to pour a lot of praise on both of them and say, “You guys are great. I really want you here. I want you guys to work together.”
And so clear objectives, forward facing conversation. I'm going to start with the why. And I'm going to say we are here because you guys are both great. And I like you both, and I want you both to be part of our team. And I need you guys to get along and be able to work together.
And without me coming and being consistently involved, I can't be the referee for you guys. And so start with why. And beyond that we're going to move into commonality and values. And I'm going to start to say, “Look, you guys both do such a good job in these ways and you work so hard, and you're both a great fit for our practice. Because these are our practice values and you both have those values or serve those values. This is our mission and you guys both pursue that mission. You're part of the team, you do great stuff. How much you care is absolutely obvious for both of you.”
And what I'm trying to do is build this framework so they go, “Okay, I don't get along with this person, but we're not entirely different. And we do want a lot of the same things and we both want very similar outcomes at the end of the day. We both want to have a good place to work. We both do not want to be stressed. We both don't want to have to watch our backs all the time. We both want to believe we're making a difference for the pets that come in. We both want to believe that we're providing a good experience for pet owners who need us. We have a lot in common.”
And what I'm really trying to do is make the division between them feel small compared to all the things they have in common.
And so those are the things that I start laying down as I open this conversation up. And so just you know, this is what mediation with Andy looks like. What are we doing here? How are we going to go forward? I don't care about what happened in the past. I'm not going to tell them I don't care. But I'm going to say, “Look, the past is done. It's behind us. I want to go forward.”
And then I'm going to talk about why I want to go forward, it's because I think you guys are great. I'm going to talk about the values that we all share, the things we have in common. And I want to talk about those things, and that's why we're here. And so that's how I'd set this thing up to open it up. What do you think about that?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. No, I love it. I think that it is a great framework. And like you said, it doesn't have to be an agenda that they both have, but I think you have to try and work them towards feeling heard and then work them towards finding the commonality between the two of them.
And sometimes the reality is I don't have to like everybody that I work with. Sometimes you have people that you work with that you actually don't like, and that doesn't mean that you don't care about each other. Because if you both care about the work that you're doing, there can be commonality in that. And so the reality is even if you don't like them, who they are as a person, and I can't imagine a place where you or I or any of our friends would have people on their team who truly were horrible people.
That's not what we're about. We're about having good culture. And so the reality is if somebody is truly doing something that is malicious or has the intent to be mean or harmful, that's the stuff, that's my lines in the sand. That's my I'm not going to tolerate that. So I think we're not talking about that. We're talking about two people who do care about what they're doing, and maybe even about each other.
But even if they don't like each other, they still care. And so there is that commonality. And so I think finding that middle ground where they can recognize, “Hey, look, I that you wouldn't intentionally hurt my feelings or that you wouldn't intentionally be mean to me, but yet when you did this thing,” and actually calling out, what are we actually upset about?
So that's where that pre-work comes into play for me is what are they actually upset about so that you can work them to that place, like you said, of leaning into the commonality and the values to solve the problem, which is okay, is this an instance where we just have hurt feelings and you both need to resolve your hurt feelings? Does somebody need an apology from somebody else?
Is somebody actually doing something wrong? Is a job not being done? What is the actual issue and what do they both need to resolve that issue? And that for me as part of that pre-work is figuring out what is actually going on here and what do they need? And that's a very personal thing, because there are times where I'm like, I am not going to ever feel good about this situation if I don't get an apology from this other person.
If I'm mad at you, Andy, and I might be like, “Dude, I'm not going to feel good about this situation until Andy gives me an apology.” And there are plenty of times where I'm like, oh, I just need to feel like Andy sees that he hurt my feelings and then I move on with it. And it varies situationally and it changes every time.
So part of it is asking them, what do they actually need to get out of this? How do we resolve this? And making it actionable on their part in terms of how do you guys want to solve this problem? I'm not you, it has to be something that is going to work for the two of you. Because ultimately once you find that commonality, you have to drive it forward. And I love your approach of it all being future facing.
And so how do we move forward from this? What does that look like? How do we work, to your point, how do we work together? What are those ways of working? Do we need to put some rules in place for how we communicate with each other? What do we need to resolve this situation? And I think there are tools from a communication perspective that we can teach them that help with all of these things, teaching them how to actually give apologies to each other.
The reality is we are taught as children how to say the words I'm sorry, but we don't actually get the knowledge and the learning, most of us, for what actually makes up a good apology. And how do we do that without… You can apologize, it's one of my favorite things to talk about is you can apologize always. There's never a situation where you couldn't apologize for the impact that whatever happened had on someone else.
It doesn't mean that I think I'm wrong. It doesn't mean that I am even taking it back. Although lots of times want to hear how I've made another person feel, I'm like, “Oh gosh, that was not my intention. I did not mean that. I truly am sorry.”
And at the same time, there's also been times where people have been hacked off and I'm like, “Oh dude, that was not my intention. I'm sorry that you felt that way. And I don't think that what I did was wrong.”
It doesn't mean that you're acknowledging you did something bad, which is something that I had to learn. You don't learn that in communication as a child. And so I think that's part of it for me is teaching them those ongoing tools so that they can start to recognize how they create that relationship together, even if they don't actually like each other, because they don't all have to be friends.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I completely agree. I think where we go after, so the commonality groundwork stuff is 100% dependent on what's going on. And I completely agree with you. I don't know how to make a structure to say, “And then you say this.”
I really like your idea of what's going on? What do we need to go forward? I will tell you there are a number of tools that can make this conversation so much easier. And I'm not saying you should have all of these, but you can. A few of the tools that I like and have had a lot of success with is we use DISC in Uncharted. Sure. We used it for our employees and Stephanie teaches it in some of our communication training stuff.
It's a thing that we use to help people work together. And we use it in exam room training and communication training. If you are having team members that are having hard times communicating with each other, DISC is great.

Stephanie Goss:
Super helpful.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's generally very affordable. It's a staff meeting. You can do it in a staff meeting.

Stephanie Goss:
Because it's not about right or wrong. That's what I love about DISC. It's not about right or wrong, it's about how we feel and learning how to take how other people receive information and change what we're doing to have a better approach. It's not a negative thing. That's part of what I love about it so much.

Dr. Andy Roark:
That's exactly right. Everyone's got different communication styles, and I feel like you can use DISC to unlock a lot. If you have that doctor that is just dominant or just bulldozes people, that person may be a high D personality. And if you say, “Hey, this is what you are and this is what other people are, and this is how they communicate and how they like to be communicated with. And because of that, they see you as an intimidating person or they're feeling bulldozed by your communication style.”
And then you can also say to the person who feels bulldozed, “Hey, you're not wrong. This is the style this person has. No, it's not because they don't like you. It's not because they think you're stupid. It's because this is their communication style.”
And that doesn't mean that's okay, but it does mean that this is where they're coming from. And it's a nice tool to open those conversations up about why we communicate in different ways. And so DISC, D-I-S-C, you can find it and check it out, but we use it for Uncharted in our team and we use it when we teach exam room communication stuff.

Stephanie Goss:
And I love, because it takes… When you have two people who have different communication styles, ultimately it goes back to what I was saying, which is how are we going to move forward? When you look at DISC and you look at the different styles, you learn, how do we meet in the middle, somewhere in the middle. Maybe it's more one-sided than the other, but how do we both move from where we are to move forward in the future?
It's like how do you take those differences and make something new with it? And I think it goes along with how do we solve this problem? How do we meet in the middle? And I think it's a super, super helpful tool.

Dr. Andy Roark:
The second tool I'd put out here is languages of appreciation. Being able to get positive reinforcement that other people feel, that's an important part of building a relationship. If nothing that you say to the person is seen positively, if you can't make them smile, then you're always starting at neutral. And it's really easy to go down, but you don't know how to make it go up. You don't know how to gain brownie points in that person's eye if you don't know how they like to be appreciated.
And so just having a general way in your staff where you try to assess how people like to be appreciated, it's just a smart investment. It's part of onboarding. I really like it a lot. And Stephanie and I have talked about this a number of times in different episodes, but it's questions like, tell me about a time that you felt really celebrated.
Tell me about a time that you felt really appreciated for a job well done. What did that look like? And I'm trying to figure out, is this an affirmation person? Is this a gift person? Is this a service person? Meaning if you want to make me feel appreciated, jump in and help me. My wife and I have two very different styles. I am a verbal affirmation person. I want you to tell me I'm doing a good job. And my wife is a service person. She wants you to jump in and help.
And I can't tell you how many times early in our marriage, I'd be like, “You're amazing.” And she's like, “Why don't you shut up and help me?” And not really that, but that was basically what it came down to was I am pouring out verbal affirmation for her, and all she wants is for me to come and be involved in the project that she's doing so she can get done.
And it's funny, I'm like, “Oh, I'm happy to do the work by myself. I just want you to tell me that you appreciate me and I'm doing great, and I'm awesome.
She's like, “I don't need you to tell me I'm awesome. I need you to come and help me do the thing, because that shows me that I'm appreciated.”
So anyway, I just used that as an example of different styles. And so anyway, languages of appreciation, if you're interested in that stuff there's a book called Five Languages Of Appreciation In The Workplace, and you can check that out.
But I do like to ask the staff how they like to be appreciated because that can help us to appreciate each other. And then the last thing is a good old fashioned ways of working conversation or a ways of working tool form kit thing, thingamajig.
Yeah, it's not a formal thing. This is a thing you make yourself. But basically it is worth the time to ask people, how do you like to receive feedback? What's important to you a when you about… When you do a good job, how do you want to hear about it?
If someone wants to give you feedback, how do you like to get feedback? Do you like to just get it directly? Do you like to have it come later on? What are the expectations that you like to have in and around your work and around how we communicate? And again, that plugs into the disc thing as well, but I just think anything that we can work on and just say, “Do you want to have one-on-ones? Do you like to have check-in meetings? How do you feel engaged? How do you feel informed? How much oversight do you have? How much do you like people to check over your shoulders?”
Things like that. If you can get some sort of a sense of how people work, a lot of times their ways of working can be very different. And you end up with someone who says, “I love when people check after me. I want to make sure I'm doing everything right.”
And you have someone else who says, “I hate when people check up after me. Just tell me what you want from me and leave me alone.” And those are not wrong. They're not bad people. But when we have someone who says, “I really like to have people check up on everything I do.”
I go, “Okay, how do I get this person to be able to work more autonomously so we don't have to do that?” And people who say, “I never want to be checked up on, how do I get this person to understand, I don't want you to go too far off the rails before anybody notices and comes along to have to make adjustments about things that maybe you just didn't know about.”
And so anyway, if I don't know that that's how you'd like to work or what your ways of working style is, it's really hard for me to help you. And so having those conversations ahead of time can be valuable.

Stephanie Goss:
Well, and I think it's really important, because they're all tools that help them develop empathy for one another, that you're asking them to look at things that help find the common ground. And imagine a place where they could put themselves in the other person's shoes, which is honestly the best tool that I have ever found for getting them to communicate better. Is what does middle grounds look like and how do we get there? And so I think all of those are great resources, because you got to get them to be able to empathize with each other.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I completely agree. And so that's what that conversation looks like. It's definitely, I'm not trying to get to the bottom of it. It really is, “Hey, so how do we go forward and communicate? And what do you guys need from each other?”
And honestly, at this point, I might leave the meeting and be like, “Hey, I want to leave you guys here. I want to let you guys just talk it through how you work together, what you need from each other, how you can be happy working together, how you guys can respect each other and collaborate? And when you guys get it all worked out or when you feel good and you guys feel like you have a groundwork for being collaborative and being happy together, then come on back.”
And at that point, because they do need to work through it on their own. And I don't want to be there holding their hand until the end. But I can facilitate this, get it started, talk about why we're doing this and what we need. Give them some tools, and then step away and let them work on it and work on how they want to communicate and how they want to work so that they feel good. And anyway, that's how I would set it up.

Stephanie Goss:
I think the two last pieces that go with that is then you have to know that there're going to be slip-ups; we're human. And you're not going to jump from radical miscommunication to perfection. And so recognizing when there are slip-ups, being able to come back to the foundation that they created together and remind them, “Hey, we talked about this before and this was what you guys agreed you were going to do. Have you done that thing?”
And then the last piece is you got to catch it when it's going good. And so it becomes your job as the leader to start to pay attention to this and call it out. And with the hope that they get excited about the wins. And that's the real Yoda place for me is when they come tell me, “Hey, this thing happened today and instead of getting pissed off at each other, this is what we did to solve it. And I just wanted you to know.”
Because when they feel proud of that, and that comes from training like we would any other simple animal, which is rewarding when the good happens. And so I think that as our job is not just to give them the tools and then walk away, and go, Jesus, take the wheel. That's not how we operate. We have to be able to say, “Hey guys, you guys did a great job today. How do you think this week went?” And have those follow-up conversations to keep that the good ball rolling.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I agree. All right, guys, that's all we got. I hope it's helpful.

Stephanie Goss:
Have a great week, everybody. Take care.
Well gang, that's a wrap on another episode of the podcast. And as always, this was so fun to dive into the mail bag and answer this question. And I would really love to see more things like this come through the mail bag.
If there is something that you would love to have us talk about on the podcast or a question that you are hoping that we might be able to help with, feel free to reach out and send us a message.
You can always find the mail bag at the website. The address is unchartedvet.com/mailbag, or you can email us at podcast@unchartedvet.com.
Take care everybody, and have a great week. We'll see you again next time.

This Clinic is ALL Drama

This week on the podcast…

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and practice manager Stephanie Goss are talking through a mailbag letter from a colleague who joined a new practice that seems FULL. OF. DRAMA! There are cliques, there is standing around, there is setting others up to fail and this doctor is wondering if this is just a lost cause or how they possibly begin to tackle this place and make it a more positive, less dramatic place to work. This was so much fun for Andy and Stephanie to debate through. Let's get into this…

Uncharted Veterinary Podcast · UVP – 216 – This Clinic Is ALL Drama

You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.


Do you have something that you would love Andy and Stephanie to role-play on the podcast – a situation where you would love some examples of what someone else would say and how they would say it? If so, send us a message through the mailbag!

We want to hear about your challenges and would love to feature your scenario on the podcast.

Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag


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Episode Transcript

Stephanie Goss:
Hey everybody, I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of the Uncharted podcast. So, this week on the podcast, Andy and I are tackling a question from the mailbag. We got a letter from someone who joined a new hospital and is on the struggle bus about how much internal drama there is amongst the team. There are cliques. There are technicians and people on the team actively avoiding doing something while waiting for quote-unquote, “The other person to see if they're going to do it. And then they come running to me or to another doctor to complain about how X person didn't do Y task. It makes me want to pull my hair out,” is what the email said. And I can understand that because, oh boy, this does not sound like the kind of place that I would want to work.
And this vet has great intentions and they're like, hey, is this a thing that I can fix? Is this a lost cause? How do I tackle it? We talk about the details and more about their mailbag letter. This one was so much fun, even though it was full of drama. Let's get into it, shall we?

Meg:
And now, the Uncharted podcast.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And we are back. It's me, Dr. Andy Roark and Stephanie “I'm going to start some drama, you don't want no drama” Goss. No drama.

Stephanie Goss:
Drama llama for your mama. How's it going, Andy?

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's good. I don't get to say enough lyrics from My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas. And so, when that came into my head, I was like…

Stephanie Goss:
You were like, “Yes.”

Dr. Andy Roark:
What is that from? Don't start no drama, what's…oh it's My Humps. That's what that is. It's in the dusty, cobwebby corner in the back of my brain lives Fergie, My Humps and Fergalicious. That's where that lives. It's like it's when songs come into your mind and you're like, why is that there? I can't … Of all the things I can't remember. Why is My Humps just, is permanently etched into the walls of my brain?

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, I love it so much.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, good gosh. I have a story for you.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh yeah?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, my God, I have not…Yeah, I have not gotten to tell you this story. All right, so you're going to love this. So I'm at the grocery store with Alison, right?

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And we have got a full cart of groceries and we're leaving the store and it's like 10:00am on Saturday morning. So the grocery store is fairly empty.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh, okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And so, I'm pushing the car and Alison's with me, and it's loaded with groceries. And we go out the sliding doors, and as we go out into the empty parking lot, this lady with her cart gets behind us and she's following us out of the grocery store and out of the sliding glass doors into the parking lot. And I'm just driving my cart right down the middle of the parking lot lane, and she's just walking behind us.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And we have the meat in the plastic bag on the bottom shelf, you know what I mean, of the cart down by the ground?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And it starts to slip off. And Alison says, hey, wait, we're losing our meat. And so, I said, oh, and I stopped. And when I stopped, Alison went to fix the meat and I heard the shopping cart behind me stop. And so, the woman who was following us through the parking lot stops when we stopped.

Stephanie Goss:
Instead of going around you?

Dr. Andy Roark:
And then Alison went to fix the meat. No. It's an empty parking lot.

Stephanie Goss:
I know. That's what I mean, so instead of going around, why is she following you?

Dr. Andy Roark:
She stopped, she just stopped. And so, I waited a moment and then I turned around and I looked at her and she was standing behind me with her cart, and I kid you not, she rolled her eyes and went, “Ugh,” like that.

Stephanie Goss:
I have so many questions. This is like the people, the time that you were at the beach, who came and sat down right in front of you at the empty.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Exact [inaudible 00:04:00] yes!

Stephanie Goss:
So many questions. A, why was she following you? B, why didn't she just go around you? It's, why, oh, I don't understand people. I don't.

Dr. Andy Roark:
There was a commercial that I saw, it used to come on, I don't remember what it was for anything, but these people were on the escalator and the escalator just stopped halfway up and they just battered down. And they were like, I guess we'll have to wait until be rescued. And it's an escalator. They could just walk…

Stephanie Goss:
Walk right up…

Dr. Andy Roark:
But they're like, who's going to come for us? And that's what I thought of as this woman just stopped and rolled her eyes and grunted. And I got in the car and I said, Allison, should I have pulled over? And she's like, it's an empty parking lot. And we're pushing a shopping cart.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
We weren't even a car.

Stephanie Goss:
It's not like you were walking down the aisles.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No.

Stephanie Goss:
And you stopped in the middle of the aisle where you can't go around people depending on how narrow your aisles are, there's lots of grocery stores where…

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's a solid three acres flat paved surface. And she's standing behind me going, “Ugh”. And rolling her eyes. And I was like, what is this world? And then I thought, I was like, what experience in life has this person had where she's like, now I'm stuck here behind this a-hole. That's great. What am I going to do about this? I have places to be like…

Stephanie Goss:
Oh ma'am, it's a parking lot. Just go right or left. Doesn't matter. Just go around.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So funny.

Stephanie Goss:
Go around.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I was just like, oh man. It's like learned helplessness. I think she was totally on autopilot. But oh man.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my gosh, that's really funny.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I should've waved. I should have waved her.

Stephanie Goss:
Right?

Dr. Andy Roark:
I should have waved her on like when you put your other window and just like go, go around. I need to complain to Publix that their carts don't have blinkers that you can put on when you're stopped. So people know just to [inaudible 00:05:58].

Stephanie Goss:
I need a blinker on my Publix cart please.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But as she rolled her eyes and stood behind me, I was like, I can't wait to tell Stephanie Goss about this.

Stephanie Goss:
I have so many questions.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh man. I don't have any answers.

Stephanie Goss:
That's the thing, when things like that happen, don't get me wrong, I am way road ragey and probably way too much for my own good. And my children learned all the expletives very early on, particularly in my car. And a lot of the time where my brain immediately goes to is the questions. Why would they do that? What made her think that she had to follow you? Why not only why did she roll her eyes, what was going on in her head where she was like, oh, this a-hole? Like, but just so many questions.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I think that, in all seriousness, so I've been thinking all about this. I think that there's a commentary on society here. I think that so many people have just been habitualized into, we were going out the door and so she…

Stephanie Goss:
We're in a line.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And so she just fell in line. But I think that there's some weird part of our brains that pick up on those patterns and do it. And then the stopping like, oh, great, now I'm stuck here.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But it's like people you know in your life who just have a problem and instead of just doing the obvious thing to fix the problem, they're like, I guess I have to wait, or I need to go to a higher authority. They come to you and they're like, we're out of toilet paper in the bathroom. And you're like, did you get toilet paper out of the storeroom? And they're like, no.

Stephanie Goss:
Cool. Could you go do that?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Could you? Oh, okay. And next time you should just feel empowered. You don't even have to come and ask me. You can just go get more toilet paper and put it in the bathroom.

Stephanie Goss:
Don't start about toilet paper because that is the number one thing in the clinic that gives me rage. Hands down, toilet paper rage is worse than road rage because nobody ever knows how to change the freaking roll.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Like the empty tube?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes, yes. It'll get used and then the tube will sit there and most of the time they don't even get another roll and place it on top of the role, which would also, the empty tube, which would also piss me off, but would piss me off way less than when the empty tube just sits on the thing and nobody gets any more toilet paper. Because it's always me. Always. Every single clinic that I have ever worked in, it is always me without fail that sits down to pee and there's an empty freaking toilet paper tube on the roll. In fact, the best Christmas present I ever got, it just came up yesterday in my time hop. The best Christmas present I ever got from my entire team. There's two presents that stand out in my mind. Both of them involve toilet paper.
The best Christmas present, though, is one of my assistants…This became a thing. And my team knew how ragey, because without fail, at least once a week I would sit down to pee and it would be empty. And so one of my assistants one year took…you know how you mark the IV bag that when the line was changed last or when the bag was changed last, and you put your initials in the date and time? And one of my assistants changed the toilet paper and then put white tape across it like an IV, and wrote the date and time that she changed and her initials. And she gave me the picture as a Christmas present. And I was like, this is the best Christmas present that I've ever gotten, is someone besides me changing the effing toilet paper in the clinic.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, I just imagined the woman with a shopping cart walking into the stall and seeing the empty thing and just going, “ugh, great”. Yeah, now I have to hold it. And then just standing there until Stephanie Goss comes with toilet paper that she could have gotten…

Stephanie Goss:
To be the toilet paper fairy.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly…

Stephanie Goss:
Anyways…

Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay. All right. I just wanted to share that with you.

Stephanie Goss:
Oh my god, I love it so much. I love it so much.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I was like, oh people are crazy. I've forgotten about the people at the beach coming and sitting directly in front of me.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
That's hilarious. All right.

Stephanie Goss:
So there are people in your life who cause drama. And this week's episode is all about drama because we got a great mailbag letter from someone who has joined a clinic and who said, this clinic is all drama. They joined a new hospital and they're struggling with how much drama and conflict there is in the team. So they have a problem with cliques it seems like. And lots of different facets of the team will actively avoid doing something, waiting to see if the quote-unquote “other” person or the other group or whatever will do it. And then when it doesn't happen, come running to, this person is a doctor on their team, come running to the doctors and be like, so-and-so Andy didn't, Andy didn't replace the toilet paper in the bathroom. I caught him because I went in there right after he was in there and it was empty. It's all his fault.
They're doing that kind of nonsense. And this doctor's like, look I literally want to pull my hair out. It is driving me crazy. And they were like, I've tried leading by example. I've tried emphasizing good intent and channeling the Andy and Stephanie like Zen head space. Let's assume good intent. Let's think good thoughts. But this seems to backfire with this crew because they said, the more I do that, the more it seems like they're then trying to prove to me even more why the other person is so bad or does not have good intention.
And they're struggling because this doctor is not a manager. And they said that the management doesn't seem to have a good handle on the situation and doesn't really seem to be doing anything about it. And this doctor is frustrated because they said, look, this is a really good high skilled group of paraprofessional team members, and they could be fantastic if they would just get out of their own way and get out of the drama. And so they were asking, what can I do to help reward them when they do work as a team to be positive, to seek out the good in each other because they really are really high skilled and I want them to be a high functioning team. How do I help do that? Because I'm feeling like I don't know whether this is a lost cause or not.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Oh man. All right. This is a good one. I really like this one. I really like the idea of this question coming from the associate doctor who's like, I'm not their boss, but I have to deal with this. And so what do we do?

Stephanie Goss:
Yep.

Dr. Andy Roark:
All right. Well let's go ahead and start with some head space.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Huh. I have concerns, Stephanie. I have concerns.

Stephanie Goss:
Me too.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I also like the phrasing, I feel that they asked us very reasonable questions that I can answer these questions for sure.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I don't know if it's going to do enough good.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I don't know if it's going to, I can answer your questions. I don't know if it's going to make this situation good enough to make sense.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So headspace perspective, culture comes from the top, right?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It just does. And there's no way around that. And as we've seen more multi-practice groups and things like that, I think this is the problem of the next generation in vet medicine is we've got bigger and bigger groups of practices together. And there's some, I'm not being anti-corporate, I'm really not. There's some real benefits to corporate medicine and I think you'll continue to see benefits. The downside is that there are also real benefits of having the practice owner whose reputation is on the line being right there shoulder to shoulder with everyone else. You know what I mean?

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And so when I think about…Culture comes from the top, and if you don't have someone who's really invested in culture right there on the ground, I think you can have trouble. That said, now that I'm saying it out loud, I also, it's not lost on me that there have been a lot of practice owners who have generated negative.

Stephanie Goss:
I was just…

Dr. Andy Roark:
You just kind of looked at me and didn't immediately respond positively. It dawned on me. I was like, yeah, okay, that's fair.

Stephanie Goss:
I was waiting.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Okay, that's fair.

Stephanie Goss:
I was waiting for you to hear your thought process play out.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, okay.

Stephanie Goss:
Because what I would say is that equally if they're on the ground and they're not doing anything about it, they're not any better than somebody who is absentee from the day-to-day of the practice. And I think you're not wrong that this is something that we're going to have to, I think deal with, and I don't know that it has to do with the size of the practice, but that there is a lot of drama and there is a lot of toxicity and negativity in veterinary medicine. And your point about it coming from the top, culture being set from the top, is so so true and it matters.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And I think that was the first thing when I read this as well, is I was like, well, you can absolutely lead from the middle. I am a firm believer in being able to lead from within the team. And at the same time there comes, there is a line where if at the end of the day your boss, whether it's corporate leadership, private practice owner, doesn't matter. Whether the management at the top is not willing to set that culture on down, your hands are kind of tied.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
At some point.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah and that's where I'm trying, that's where I'm sort of trying to go here is. You can absolutely lead from the middle. I agree with you on that. And if management leadership above you is undermining the positive culture that you're trying to build, you're going to lose.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Top-line leadership has a disproportional impact.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And it can be super frustrating trying to lead from the middle when management just perpetuates behaviors above you that continue to make this type of drama happen. You know?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. Totally.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So yeah. So anyway, I guess that's where I want to start in headspace is just to sort of say, I think that when we have systemic problems with culture that radiate from leadership, the impact that we can make in the middle is limited. It is really almost impossible to revolutionize the culture if leadership's not on board. I think you can make a positive impact. The reason I said at the very beginning, we have concerns. It's because I'm kind of like, I don't know if you can make enough impact to make this be a place that you want to continue to work.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Maybe you can and in some cases you can. And it really depends on how much influence do you have, how much do people listen to you? What is your schedule like? How much can you control your immediate environment? And then also what's your tolerance for drama?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Because it might be that the drama's at an eight and you can help make the drama a six and you're okay with a six.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But if it's at an eight and your tolerance is a three…you might be able to make it a six, but it's still not a three and you're still going to be unhappy.

Stephanie Goss:
Yep. I agree with you. And I think the question for me that I ask myself is what level of control do I have if I'm not the boss? Because I have seen and have been in my very first practice, a role where I took a leadership from the middle position and led from within the team. I was not in a formal leadership position. And there is absolutely environments and situations where you can have and be afforded a good amount of control as a member of the team. And so as a doctor, I would ask this doctor to do some introspective work and look at it and think about how much control do you actually have here?
Because if you are in a position where they're letting you be pretty, you can be pretty empowered even if you're not on top, you might be able to overcome more of that. Like you were saying, more of their lack of jumping in. Maybe it's a situation where they're not directly contributing to the drama, but they're not doing anything about solving it. But if they'll let you take the lead there, that might be a workable situation. So the first head space piece for me is what level really examining for yourself, and this is a totally individual thing based on your situation and your environment and your practice, what level of control do you actually have when you're not the positional boss?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. This is, one way or another in the end, this is going to come down to one of our math problems and you're going to pick your poison.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And it's going to be, I mean, it's just a, it going to be…

Stephanie Goss:
True story.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I think my advice, just head space looking out at this is I think where you really get screwed is if you think that this is, that there's no options.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
There's drama here and I have to figure out how to fix it or else I'm going to live with drama for my whole life. And I see a lot of people who fall into that. It's called “either or” thinking. Either I fix this or I live with it forever. And I go, I got another option for you. Got another option for you. And that's leaving.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And it's not catastrophic. And I think all of this gets better if you say to yourself, I'm a doctor, I signed a one-year contract. That's what I signed. One year. And I'm going to try, I'm going to do this. I'm going to put up with this garbage for one year and then I'm going to reassess. And I think that that makes everything feel much more manageable and approachable. And so remember, it's a one-year contract. You didn't get married, you took a job to see how it goes. And so my advice is I think it sounds like this person's got good open eyes and clear expectations about what can be done. Let's see what we can do in the next year, and then we're going to reassess. And if this place is still just drama central and it's sucking the life out of you, or it's just a constant headache, then this might not be where you want it to be.
I may have a bit of a, I don't think it's callous, but I don't know. My perspective on this with sort of staff drama and things is this is a leadership problem.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And if you are trying to have a good quiet life and there's drama just going on around you and around you and management is not going to address it, I don't think it's bad if you leave.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. Totally.

Dr. Andy Roark:
To me, that's a very understandable position and I think you should reward clinic culture. I want to work at a good positive place to be. And I think that that's, I think that that's very understandable. And so again, all of this is just headspace and trying to get to where we feel like, okay, I feel all right here. I also feel like when you feel like you don't have any other options other than to fix this, the stakes get real high and everything feels really, really important. And that honestly limits your effectiveness, right?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You're at your most effective when you don't care all that much.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes. Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
When you can kind of wait, when you can let things go, you can pick your battles, that's being effective. And so we got to get the stakes down. So that that's kind of what I'm trying to do, get my head straight here and go, let's see where it goes for a year. Ultimately, this might not be salvageable and I need to be okay with that.

Stephanie Goss:
That was my second piece was like, I think you have to get zen before you can tackle it. And so there's two pieces of that. One is putting down the flaming raging sword of justice and not be raging when you go into dealing with it. But the other is what you were just talking about, which is if you are feeling amped up, if you are hacked off at somebody, if you are feeling triggered, you can't be super effective. And so finding that place where it's, you're not trying to tackle this on a day when there's been clique drama in the practice.
It's not so much, I mean it's a part of our safe acronym that we talk about all the time, but really is, are you in a good head space? Are you in that place where you're just like, I don't, this is not bothering me. Even if it's just for today or just for an hour while you're making a move here. I think what's really important is being in that place where it's not mattering so much and you do not have the flaming raging sword of justice in your hands because that will not end well.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
For you.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no. I agree with that. I think, I'm trying to think if there's anything else from me. Those are the big ones.

Stephanie Goss:
I think the last thing for me from a head space perspective goes along with the other piece of the acronym and it's assuming good intent, but really for me is just remembering, and I've had to remind myself of this in practices that I've been in and just even behavior of myself and the team, is cliques happen when people don't feel safe and/or they're trying to fit in.
And so reminding myself this is happening because people ultimately want to be liked at the end of the day. And so if I can figure out how to shift their perspective from this group versus that group to meeting the need where they do feel safe and they do feel like they fit in because they feel valued and appreciated, I might be able to make a bigger impact with that in mind. And so I think from a head space perspective that that's the last thing for me as a leader, is just to look at assuming good intent, but also asking myself, why is this happening? And scientifically, the science goes behind cliques and how they happen has to do with the fact that people don't feel safe or they're trying to fit in. And I think remembering that when dealing with any mean girl drama has been really helpful for me.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Well, let's take a break and then we'll come back and my first action step is to dig into why this is happening.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Sound good?

Stephanie Goss:
Sounds great.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Let's do that.

Stephanie Goss:
Hey, it's Stephanie, and I'm jumping in here for one quick second because we have a workshop coming up next week that you are not going to want to miss. Our friend and colleague, Maria Pirita CVPM is going to be leading a workshop that is open to the public and to our members on February 15th, 2023. It is at 8:00pm Eastern, 5:00pm Pacific, and it is called Texting it to the Next Level. That's right. Maria is going to be tackling, talking about some of the do's and don'ts when it comes to texting with our clients and really how to take what we all jumped in and started doing full tilt during the pandemic and use it to level up and build a stronger bond with our clients without lengthy phone calls, and hopefully save you and your team some headache and some time and some stress and recoup that time back into your day.
So if this sounds like something you'd be in on, head on over to unchartedvet.com/events. Check it out. If you are a member, you always get in for free, if you're not a member, you can join. It is $99 for this workshop or check out an Uncharted membership because you get all of the workshops that we do in the course of the year at no additional charge with the cost of your membership. So check it out, unchartedvet.com/events. And now, back to the podcast.

Dr. Andy Roark:
All right, so transitioning from action steps, and I think hopefully we did a pretty good job of getting into a safe head space where we can feel comfortable as we try to see what's possible in moving forward here, right?

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Lower the stakes. I understand that we got options. We're going to give this a try and then see how it goes, and we'll have to make the call after a little while and see what sort of traction we can get. The first action step from me is root cause analysis. What is going on here? And it's easy to say people are, they're setting traps for each other, they're forming cliques, they're trying to catch each other, they're not engaging in getting work done, and instead trying to get other people to do it. I'm like, these all sound like symptoms to me. Symptoms of a problem.
And so the first thing that I would counsel this doctor on is root cause analysis. Why is this happening? Is it because people are unhappy here? Is it because there's a lack of information being shared?

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Between management and staff. Is there some weird positive reinforcement loop that's happening? When I get Stephanie Goss in trouble, do I get patted on the head?

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Does she get punished in a way that benefits me?

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I've seen weird stuff like that in practices where I've seen, I have…I'll tell you one that I've seen in practice. It was if you tattled on other people, then you got to go and sit in the manager's office and talk about the problem at length and have these conversations and feel important because you're in the manager's office talking about practice business and also be off of your feet sitting in a comfortable chair and also off of the floor not having to go into rooms because you are talking to the manager.
And oftentimes what would happen is these were just gossip sessions, but basically people had figured out if I can report some drama, then I get to be a part of…

Stephanie Goss:
Go take a half-hour break.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Gossip.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I get to have, yeah, exactly. I get to have a half an hour break talking about drama stuff and not actually doing the job.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Per se. And there's chocolate in the manager's office. So I'm eating chocolate, talking about Stephanie Goss not doing what she's supposed to do, feeling good about myself, you know what I mean? And other people are actually doing the flea and tick talk in and out of the exam room, you know what I mean?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And I saw that and I was like, and it just happened.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Again, and every day somebody was camped out in the office talking about some drama and management was taking notes, and it was a very intense session.
At the end of the day, I'm like, what'd you do today? And they're like, nothing.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm investigating this drama. But did we audit the inventory? No. Did we call clients back? No. It was, anyway.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It was silly, but I saw that. So anyway, is there something like that going on? Is there some weird positive reinforcement mechanism that I don't know about? Is there a single toxic person? Is this coming from one bully person or one drama person? Is this radiating from a single individual?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And again, maybe not, but a lot of times there's somebody who, I don't know what their thing is. Are we doing all this stuff because somebody needs to be in control? Because they need to feel powerful? Because they need to bend others to their will that they feel insecure and they feel better by calling out other people not doing their jobs. Because if this is a one-person problem, that's a much easier problem than this is systemic across the entire organization.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. Yep. Yeah, no. I think that's all makes perfect sense. The other thing that I have experienced is where, like you were saying about the rewards, and I think another really common reward is when there is friction, because we are a conflict-averse group as a whole in veterinary medicine, there can be the unintentional reward of, well, I'm just going to shift around who works with who so that I don't have to deal with it as the leader. I've seen this employed over and over again. And so people are rewarded by getting to be in surgery for the whole day and do surgery instead of having to be with the rest of the group. And it's less drama for everybody else. And so they're getting, the negative is being reinforced.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
And so I think that that, I've seen it manifest in multiple ways. Your manager's office example is another great one. But I think that there's a lot of that, and especially here, it sounds like there is conflict-averse management. And so I think the root cause analysis is super, super important because I think you're going down the right path for sure, in terms of these are symptoms of an underlying cause and you have to figure out what is that actual underlying cause.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. The questions I ask myself again and again are, why is this happening? Why is this happening? Who's benefiting from this happening? And I'm looking for those things because I'm trying to figure out where is this coming from?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Why is it happening? Who's benefiting from it happening? Are there consistent players that seem to be involved again and again and again? And if I can figure out the answers to those questions often I have a much clearer way to approach this. It's rarely everyone is misbehaving and independently they've all decided to tattle on each other or dodge tasks.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
This is coming from somewhere and there's some strange reward mechanism. And sometimes it's, there's a bully. And the bully is nice to people that join his clique. And so people join them to get, and they're, the bully's, dishing out positive reinforcement or withholding negative reinforcement if you go along.
And again, when you see this for the first time, you go, I don't understand why everyone's acting this way. You have to dig a little bit and watch for a little while and ask some questions before you get this pinned down. But that root cause analysis I think is really key. As far as cliques go, especially when you're not the boss, be friendly without joining up. So I can smile, I can be friends, I can be nice, but I'm not playing this game.

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And just decide I'm not doing this. There's so many people that I see who are good people, but they desperately want to be liked and they will say, ooh, this is toxic. And then when the opportunity presents itself, they will fall right into the game. It's like this is toxic, but I like being on the good guy side and I like having friends and I like to have things to talk about and everybody wants to talk about this drama. And so I want to be involved. And so I'm going to talk about what is topical and what is topical is drama and gossip. And so just be careful about, be nice to people, just don't play the game. And this is subtle and this is leading from the middle.

Stephanie Goss:
And I think the other piece of it too is that, again, it goes back to being a conflict-averse group, but I've seen repeated time and time again where people aren't necessarily joining in because they know that it's wrong and they don't want to be doing the thing and they're sitting there and letting it happen. And so I think for me, in terms of the action steps after the root cause analysis, the first part, if this is truly making you want to pull your hair out, you've got to shut it down. And that means not only not being a participant in it, but when it is happening, being brave and being the person to say, hey, I wouldn't want to know that you guys were talking about me like that, can you please stop having this conversation? If you have a problem with Andy, you need to go have a conversation with him.
It's shutting it down and not only not engaging in it, but not allowing it to continue. And I don't see that happen anywhere near as often. The default for people is like, I'm not going to join in, but I'm not going to say anything about it either.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
I'm going to continue to sit here and let you guys be gossiping behind me.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. That's, to me, that's the first step towards leadership. Whether you're a positional leader or not.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I think the bare minimum that I expect from an employee who's not the boss is to not participate. You know what I mean? I can be okay, I will understand if my young, that assistant, does not stand up to the technician who's 22 years older than her and say, shut a behavior down. I do understand. And I would not hold it against them for not standing up and saying something in that weird power dynamic because I think that's a lot to ask of an inexperienced person or a young person or someone who's just trying to fit in.
However, if that person is a leader, and I will tell you my opinion of that person soars through the roof when they say, I think if you have a problem with Stephanie, you should talk to her about it. And then they walk away. I'm like, that's leadership potential there, buddy. That takes, it takes some guts. It does take some guts.

Stephanie Goss:
It does.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And again, let's be honest, it's what you should say, but as a human being, it's scary to say that. Especially when you don't know what to say or that behavior's not being modeled. God, there's great pressure to go along with other people.

Stephanie Goss:
Well sure. Because we all want, it's the same reason the cliques form. We all want to be liked.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
We all want to fit in. And even if you're not a part of the clique like that, for most people, that is not an exception. You want to be liked. You don't want people to not like you. And so putting yourself out there and going against the crowd is a hard thing to do.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I think that that's amazing. So I would say to that, think about what you're going to say before you say it. I really think that just giving a little bit of thought to what your statement is going to be when this behavior happens because it's going to happen again. You know it's going to happen. I always say, I think people over, I think people say too much. I think that, you know what I mean? They'll say, well, listen, I would not want to be talked about in this way.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Just say, I think if you have a problem with Stephanie Goss, you should go talk to Stephanie Goss about it and then be done.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And I think that's all you have to say. And don't make it a big deal and don't make it sound like a big judgey thing, but just say it and then be done. And they can do with that what they will. But that takes real, real, real, it takes some courage if you haven't done it before. But that is kind of what I expect from the leadership level of the doctors.

Stephanie Goss:
The other happy medium because, for me, I hear what you're saying about not expecting it from the team, and I want a culture where every member of my team, including the kennel kid, could look at me or my 22-year senior tech doesn't matter and feel like they have the tools and the confidence. And that we have created a culture where that is acceptable and expected that they would call each other out on it. And recognizing that getting there is hard and is a journey and that is a tool, those are that you have to actually learn.
And so for me, one of the middle-of-the-road, easy starting places for my team when we started on that kind of communication journey was just calling it what it is. So if there's gossiping happening being like, hey, you guys are driving me crazy standing here gossiping, can you take it somewhere else? Then I'm not telling them to stop because that is the action that is really hard for a lot of people. I'm putting on my bossy pants and I'm telling you that you're gossiping and I want you to stop. For some people, the easier path is the path of the least resistance is sometimes it's just calling it out. Hey, you're being really mean and I don't want to hear that. Can you go somewhere else?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Do you think the way that you would handle this changes depending on what kind of support you're getting from leadership in the practice?

Stephanie Goss:
Yes, and that's…

Dr. Andy Roark:
I think so.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes. Absolutely. And I think that's what I'm saying, is recognizing that not everybody is going to either feel empowered enough to say, hey, it sounds like you have a problem with Andy. Why don't you go talk to him? Not everybody's going to feel empowered to do that, and/or they don't feel like they have that tool set. And so I think that the empowerment level matters greatly. And so if you are a person who is less empowered on a structural level within your practice or feels less empowered on a personal level because you feel like that's just, I couldn't have the balls to say it that way.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
Find the way that feels good to you and to your point is short and sweet, but calls it what it is. Like, hey, you guys are gossiping and driving me crazy. Go somewhere else.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And just say it and be done and say it with a smile on your face and just say it. But no. So we have a workshop in Uncharted that Dr. Saye Clement did, and she talked about shutting down gossip in her practice and it was very much from the top down and she empowered her people and said, if you see this, I want, this is what I want you to say. And she told everyone that and that really empowered them to say, this sounds like gossip. I'm not going to participate in this.

Stephanie Goss:
Yes.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But it came because she said that from the top. And then she continued to use that messaging again and again and again. I think again, that's a note to practice leadership of you can make these things happen by normalizing this and giving people the power and the words to say…

Stephanie Goss:
Totally.

Dr. Andy Roark:
We're speaking to the doctor here who's not getting that support from above. And I think you have to read the room and say, how loud do I want to beat this drum? How loud do I want to beat this drum? Because at the end of the day too, and these are hard realities, I have to work with these people.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And burning this relationship bridge or turning a clique against me, that's a pain I'm not willing to carry. I don't own this place. I'm not a leader in this place. I want to make this culture better. At the same time, I've got to look out for my ability to do work and enjoy being here, which means I'm probably not going to crusade against the technicians that I rely on to get my work done. I need to figure out how to influence them while still keeping that relationship stable and strong. And you need to look at where you are and make that call.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. And I think if that is you, I think one of the next steps that I would have regardless, but especially if you feel like you're in that position. For me, the next action step is being transparent about how I feel about it and how it makes me feel. And so, because really, even if our coworkers drive us crazy, we do all want to be liked. And if I heard from somebody else on my team, hey, when you do this thing it makes me feel sad or it makes me feel hurt, or it makes me feel bad on behalf of this other person. There is something eye-opening about viewing our behavior through someone else's lens.
And so for me then besides if you feel, especially if you feel like you can't shut it down and/or if you're in a position where it's not being supported from the top down, being able to just be transparent and say, hey, I care about all of you and I like you and I like Sarah, and when you stand here and you talk about her, it really makes me feel uncomfortable.

Dr. Andy Roark:
That's a great way.

Stephanie Goss:
And just being transparent about how it's making you feel because it does. It is very hard to see ourselves through, to, see our behaviors through someone else's lens. And in my personal experience, it's wildly impactful because even if I knew full well that I was being a Royal Biotch and I was acting naughty, if you told me that, I would a hundred percent feel called out and be like, ooh, maybe I need to tone that down a little bit.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But called out, but called out in a good way. I think this is really important too. I think one of the mistakes that people make in giving feedback is making people feel morally judged.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And that does not go well. When I say to you, gossiping is for the weak-minded…

Stephanie Goss:
Right. Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I wouldn't say that, but…

Stephanie Goss:
The moral judgment.

Dr. Andy Roark:
This is gossiping and I don't participate in activities like that. That makes it sound like, I think most of us would hear that as, I'm better than you and you are doing something that I think is gross and that is going to make a lot of people feel judged and defensive. And you could be a hundred percent right, but I think we always want to be careful about making people feel judged. That's not a behavior that I would take part in as opposed to when you say that it hurts my soul because I like Stephanie Goss and she's my friend, and that's it. That's what it is.

Stephanie Goss:
It gives you feels. Like even if, like I said, even if you are the, because there are people who live for drama. I don't know how because I am not one of those people, but there are people out there who just thrive on drama. But even those people, when they hear that, it's like, ooh, even if it's just for a split second. And so I think that's the next step for me, is just being transparent about how I feel, how I in fact, how I am impacted by it, how I am affected by it.
You guys, I leave here at the end of the day and I'm just super stressed out because it just seems like we're picking at each other all day and I want us to have fun at work. What can we do to have more fun? That is leading from the middle and addressing it without being like, we're going to call a team meeting because everybody's acting like a-holes and we need to change it. Sometimes that is the thing that needs to happen. But if you're not in that position where you can do that, being able to lead from the middle and just say, hey, look, this is how it impacts me, this is how it makes me feel, is very, very powerful thing.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I agree. The part for me that kind of ties into this as well is, and I preach this to associate doctors especially, but I probably should just preach to the whole team, having a healthy anchor in your life outside of the vet practice is just good. It's just good life strategy. Where drama really sweeps people up and breaks them is when your whole life is the vet clinic and all your friends are in the vet clinic and your self-identity is in the vet clinic. And then people come along and they talk trash about you and you're like, this is my whole identity and it's being spread to all of the people that I know and spend time with. And you just get swept up into this and I go, look, you care way too much about this. And it's one of those things, one of the best things about to diffuse drama is not to care all that much.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And yeah, it's a balance to walk, but honestly, I think for most associate vets, check yourself and make sure that your self-identity isn't so tied up in your life at the clinic that you don't have a good solid anchor outside of the clinic. I am a father and a husband and I like to do CrossFit stuff and there's a community that I do. Stop laughing at me, Goss.

Stephanie Goss:
I was wondering when CrossFit was going to come up. It's been a hot minute since we talked about CrossFit.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I had to look at all of my secret nerd hobbies and decide which one I was going to put out. I'm going to go with the most macho of my nerd hobbies. And then you literally straight up laughed.

Stephanie Goss:
A hundred percent, keep going.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So anyway, I am father and a husband, a CrossFitter, and a quilter, and whatever else I might be. And working in the practice is a thing that I do. And I like the people that I work with and they're nice people and I care about them, but they are not my family and they are, they're not my only friends and my identity is more than just who I am to this specific group of people, which protects me and insulates me if and when drama comes up because it's not life defining for me. And I can look at it with a healthy eye and a healthy perspective and navigate it much more clearly. And so I always put that forward of if you don't have a life outside of the practice, you are going to be much more at risk for getting swept up in drama and cliques and gossip and things in the practice.

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I've found it's so much easier just to rise above that stuff if you've got other things going on in your life. And so anyway, that's just general life advice on practice.

Stephanie Goss:
And so it sounds like this doctor is doing, they're modeling the behavior that they want, so they're doing check, check box number one. Maybe they're doing number two, which is when they are trying to involve you in it, don't engage them, right? Or whether you're intentionally disengaging them and saying, you're driving me crazy doing this thing. I need you to stop. Or whether you're just unintentionally engaging them and are ignoring it, but not engaging them when they act that way. And then I think the other thing that they already brought up, but continuing to expand on it, is rewarding that good behavior and doing it in the sense that when they do do things that you like rewarding that. You always talk about how we're simple animals. And so praising the behavior when it is positive, when they do work together, which again it sounds like this doctor is doing, but making sure to remember that we've got to keep it, make it specific, make it personal to them.
So say thank you when they do it and tell them why it means a lot to you. And then making it fun. And that's where I would lean into asking them, hey guys, it seems like we've been doing a lot of picking at each other or there's been a lot of, even saying, there's been a lot, seems like to me there's been a lot of drama. There's been a lot of people like mad at each other and just not wanting to work together. I want to make work a fun place. What can we do to change this? And asking them to actively get involved in changing it.
Because ultimately I think where we started this episode is that this may be something that you can't change, but for me to be able to sleep well at the end of the night, I would want to know that I did everything that I possibly could. And so asking and trying to get them engaged. And if you can't, then to me the answer is like, well, this may be a situation I can't solve. And I would feel okay going somewhere else if that was the case.

Dr. Andy Roark:
There's two tools to put in the toolbox for this vet that I would say. We've talked all around getting your head straight and kind of how you sign up or don't sign up and getting your priorities in line, all that sort of things. There're two big ones for me with working with my team. And this is actually just getting through the day, positive reinforcement and giving people reputations. And those are two big ones that I use, which is… So positive reinforcement is when you see someone behaving in the way that you want to see more of, stop what you're doing, look at them directly in their eyes and say, hey, I want you to know that I saw that you did not join up in this conversation and thank you. I really appreciate it and I want you to know that that makes me think very highly of you.

Stephanie Goss:
Yep. I love that.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And thank you for not perpetuating drama. And oftentimes that's the fuel that people need to keep going. The truth is participating in the drama, it often gets positively reinforced. Not participating in the drama, it doesn't get positively reinforced. And so just start positively reinforcing people jumping in and doing things. And what that means is if everyone stands around and doesn't do a thing so they can catch somebody else, when someone does do the thing, stop them and say, hey, I saw you do that. I just want to say thank you for jumping in and doing that. And I wanted you to know that I saw it and I appreciate it because I know other people could have done it and they didn't. And so thank you.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And that's just call out. The other thing is give people a reputation and they'll live up to it. So if you have someone that you work with who does not participate in those things, you should say, hey, the number one thing that I enjoy about working with you is that you are no drama. You don't gossip about other people, you're nice and kind, and you get things done and you don't talk bad about other people. And I just want to tell you how much I appreciate that and it's just something I admire about you or it's something that I am, it just makes me so happy to get to work with you.

Stephanie Goss:
Right.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And that's it. And once you tell someone that the chances of them turning around the next day and starting to gossip are fairly low.

Stephanie Goss:
Sure.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Right? If I give you a reputation and say, Stephanie Goss, this is what you're good at and this is why I love working with you, that tends to hit people pretty hard. And they tend to remember, oh, this is what Andy thinks of me and then they behave in that way at least when I'm around. And that's it.
So those are your two tools. Give people a reputation. Say to them, I really love working with you because you don't participate in these behaviors. I love working with you because you're the first one to jump in and do what needs to be done, not waiting to see who else is going to do it. And that means a lot to me, and I love that you do that. That's giving a reputation and then catching them doing not the thing that's making you crazy and positively reinforcing it. Just call it out. Say specifically, you did this and I think it's awesome and I want you to, I just want to tell you what it meant to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
That's it. Those are your two tools. And I would do that and I would go after it and I'd give it some time. And if you feel like you can get a little orbit around yourself that works, even if drama continues in the hospital, if you end up with three or four tech's assistants that you've given reputations to, that you've positively reinforced their behavior, you might be able to get a little drama free zone around yourself and the people that you work with on the regular. And that might make everything just good enough to keep going and to enjoy your job and to be there, even if drama kind of swirls through the larger practice as a whole. It's worth a try.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Cool. That's all I got.

Stephanie Goss:
This was a fun one. Drama, drama, drama.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No matter what, don't just stop your shopping cart and wait for them to go. Figure out how to get your shopping cart and go around the other person and…

Stephanie Goss:
The moral of the story.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And continue on towards the career that you want to have.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it. Take care everybody.

Dr. Andy Roark:
See you guys.

Stephanie Goss:
Well gang, that's a wrap on another episode of the podcast. And as always, this was so fun to dive into the mailbag and answer this question. And I would really love to see more things like this come through the mailbag. If there is something that you would love to have us talk about on the podcast or a question that you are hoping that we might be able to help with, feel free to reach out and send us a message. You can always find the mailbag at the website. The address is unchartedvet.com/mailbag, or you can email at podcast@unchartedvet.com. Take care everybody, and have a great week. We'll see you again next time.

Coaching Spicy Tenured Team Members

This week on the podcast…

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and special guest practice manager Maria Pirita break down the problem of what to do when one of your seasoned team members turns spicy! In this question from a conference attendee, we have a lead technician who is not doing the “menial” parts of her job and is being rude to other team members. How are we going to handle it? Let's get into this…

Uncharted Veterinary Podcast · UVP – 213 – Coaching Spicy Tenured Team Members
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Episode Transcript

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This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Hey, Stephanie Goss. You got a second to talk about GuardianVets?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. What do you want to talk about?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Man, I hear from people all the time that are overwhelmed because the phones never stop ringing. And I'm sure you hear from these people as well, our caseload is blowing up, and the doctors are busy, and the phones just don't stop.

Stephanie Goss:
They never stop. That is true story.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm amazed by how few veterinarians know about GuardianVets. This is a service where you have registered technicians who can jump in virtually and help you on the phones. You can flip the switch and GuardianVets can jump in and take some of the load off the front desk, and they can handle your clients and get them booked for your appointments and give them support, and it really is a godsend.

Stephanie Goss:
Pre-pandemic, it was amazing to me how many people hadn't heard about it for after-hours call help. But at this point, I can't believe how many people don't realize that they are offering help during the daytime as well, which I would think right now is a huge benefit to practices because everybody is shorthanded. Everybody is drowning in phone calls. And so we talk about it, we've talked about GuardianVets a lot on the podcast and every time we do, we always get somebody who says, “What is that?”

Dr. Andy Roark:
Guys, if you're not familiar with GuardianVets, if you think that you could use some help on the phones or up at the front desk, check them out. It's guardianvets.com and if you mention our podcast, me and Stephanie Goss, you get a month free. So check it out, guardianvets.com.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Hey, everybody. I'm Dr. Andy Roark and this is the Uncharted Podcast. Man, it's been a while since I got to do that. Welcome, welcome, everybody. I am here with Maria Pirita today. We are breaking down how to coach the spicy tenured team member. What do you do when you've got somebody who's been on the team for some time? They may be a shift lead, a team lead, a department lead, and they're just not performing.
Maybe they're not doing menial tasks, they're not cleaning cages or cleaning up the surgery suite because they think it's beneath them. Maybe they're just grumbling, maybe they're just snapping at people, maybe they're not treating people in a way that that person feels respected or they're throwing their weight around a little bit. What do you do? How do you talk to that person? That's what this episode is all about. Guys, let's get into it.

Speaker 3:
And now the Uncharted Podcast.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Hey, and we are back. It's me, Dr. Andy Roark and the one and only Maria Pirita. Hello, my friend.

Maria Pirita:
Hello. How are you doing?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Man, I am so good. How are you doing?

Maria Pirita:
I am so good. We just got into Chicago, and we beat the blizzard, so I'm feeling great.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Like you raced to your little den and lit your fire, and then the snow came down outside and now you're toasty as a bug in a rug.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. I literally got hot cocoa, so now I'm just going to make my hot cocoa and watch the snowfall.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You are who I aspire to be at Christmas time. We did a workshop together, you and I, and it was like 50 doctors. And we couldn't get anything done because Maria has a Christmas tree that rotates and it was behind her, and so everyone was watching her Christmas tree just rotate, and there was like every three minutes someone would notice it and the chat would just blow up with, “I know.” And so you do Christmas really, really well. I have to say.

Maria Pirita:
I love Christmas. I've always loved everything about Christmas. My birthday's 10 days before Christmas, so I don't know if it's a mixture of both of them going together or the fact that my family always did it so big. That rotating base actually was a recommendation for my sister a long time ago. And then one time my base actually broke and I needed to go to get one, and all they had was the rotating one, so I had to get it, and it turned out to be a great purchase until we did the workshop and-

Dr. Andy Roark:
And shut it down.

Maria Pirita:
… we couldn't get through the workshop because everybody wanted to hear about the rotating base.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. The whole thing.

Maria Pirita:
It's available. It's a real thing.

Dr. Andy Roark:
The whole thing ground to a halt. Yeah. When this episode comes out, it'll be New Year. You're a big New Year person too that you go all in for 20 days.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. I love New Year's. Man, it's a lot of fun. I prepare a lot for New Year's. My husband and I have a great tradition where we make surf and turf steak and lobster dinner, and we write out goals and aspirations for the new year, and we light a fire. And then once midnight hits, we celebrate with all of these Latin traditions, which are crazy and out there, but I absolutely love all of them. Some of them, a lot of people know about like you wear red underwear if you want love in the new year, or you wear yellow underwear if you want money. You can put lentils in your wallet and that represents that you're going to spend your money well in the new year, and all these crazy things. We do all of them. So we put 12 grapes in our-

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yes. You got multiple pairs of underwear.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. All at once. You got to want all of them. You got to wear all the underwear. We put 12 grapes in our pockets and you make a wish with each one. But my favorite one is that at midnight you take your suitcase, and you walk around the block with your suitcase and that represents that you're going to travel a lot in the new year. And last year was actually the first year that we did that. And I will say that this past year we went to Paris and Rome, and I got to go to Greenville for the conference, and we went to Indianapolis for work too. So I would say that it worked. So if you're trying to travel in the New Year at midnight, grab your suitcase, go walk around the block with your suitcase, and you'll probably travel is all I'm saying, unless it was just a fluke.

Dr. Andy Roark:
I think some people can just stop the podcast right now. They're like, “I got what I needed for… Yep. I got what I needed.”

Maria Pirita:
Unless this comes out after New Year's, then it'll have them the next year.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. And they're like, “Ah.” Going to have to put it on the calendar. Yeah. Oh, man. So for those who don't know you, you are a newly minted CVPM. Congratulations on your new certification.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. Thank you.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You work with us over at Uncharted, you're doing more and more of the lecturing and the lifting. And I've been so happy working with you, and I just enjoy the heck out of you.

Maria Pirita:
Oh, thank you.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And so anyway, I want to talk to you about what we got. It wasn't the mail bag, we got it at a conference. Do you want to go ahead and break down what we're looking at?

Maria Pirita:
Yeah, actually. So we were at a conference in Indianapolis and this amazing practice manager, if you're listening, you are amazing, but she was telling us about a challenge that she's having and it's essentially that she has this tenured team member who's a little spicy, we'll say. She has been with the clinic for a really, really long time. Great skills, however, lately, she's been doing things like she's been not wanting to clean up after surgery because she thinks it might be beneath her, or she's just been a little bit spicier in the way that she talks to people. And what was crazy is we started talking about it and it turns out a lot of people were struggling with this challenge, and that's when we thought, “This would actually make a great podcast episode because there are definitely things that can be done.” And I've certainly been there. Have you been there?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, totally. I think we all were. I like the term here for spicy. This is one of the things I think that you do really well. It's like that's your word. And I think it's a healthy way to look at it to say, “Oh, well, this person's a bit spicy.” It's not that they're not aggressive or angry, but once we frame them that way, they take on a villainous personality and you say, “Well, they're spicy.” And I go, “I like that, I can work with spicy. Sometimes spice is okay.”
And so I like that you frame it that way. It also brings across a lot of times what the behavior with the attitude is. And so I just want to start upfront and say, “I like how you frame this question,” and by making this person framing them as spicy, I think you're already opening up a lot of good doors for us to get things done. I don't want to be told that I'm aggressive, I don't want to be told that I'm a bully. I don't want to be told that I'm hard to work with. But if you tell me I'm being a bit spicy today, I'm not going to take that particularly hard. I think language matters and how we frame things matters. And so I like how you set that up. Just open up.

Maria Pirita:
Thanks.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So yeah, I have a lot of ideas on this.

Maria Pirita:
I love the term spicy too because… Well, I think we started using it in clinic because when we became Fear Free, that was one of the big things that they taught you is try to stop using the word aggressive or mean when you're talking about patient because they're not, they're just fearful, stressed, or anxious. And so you changing your mindset there. So we adopted it and we started using it a lot, and one of my favorite things to say to people would be, “Ooh, that came out a little spicy. How can we add some sour cream?” And it became a hit because it'd be like, okay, it's not that you are a mean person. It is totally that it just came out spicy and sometimes we all wake up a little spicy and that's okay. Just get that done and done with some sour cream. That's it.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I like that. I think that's part of building a good culture is setting it up where we can give each other feedback that's not catastrophic or devastating, that doesn't strike at who you are as a person. But yeah, it's a little thing. I always say one of the real tricks to giving people feedback is lowering the stakes, trying to make it so it's not a big deal for me to say, “Hey, when you said this, it had this impact that you didn't really anticipate. I need you to do that differently.” How do I make that not a big deal? Like, “Hey, I know you know this.” But whenever you say something that starts with, “Hey, you”, people get real defensive real fast, and I just want to make sure you get heard. And so “let's do that differently next time. Alright. Thanks, man.” And just try to make it so it doesn't matter.
And I think a lot of times we don't say anything when it doesn't matter, and then we wait until it does matter and then we have these high-stakes conversation. So anyway, just anything that just takes the edge off and it's just like, “Hey, man, this is okay. We're just going to break it down a couple notches, but also I need you do this differently for me. Thanks, man.” I think that that's just good feedback coaching headspace.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Dr. Andy Roark:
So speaking of headspace, let's get to headspace here. All right. Cool. So first, we start talking about this. I want to point something out in the question itself. And so one of the examples was, “Hey, this person's not cleaning up after surgery, things like that. She acts like maybe this is beneath her.” I would say, does she say that it's beneath her or is that the assumption that I, as the manager, and making about her, right?

Maria Pirita:
Absolutely.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Because one of the first things we want to try to do is assume noble intent, assume good intent. I don't want to be like, “Oh, she didn't do it.” That clearly means that she thinks she's better than this like, “I don't know what it means. I don't know why she's not doing it and neither do you.” So until we ask her, “Hey, I saw this thing didn't happen. It seems like it's starting to become a pattern. What's going on? What's the story?” That's straight up, those are the exact words I would use. “Hey, I see this, it seems like it's starting to become a pattern going on. Just what's the story here?” And then I'm going to shut up, and I'm going to let her tell me, but I don't want to try to assume what her intentions are. And she might be like, “That's not my job.”
And now I go, “Okay. Okay. I get that.” At least I understand now that she does not believe this is her job. That's not an assumption. That's what she told me. And then we can start to work on that. So yeah, I think we start off assuming good intent. It's our safe headspace, right?

Maria Pirita:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Can I sit next to this person? Can I smile at them? Don't give them the feedback when you are triggered. Just let it go for a day. The key is put it on your calendar. If you're triggered, you're like, “I can't talk to this person right now.” If you're me, I can't talk to this person right now and then tomorrow's not going to seem like that big a deal, and I really don't like conflict, and so I'm not going to do it tomorrow. And then after that it's going to disappear. It's not going to happen. And then we're going to do this again. So put on the calendar, be like, “All right. I'm going to talk to this person on, if I haven't talked to them by Thursday morning, we're going to talk on Thursday morning.”
But can you sit next to them? Can you smile? Are you assuming good intent? Have they been set up to fail? If she thinks this is not her job and it is her job, that's on me because I didn't communicate to her, “This is your job.” And so maybe she's been set up to fail, maybe our job descriptions are not what they should be. Maybe she didn't review her job description, maybe she didn't sign her job description. Maybe she hasn't gotten an evaluation on performance, reviewing her job description, whatever. Maybe she's been set up to fail.
And the last thing is the end result like, “What do I want?” And this is a big thing of like, look, I don't want her to apologize for not cleaning up the surgery suite. I don't care. I just want her to clean it up next time or do what she's supposed to do or come to an agreement with the other tech so that it gets done. But basically, I want it to get done. I want everybody to feel like they're being treated fairly. That's what I want. And so that's the end result I'm working towards.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. Absolutely. And one thing that I think is really important in that is when you're seeking to understand is that sometimes it could be so many other things as far as why a person is spicy. So it really is important to ask that question, how did this person even get here in the first place? And so having that discussion, you might find out this person might be frustrated from other things happening in the clinic. Perhaps she may need some change here or there. If she's a registered veterinary technician and she thinks maybe she should be doing more as a registered tech. How many of us have credentialed technicians that we're not utilizing to their fullest potential or treating them like assistants? And so the only way you're really going to figure out how this person got here is by having that conversation and, like you said, seeking to understand.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Sometimes these people get set up to get caught. Sometimes they're just not as savvy as the people who are really doing the dirty stuff. I hate to compare it to my kids, but it was like with my kids. My older one could just tweak my younger child so that my younger child would go off, and then everyone would look at the younger child. And it didn't take long as a parent before you realize, you're like, “Okay. Hey, older kid, I know that you are the one who caused this problem.” And you put our younger kid in a position where they're going to get in trouble. And sometimes that happens with the staff where the person who gets mad is not the person at fault, they're the person who's reacting and they're probably not reacting appropriately or else they would've done this another way. But sometimes they're reacting inappropriately to something that's not fair or just something else where somebody else has screwed them over. And that's again, that's why you just got to ask the question.
The other thing is they specifically said this is a tenured person. And so there's a couple different types of problems that come up with tenured staff that are less likely to come up with younger staff. This is broad generalities, but to me the term tenured, matters. When there's certain types of behaviors that we get, it's often they're power play behaviors of, “That's not my job, that's someone else's job.” So just some of that stuff. But the other thing is when you have tenured staff members and they're having patterns of behavior, they didn't get that way overnight. It's like you hired this person and then you were surprised that they acted this way. They've been around for a long time. So my question is, what has changed? Has this been a slow steady creep or is this something where there's something going on that has changed their behavior?
The other thing is if they're tenured, they've conceivably had a history of being successful in your practice. And I think that that's something that we can lean on. So we talk about headspace, we go, “Well, this person's been here a long time, why is this becoming an issue now?” And again, I do find it's helpful for me when I can assume responsibility and say, “Well, I've been her boss for some time and this creep has happened on my watch and I haven't corrected it.” So I got to look at myself and say, “Where did I miss a trick?” And that's just a healthy headspace to get into, make you really effective when you go and talk to the person. So that's it too.
I asked myself questions a lot about burnout and fatigue. When I have people who are tenured, they've been doing this a long time, is this person burned out? Are they just done? Is this just a general, not about work, it's just about life or things like that? Is there something else going on with them? Those are all things I'm looking for and trying to figure out, again, what is the underlying thing? Is it just straight up, “I don't want to clean up the surgery suite”? Or is it, “I'm tired, I don't see a future for myself here. I don't feel like I'm appreciated, I don't feel like I'm respected”? Those things matter.
And I'm not saying the person is right, and we may disagree. Sometimes people say, “I don't feel appreciated.” And sometimes that's valid and sometimes it's not. And usually, the truth is somewhere in the middle where they should be appreciated for some things that they do. And there's some other things that maybe they don't do that they should do. It's always a mixed bag. It's always shades of gray with people. But I'm just trying to get down into their psyche of where are they coming from and what's the real issue?

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. And I think sometimes as practice managers too, we're putting ourselves in this position where we think, “Oh, this person has great skills. They've been here a really long time. I'm afraid of losing them. So then we fail to have some of the conversations that we should have.” So another question that I would ask myself is, how often has she gotten away with this without us discussing it over and over again to the point where she thinks that this is now how it should be?
Or in some cases, they try to push buttons… Not push buttons. That's a bad way of saying it. But they try to see what they can get away with because they themselves know they're high tech skills. They know that they have the ability to draw blood, and drop catheters, and they can be in surgery, and they can do all of these great things. So there is something, as a practice manager, you have to ask yourself, “How often has this been happening? Did this become a pattern and I didn't say it so now it has become the norm?” And getting into that space mentally before you have these conversations.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. I agree with that. And I think the other thing we want to think about with a tenured team member is where do they want to go and what do they want to see in the future? And a lot of times I feel like these spicy team member, tenured team member things, they come from a place from where this person topped out, and they don't really know where they want to go in the future, or what they're going to do, or what's going to be different. So they're like, “I'm the head surgery tech and I don't want to be the practice manager or there's already a practice manager and there's not space for me. And so here I am, but I'm tired of this, but I don't really know where I want to go. And so I'm just generally at a loss for who I am and where I'm going.”
And I think that this starts to really unlock the key for me with dealing with tenured, more senior people. This person has climbed up to a place where let's say their career path may be a bit hazy in the future or they topped out in what they can do, and if they're burning out because of that, if they're bored because of that, if they're just like, “No, no, I don't see myself in the future, so I'm just going to do what I want to do right now.” That's a vision problem. It's a motivation problem. It's a vision problem. And so again, it starts we try to figure out, “Where's this person coming from? What's driving this? Is it that they don't know where they're going?” And you can ask those questions like, “Where do you want to go in next year?”
We just did with our team. Maria and I were talking and the team was there, but I was basically like, “What's your development goal for 2023? What do you want to be? What do you want to learn? How do you want to grow?” You can do that professionally. I want to do it professionally but also personally. And so just like Maria's walking around the block with her suitcase because she wants to travel. I want to know where people want to go. It's not something to hold people to, but I ask people that and now it's a great time to say, “Hey, it's the new year. Where do you want to go in the next year? How do you want to grow? How do you want to develop?” And ask them, and then when they say that, try to figure out how to get them there, how to keep growing. There's a lot more latitudes for people to grow in that medicine than we give credence to.
For example, we're like, “We have a vet assistants, and we have vet techs, and then we have lead vet techs, and that's the end of the story.” And I'm like, “No, it's not.” There's so many different subjects that we can expand to. There's so much expertise. There's credentialing, advanced credentialing, there's technician specialists, there's management credits, there's leadership opportunities, there's communication things, there's workshops, there's skill workshops, there's all these things that they can do. You can spend years getting great at dentistry, and then just roll off of that into anesthesia, and roll off of that into pain management, and into low-stress handling, into fear free. And you can work your whole career learning and growing and learning and growing. But if you think your whole path is assistant vet tech, head vet tech, that's it. That's a very short, stunted path that leads to a lot of frustration.
And so one of the big things is where do these people want to go, and can they see themselves in the future being developed, and do they feel like they're moving towards something greater? And if you can't make them see that, a lot of times you can't coach them very well. And so anyway, when we start thinking about senior people, do they see the vision for the future? Do they see where they can go? Do they see how they can grow? Are they engaged with that vision? And if the answer is no, then from a headspace standpoint, I need to figure that out because this person's going to be consistently hard to manage and they're going to be consistently hard to motivate if I can't make them see a future where they are better and more developed than they are right now.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah, Andy, and I'm so glad you said that because it actually reminds me of a spicy team member who I had when I was a practice manager. And she was amazing. She had amazing skills, the kind that you could always trust to hit the vein or drop the catheter, but she did have a bit of a spiciness around, especially around new people. It seemed like she would get frustrated during the training. So it was one of the situations where I looked at her and I was like, “Man, she could go so far. We just have to work on that one thing.” So I remember sitting down with her and having this discussion and we started on that, and on that topic is development. I asked her, “Where do you see yourself?” And she said, “Actually, I have been thinking about that a lot.” She was a veterinary assistant at the time. She's like, “I think I want to go into CVT school. And I also think that the treatment manager position looks really great.” Treatment manager was taking care of the hospitalized patients, right?

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah.

Maria Pirita:
And so I was like, “Okay. That sounds awesome. Yeah. Those are definitely areas we could talk about going.” And as we were discussing the treatment manager role, we got into discussing training. And so it was a perfect opportunity for me to talk to her about, “Well, I've noticed you can get a little spicy around new people. And so if we want to go down that path, there's things that we should work on there, but that's totally normal. We can work on those things. There are tons of leadership webinars that we can talk about books and bottom line, nobody became a leader overnight. And so this is great that this is the route you want to go in.” And so she said, “I know what you're talking about. The issue is that I never notice when I'm doing it until it's too late.” And I said, “I get that. I grew up around siblings, so I have a sassiness to me.” Andy, I'm sure you've seen it at conferences and whatnot, that it can happen to anyone.

Dr. Andy Roark:
You have more than a sassiness to you, just for people who don't know. You have amazing sass. I'm going to stop you right here because this is important. Maria and I were having dinner and we were at Tupelo Honey restaurant.

Maria Pirita:
Oh, no.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And she was looking at her straw. She was like, “I think the straw is made of honey.” And I was like, “I don't think that's a thing.” And she was like, “No, I'm pretty sure this is an organic straw made of honey.” And I looked and there was another straw on the table and it had the wrapper on it. And I picked it up, and it said, I read it out loud, I was like, “Made from 100% pure agave.” And Maria goes, “Who's laughing now?”

Maria Pirita:
It still wasn't honey, guys.

Dr. Andy Roark:
But that's the same thing. But you were like, “It's organic, it counts. Who's laughing now, Roark?”

Maria Pirita:
It's close enough.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. It's close enough. And I will say, I learned a couple days later, there's a store that sells honey products in Greenville. I looked in there, I was like, “Do you have straws?” And they were like, “Yes, we do.” I was like, “Oh, she could have been right.” But then I thought when they were like, “Yes, we do.” I was like, “Who's laughing now?”

Maria Pirita:
Who's laughing now?

Dr. Andy Roark:
[inaudible 00:25:13]. It's not a little bit of sass. It's a pretty defining characteristic. I love it, but let's not downplay it.

Maria Pirita:
So that's exactly what I was talking about. When I was talking to her about it, I said, “Yeah, I have sass too.” It's a matter of where to use it, and we were out at dinner in this example. So that's when my sass comes out is because I'm not working. I got it, but it's also… Obviously, I didn't talk to her about that because it hadn't happened yet.
But when I was talking to this team member, I basically told her it happens. It happens to all of us. It happens to me. And so I asked her, “What's a good system that you think would work for us to help you in this journey?” And she said, “Well, actually, if you could just point it out when you see it, if there could be a signal?” And I said, “Yeah. Absolutely.” So we decided that I would give her this eye contact and make the peace sign. Eventually, I didn't even need to make this peace sign with my hands. The number two, looks like a two. But I got to the point where I didn't even have to, I would just look over when I heard it, and you could hear her going back in herself, the way she was talking and try to formulate it a different way. And that helped a lot.
And we also talked about leadership as a whole and what kind of resources were available to her and giving her the time to do some of those and some recommendations on books. And I still remember she came to me so excited one time, she's like, “Hey, I spent this weekend reading this book that you recommended. I think it really helped me a lot.” And I will say that there was a noticeable improvement in her because she was striving towards this goal of becoming a manager and a leader because obviously, she had great assistant skills. She had done so much there that she was ready to move up to that next level. And putting in, not only giving her the resources, but also acknowledging that there was this area that we could work on helped tremendously.
To this day, she's still going strong in her position as treatment manager, and she's going to school still for her CVT, and she's loving it. And it's definitely something that I love seeing in people because they got to have that strive to want that, and she had it, and she did it. And big props to her. I hope she listens to this episode one day.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Okay. I love that story, and it's awesome. And I want to break it down step by step into action. So let's pause for a second here. Let's take a break and then we'll come back, and I want to run back through that story and just tell you what I love about it because that's going to… I think we should use that story to frame the action steps because that's [inaudible 00:27:50] with us how you do it, you crushed.
Hey, guys, I just want to hop in really quick and give a quick plug. The Uncharted Veterinary Conference is coming in April. Guys, I founded the Uncharted Veterinary Conference in 2017. It is a one-of-a-kind conference. It is all about business. It is about internal communications working effectively inside your practice if you're a leader. That means you can be a medical director. It means you can be an associate vet who really wants to work well with your technicians. It means you can be a head technician, a head CSR, you can be a practice owner, practice manager, multi-site manager, multi-site medical director. We work with a lot of those people. This is all about building systems, setting expectations to work effectively with your people.
Guys, Uncharted is a pure mentorship conference. That means that we come together and there is a lot of discussion. We create a significant percentage of the schedule, the agenda at the event, which means we are going to talk about the things that you are interested in. It is always, as I said, business communication focused, but a lot of freedom inside that to make sure that you get to talk about what you want to talk about. We really prioritize people being able to have one-on-one conversations, to pick people's brains, to get advice from people who have wrestled with the problems that they are currently wrestling with. We make all that stuff happen. If you want to come to a conference where you do not sit and get lectured at, but you work on your own practice, your own challenges, your own growth and development, that's what Uncharted is. Take a chance, give us a look, come and check it out. It is in April. I'll put a link in the show notes for registration, ask anybody who's been, it's something special. All right. Let's get back into this episode.
Okay. Let's get back into this. So you just told the story, I love it. I want to break down some things that I see in the story when you were talking about coaching this person. Number one, the first thing you did, which is absolutely amazing, I love it, is you framed your feedback not as corrective, not as like, “Hey, you really screwed this up and we need to go through, and look at what you did, and you need to apologize.” It wasn't corrective feedback, it wasn't, “I want you to own your mistake.” You 100% were like, “Where do you want to go?” And you got a picture of where she was going, and then you framed your feedback as developmental feedback. This is how we want to get there.
And so especially with your tenured team members, if they've been around a long time, if they're a shift lead, a department lead, stuff like that, they may not take just straight up, “Hey, you messed this up” feedback very well. They can feel like they're being taken down a peg. Really, really dislike that. Those people tend to respond better, in my experience, to developmental feedback of, “I see you, I see your skills, I want to talk about how we're going to grow you and where you go from here and these are the changes you're going to need to make to get there.” And so I think that was just a textbook lesson and how you give developmental feedback and figure out what people care about.
The one thing that the tech had going for her, which I think is really, really important, it's just a self-awareness when she's like, “Yeah. I do that. My thing is I don't realize it until it's over.” I go, man, self-awareness is an underutilized, underappreciated characteristic for people to have. And then the last thing is you talked to her, you came up with a plan about how you were going to help her, and then you were there to catch her in the moment like, “I'll give you the sign,” but you were there to give her the feedback. And when you're like, “I didn't have to give the sign anymore,” probably just the fact that you were there was enough for her to be like, “You are a sign of, ‘Oh yeah, I'm trying to do my best or I'm trying to do better.'” So I don't know. When I lay that down, do you agree with that or are there other pieces to it that you think should be called on?

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. Absolutely. And I agree with all of that. I think it's interesting. I would talk about the sign and just being there because I think we forget that sometimes with sass or with spiciness, coming from an expert in it, it does take the habit. It's a habit.

Dr. Andy Roark:
It is a habit. Yeah.

Maria Pirita:
It is a habit. You have to break a habit in order to be a better leader. And it's something that obviously, being a leader myself, we had to get over that, but it's going to take time to break a habit. And so the other part to that is being able to give them the time to do that but also the follow-up. When we're talking about… In this example, following up later on within the 30, 60, 90-day mark, whatever you decide to do on, and giving them feedback that, “I see you working on this and it's going great. Keep up the good work.” Or seeing, making sure that we don't just talk about it once and then forgetting about it, but also going back, giving that feedback, and talking about it again later on.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. How do you get tenured team members to tell you what their goals are when they don't know what their goals are? So let me ask you that.

Maria Pirita:
That's a really good question because-

Dr. Andy Roark:
It's hard.

Maria Pirita:
It is hard. It's hard and sometimes they need time to think about it themselves too because they haven't sat down and thought about it themselves to say, “This is exactly where I want to go.” And a lot of times, they don't even know of the possibilities that are out there. You said it yourself, we put them in veterinary assistant, certified tech, practice manager, and there's all these other linear possibilities. Unless we're constantly talking about these things, they're not going to know about them. So if I have a technician or a veterinary assistant that's like, “I don't really know where I want to go next.” I think the most valuable thing you can do be like, “Yeah. Okay. Well, take some time to think about that. Here is a list of just ideas and see which one you feel the most passionate about and think about it in the next couple of weeks, and we'll revisit this conversation in a couple of weeks.”
Because in that time they're going to be like, “Oh, I noticed that I really like behavior, and Fear Free is really important to me, and I realized that I want to do perhaps do Fear Free because I want to become a Fear Free certified professional.” The other thing too is telling them what they're good at. Andy, you're really good at that. You're really good at telling people, “Hey, I noticed that you're really good at this and so would you ever consider doing this or…” Maybe you should talk, and say how you do it because you do it so much better.

Dr. Andy Roark:
No. Well, thank you for saying that. I think that's a good… what's worked well for me is to look at people from the outside because you can see people more clearly than they can see themselves. And we tend to like the things that we're good at. And so if you see somebody who's crushing a thing, you should tell them, “You crushed this thing.” And it's amazing to me, in my life, how many people will be just fantastic at dentistry. They'll just be great at it. And you say, “Well, what do you want to work on? What do you want to grow?” And they're like, “I don't know.” And you go, “Well, I notice you're really good at dentistry.” And they're like, “Really?” I'm like, “Yeah.” And I don't know if their self-confidence doesn't let them believe that they're good at dentistry. They needed some random shmo on the outside to tell them that they're good. I don't know.
But I have found again and again that when I see somebody, they're just doing something that's obviously good at, if I just say, “Hey, you know what, I think you're really good at that. Not like you have to do this, but I'll tell you what I think you're good at. I see you doing these things.” And two things happened. Number one, they get some clarity, and they go, “Well, now that this has been validated, I'm going to own the fact that, yeah, I'm good at these things.”
And the other thing is they rise. They rise to that even more. So if I say, Maria, one of the things that you are really good at is you are a wonderful communicator in how you do developmental feedback, you'll do more of that in my experience. You'll be more ready to do it and more likely to practice and just lean into that skill, and then you really get better at it. And it's just this weird self-fulfilling prophecy when you tell people what they're good at. So thank you for saying that. I do try to call it out, but I'm always amazed by how powerful it seems to be when you just tell people what they're good at. I love the idea of just having people pay attention.
One of the questions that I ask that seems to help a lot is, “What do you love the most about your job?” Just framing it that way. Not what do you want to do, but what do you love the most? And then or I'll ask them like, “Hey, I want you to think about the last couple of weeks. What was the best day that you had? Just tell me what the best day was or squish the last two or three weeks together and make me an imaginary best day. What does the best day look like for you?” And a lot of times they'll tell you what they want to do and they want to… You say, “What do you want to do?” And then, “I don't know.” “Tell me what the best day at the practice looks like though.” “Well, I come in and I hit the dentistry table right off the bat.” I'm like, “Okay.” Not now.

Maria Pirita:
Well, there it is.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. There it is. But it's funny, and we've all had the experiences where someone asks you a question in one way and I got no answer. You ask me another way and I'm like, “Oh, well, here's the obvious answer.” And so we play the role of therapist in that way of being like, “Hey, I'm trying to tease out of you, what do you like, what makes you happy? What makes you excited to come to work?” And you pair that with the idea of giving them some time to think about it in the coming days. “I think you've really got something,” and then you tell them what you think that they're good at and the skills that you are impressed by them. I like to use the words to say, “You know what I most admire about you is,” or, “The skills that you have that I try to emulate are…” And boy, people really are flattered when you say that. I only say if it's true.
But people are not used to hearing the things when you say, “You know what I admire about you,” or, “What I try to emulate that you do really well is this.” That's just, man, that's powerful feedback. And you make people feel really seen and really appreciated. And again, especially for your tenured people, your upper-level people, that stuff hits them pretty hard and it gets their attention, and it makes them feel like they're doing something that people notice. So those approaches have worked well for me. So I like that stuff a lot. So I think that's a good way of trying to tease these things out of it and then coach them about where they're going. What do you do, Maria, when we don't get traction? We have these conversations and we've got this tenured person, and we talk to them and we're doing the 30, 60, 90 follow-up. What does that look like when the bar is not moving?

Maria Pirita:
I think that that's when you've got to revisit your own policies and protocols on what the next steps are. And as much as we all hate it as managers, none of us ever wants to let anyone go. I get that and then there's anxiety in that, but sometimes you do have somebody that may not be the appropriate fit for your clinic, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe their heart is set on becoming an ultrasound specialist and you don't have ultrasound in your practice.
You have to sit down with that scenario and really lay it out because at the end of the day, if you do have somebody that's a little too spicy, it's going to affect your clinic. It's going to bring down the tone. Your other team members are going to become resentful. “How come she never cleans the surgery suite? And we always have to clean the surgery suite.” And then you have really key valuable players that may quit just because you're trying to hold on to one player that may have the skills but may not have the tone that you need for your clinic. So those become a little bit harder, but it's a matter of what the disciplinary actions are at your clinic and following through with those because if you don't, it's just going to continue to affect your clinic, unfortunately.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. No, I think you're right. I think you're smart too. You got to look at the ripple effects. At some point, it's not about the surgery suite not getting cleaned, it's about the fact that the other techs are going to fold if they have to clean up this mess again while this other person refuses to do their part. At some point, it becomes this thing about fairness of this, “We're being treated unfairly because this person's getting preferential treatment.” And it's not about the surgery suite not getting cleaned, it's about, “I'm being disrespected, and I'm being forced to do this and management is not supporting me, and they're allowing this to happen.” And so it's much, much, much more than the surgery suite not getting cleaned. It's a cultural problem that's impacting other members of the team. So a lot of management is picking your poison.
All right. How do you want to struggle? How do you want to suffer? Do you want to struggle and suffer putting up with this person who won't clean the surgery suite, or do you want to put up and struggle with not having that person on board? And I go, “Well, it depends on how much that person is affecting the rest of the team to make that decision.” The last part too is, and it's hard to hear, but I always got to put it back on the table, is people change and life comes in phases. And sometimes people are done. Sometimes they've done the vet tech thing for 10 years, and they're just done. And maybe it correlates with them starting a family. Maybe it correlates with their kids going off to school and their life is just changing or going off to college, maybe their kids moved away. Maybe it has nothing to do with kids, Andy.
Maybe it's just their spouse has a new job and she's wildly fulfilled with the job and this person is realizing, “Hey, I've fallen out of love with this, and I want to be in love with something.” And you can't do much about that. People just change. And so I try to remind managers and leaders and owners that sometimes people are going to leave, and it's not about you, it's just about them and what's going on in their lives and what they want. And I don't think any of us really think that we're going to make a job that people are going to spend their whole lives in. You know what I mean?

Maria Pirita:
Yeah.

Dr. Andy Roark:
And if they leave that's because we failed them. But man, it feels that way sometimes. And so sometimes it's just good just to call it out and go, “Sometimes people outgrow your clinics, sometimes they outgrow the job that they have. Sometimes they just want to change.” And that's not failure. But if they've outgrown your clinic and they've checked out, but they're still showing up, cashing a paycheck, and they're causing headaches for other people, that's not okay. We're not going to do that.

Maria Pirita:
Yeah. Absolutely. I agree.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Cool. Well, I think that's all I got. Have you got anything else to add to this?

Maria Pirita:
No, I don't think so. Other than I hope we see you all in April. Actually, we have Practice Manager Summit coming out.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh yeah, the April conference. Yeah. Talk about the Practice Manager Summit. You're speaking at that.

Maria Pirita:
I am speaking. I'm so excited. I have a great workshop lined up for you, guys, on one-on-ones, which actually leads to this episode really well because we're going to talk about one-on-ones, how to make them work for you and how to make time for them because they can be very, very time-consuming. And I think that a lot of us could be having them more often, but we don't because we're like, “Where do you find the time?” And so I have a lot of great information for you, guys. And I think that's something that you could work with these spicy tenured team members. After all, that's where we can find out a lot about their development and what they want for the future. So that's exciting. That's coming up here soon.

Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. It's March 22nd is the Uncharted Practice Manager Summit is a virtual event. Anybody's welcome to attend but it is 100% targeted at practice managers. Registration is opening up very, very soon. You can find more at unchartedvet.com. All right. Cool. So thanks for running through everything with me, Maria. Guys, thanks for tuning in. I hope this was helpful and we'll see you guys next week.
And that is our episode. Guys, I hope you enjoyed, I hope you got something out of it. Thanks to Maria for being here. Gang, as always, if you got something out of the episode, if you enjoyed it, share with your friends, help us spread the word, help us get the Uncharted gospel out into the world to light people's lives, or just write us a review on Apple or wherever you get your podcast, that's also a thing you can do. Anyway, guys, enough silliness. Take care of yourselves. I'll talk to you later on.

They Admitted They’re Using Drugs… Now What Do I Do?

This week on the podcast…

This week on the Uncharted Podcast, practice manager Stephanie Goss is joined by her dear friend, Dr. Phil Richmond. Phil is the Chief Medical & Team Wellbeing Officer at Veterinary United and the Founder of Flourishing Phoenix Veterinary Consultants. He is an advocate for positive culture and individual, team and organizational psychological health, safety, and wellbeing in veterinary workplaces. Phil was also voted Most Funny in his high school class, was the NASA 1996 FL State Powerlifting champion (Juniors, 23 & under) and has seen Rush in concert more than any other band. That's what I call a bio!

Stephanie and Phil are talking through a recent conversation had with some managers after a team member at someone's clinic called off for several days and then told their manager that they were admitted to the hospital following an overdose. This is someone who is newer to the team, performing well and this manager was asking how to navigate this. The discussion turned towards disciplinary-like actions – taking away keys, possible termination for the no call, no show, drug testing and more. Stephanie and Phil wanted to talk through why the default response is often to frame substance/alcohol use disorder and mental health crises in a disciplinary way; what we can do to examine our own bias when it comes to these challenges and leadership and how to begin taking steps to change the culture within our practices, our communities and veterinary medicine as a whole. Let's get into this…

Uncharted Veterinary Podcast · UVP – 212 – They Admitted Using Drugs… Now What Do I Do?
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You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you to our sponsors! To learn more about this week's sponsor, GuardianVets, check out their website HERE.


Do you have something that you would love Andy and Stephanie to role-play on the podcast – a situation where you would love some examples of what someone else would say and how they would say it? If so, send us a message through the mailbag!

We want to hear about your challenges and would love to feature your scenario on the podcast.

Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag


Upcoming Events

New Workshop Series! Practice Owners and Managers, are you ready for some workshops to help kick-start 2023? Is this the year that you tackle creating a foundation of culture for your organization? Do you want to have a practice vision and values that do more than just look pretty on your wall? Do you want to have the right people in place on your team so that you can move forward in the same direction this year? Are you lost at where to start with leading meetings like this for your team? If the answer to any of these questions is YES, we've got you! The “Start Your Year Off Right” workshops can be taken together as a series or independently based on your practice needs.

Start The Year Off Right: Finding Values & Your North Star with Dr. Andy Roark

Start The Year Off Right: Loading the Bus with Stephanie Goss

Start The Year Off Right: Lead A Vision & Values Meeting with Dr. Andy Roark & Stephanie Goss

Upcoming events: unchartedvet.com/upcoming-events/

Episode Resources

VMX Talk: come see Stephanie and Phil present together: When a Team Member Needs Help… What To Do When

Sunday, Jan 15 at 8am in Hyatt management area

At VMX: Veterinary Recovery Meeting is Sunday Jan 15 at the Hyatt from 4-8pm in Celebration 14.

ACES Assessment/Information

PERMAH Survey Information – Workplace (and personal) well-being assessments

Mental Health Audit – Use the workplace mental health audit tool to find out how your workplace measures up.

Vets4Vets – VIN Foundation Vet Peer Support Network


Episode Transcript

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This podcast transcript is made possible thanks to a generous gift from Banfield Pet Hospital, which is striving to increase accessibility and inclusivity across the veterinary profession. Click here to learn more about Equity, Inclusion & Diversity at Banfield.

Andy Roark:
Hey Stephanie Goss, you got a second to talk about GuardianVets?

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. What do you want to talk about?

Andy Roark:
Man, I hear from people all the time that are overwhelmed because the phones never stop ringing. And I'm sure you hear from these people as well, like our caseload is blowing up, and the doctors are busy, and the phones just don't stop.

Stephanie Goss:
They never stop. That is a true story.

Andy Roark:
I'm amazed by how few veterinarians know about GuardianVets. This is a service where you have registered technicians who can jump in virtually and help you on the phones. You can flip the switch and GuardianVets can jump in and take some of the load off the front desk. And they can handle your clients and get them booked for your appointments and give them support. And it really is a godsend.

Stephanie Goss:
Pre-pandemic, it was amazing to me how many people hadn't heard about it for after-hours call help. But at this point, I can't believe how many people don't realize that they are offering help during the daytime as well. Which I would think right now is a huge benefit to practices because everybody is shorthanded. Everybody is drowning in phone calls and so we talk about it, we've talked about GuardianVets a lot on the podcast. And every time we do, we always get somebody who says, “What is that?”

Andy Roark:
Guys, if you're not familiar with GuardianVets, if you think that you could use them help on the phones or up at the front desk, check them out. It's guardianvets.com and if you mention our podcast, me and Stephanie Goss, you get a month free. So check it out guardianvets.com.

Stephanie Goss:
Hey everybody, I am Stephanie Goss and this is another episode of the Uncharted Podcast. Just a quick warning at the front of this episode, there is some swearing in this episode so if you are listening with kids in the car or at home, you may just want to be aware of that. Or other people who just don't like to hear swearing. Know that that is a thing that happens a few times in this episode. Number two, we are talking about substance use disorder, alcohol use disorder. We do talk about suicidal ideation and suicide. So heavy topics that we did our best to cover in a way that hopefully is not upsetting or triggering to anybody. And as always, we want to be upfront and make you aware of what's happening before we get into it. So if those subjects are upsetting to you and you may want to take a break from the episode, that's totally fine. We'll see you back next week. If not, let's get into this.

Meg:
And now the Uncharted Podcast.

Stephanie Goss:
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Uncharted Podcast. Andy is not with me this week and that makes me very excited because sometimes I think we need a break from our energy. And because it means I get to have one of my most favorite people in veterinary medicine with us today. As a special guest, my dear friend Dr. Phil Richmond is here. We are going to talk today about substance use in veterinary medicine. It is a passion, something that is near and dear topically to both Phil and I's hearts. I'm going to let him introduce himself. Phil, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Hey, thanks Steph. It's great to be here. And I would say, I know Andy's not here, I'm like the Wish app version of Andy Roark. For anyone not seeing the video.

Stephanie Goss:
You're a good substitute for Andy. So for the people who are listening who have not had the chance to see you, hear you, know you, in veterinary medicine. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you and I came to be connected?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
So I'm really grateful. I sit right now in a seat with a group called Veterinary United. I'm the Chief Medical and Wellbeing Officer and super cool is Tom Bankstahl, Dr. B who's the CEO. He and I right now are the only two veterinarians in the US who have a certification in applied positive psychology. So he feels really strongly about that aspect of veterinary medicine. So super, super excited about working there. But on a grander level, and this is why all of us are doing what we're doing is trying to change the face of vet med.
And trying to change what has been, keeping what's working well. But then what are we struggling with certainly in work design and that. I also sit as the chair of the Florida Veterinary Medical Associations Wellbeing Committee, and I am super excited, I get to work every time I say this is… So I'm sitting on a committee for the CDC in NIOSH for healthcare and psychological health and safety. And then just really working on a number of projects around that in Vet Med and I get to work with some of the coolest people including you, Stephanie Goss in veterinary medicine. So just very, very grateful and I think we might be able to get into a little bit of my story of that as we go on.

Stephanie Goss:
So you and I are both red dot people as I'm listening to you talking, I'm like, “Oh, that's a lot of projects on Phil's plate.” Let's just acknowledge that right up front. We are red dot people and we bonded immediately I think probably within the first 10 minutes of talking to one another. We did the jumping up and down like, “Did we just become best friends kind of moment?”

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Totally stepbrothers.

Stephanie Goss:
Which I've never actually seen that movie, but I can picture the jumping up and down in my head. Because that's what Phil and I did because we just have a lot in common. And then as we started talking and getting to know each other more and discovered some things about our own personal lives and histories, we were just like, “Oh my gosh, we had way more in common than we thought.” So we have been a part of the Uncharted Community together for several years now and you and I both nerd out about wanting to make change in veterinary medicine. And our work together started in a very small corner within the Uncharted community in terms of creating safety and space for those in recovery in our community and has grown. And we are actually, a few short weeks from doing this recording, we are headed to Florida to do to speak at VMX together, which we are both really excited about.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Super excited.

Stephanie Goss:
And if you're listening and you're going to be at VMX, you should come say hi. I will drop our session info into the show notes. But we are presenting on Sunday morning together with two human medicine doctors and we're talking about pieces and facets of veterinary leadership when it comes to helping our people. Like when we know that there's a problem, how do we handle crises and support? And so we're super excited to do that and as we are getting ready for that, you and I have started, we have this text chain where we see things or we hear things, we have people ask us questions and both of us regularly get questions from managers but hospital leaders in general asking, “Hey, there's this situation happening with a member of my team. Or someone I know is in this position when it comes to substance use or alcohol use or mental health challenges and I don't know what to do.”
And there was something recently that came up, somebody asked me a question because they had a member of their team who hadn't been with their team really long and they have by their admittance, been a pretty good employee. And then last week they texted and said, “Hey I'm not going to make it into work.” And there was no follow-up and no details. And then a few days later they replied back to this manager that I was talking to and were like, “Hey, I am actually in the hospital. I overdosed last week and I'm going to be here for a little bit and I'm not sure what it looks like from here.” And I thought it was great that this manager was asking questions and in the group that we were having the conversation with a lot of the response, an initial reaction from fellow managers was tread really carefully. And let's look at this from a disciplinary perspective.
They know called, no showed. They should just like what is your policy on that? You can just dismiss them and get rid of the problem. And I immediately texted you and was just like, “This makes me see red.” And you and I had a great conversation, I was like, “Let's do a podcast about this.” Because we get asked questions like this all the time and I think it's one of the things that you and I are both passionate about. Breaking down the stigma when it comes to mental health challenges, substance use in veterinary medicine. And so that's the context of what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about our typical headspace and actions in this specific instance. But as I suspect knowing Phil and I's conversations will probably meander a little bit along the way. Right?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Right.

Stephanie Goss:
So let's start though with a headspace perspective. So why does this kind of thing make both you and I see red? And also how do we keep ourselves from just being angry about it? What do we do about it? Why are we here? Why are we talking about this in vet med?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Absolutely. And the thing is that in the US the stigmatization of alcohol and substance use disorder is significant. And that's really where the crux of the issue comes up, is that we look at, Oprah just published a book. But there's an excellent psychiatrist, neurologist, and he says what we need to ask the question is instead of saying what's wrong with you is ask what happened to you. And some of the numbers that I wasn't aware of until I got involved in this is one of the things that we know is that in medical professions, medical professionals at a rate of 12 to 15% at some point in their career are going to meet criteria for alcohol or substance use disorder. In two, go ahead.

Stephanie Goss:
That's a huge number.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Huge number. And so if you don't know that number, that's more than one in 10, is that we're out there. But what do we think about when we think about somebody who's in, when we use the term alcoholic. Even that image that pops up, sometimes It's somebody with an overcoat, in the stigmatization of under the bridge, drinking out of, unable to stop drinking. And that is not what, it can be. Some of us can go to that place, but that is not what it is. Many of us are intelligent medical professionals and intelligence has intelligence, moral fortitude and grit have nothing to do with alcoholism, alcohol use disorder and substance use disorder. It is not a moral failure and that is the thing, it's a mental condition that we have. And so it's really how do we frame it in the first place? And I just love that reframe of instead of asking what's wrong with you, compassion and saying what happened to you. And go ahead and stop.

Stephanie Goss:
I think that's huge, because the stigma, starts with the mental image when you ask somebody. And I think that's why these questions make me see red is because the answer for most of us just as humans is we have been conditioned as a society to look at substance use disorder, alcohol use disorder, mental health challenges as other people. As a problem that couldn't affect us, that happens to other people in this dark and shady and nefarious kind of way. And the picture that comes to mind is a very negative one. And so we start by already being biased in our thinking because of the stigma that surrounds it.
And so when there are challenges in our own backyard, and I love that you brought up the medical professionals because that's huge and we are a part of that as veterinarians. And we also know that on a very, very broad level, I think the most recent numbers that I saw are a little bit older at this point. They're from 2017, but the substance abuse, mental health services administration does a survey and the 2017 number said 20 million Americans 12 and older had been impacted by substance use disorders. That's statistically a staggering number. And so and I were talking about the fact that when we talk to people and you were saying when you lecture, you actually ask the question, “How many people have been impacted or know someone who's been impacted?” And lots of hands in the room go up.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Lots of hands, most hands.

Stephanie Goss:
And at the same time when it comes to a leadership perspective, when I ask the question, “Hey, have you ever had someone who's been impacted by this in your practice?” I see so many leaders say, “No.” And I think the answer really is yes and they just don't know it. It didn't impact work, it was a secret. And so I think for me a big part of the stigma is to look at the perspective that, not normalize it in the sense that this is okay, but normalize it in the sense that this is happening. And it impacts a vast majority of us and we have to start to talk about it.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And like you said is that it was a secret. And then we ask ourselves why is it a secret? Why is it a secret? There was a study that just came out, you and I were talking about it just recently. Is in September of 2022 there was a survey that came out. One in seven physicians, one in seven physicians admitted to consuming alcohol or controlled substances at work, one in seven.

Stephanie Goss:
At work?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
At work, that's at work. More than one in five say that they consume alcohol or controlled substances multiple times per day. And then in 2017 there was a survey done by the Mayo Clinic and it was a robust survey. They had, I think it was about I think 7,500 physicians. The 7,400 physicians answered this survey. In that survey, just alcohol is what they were talking about, just alcohol. 12.9% of male physicians and 21.4% of female physicians met criteria for alcohol use disorder.
Almost one in four of us, one in six to one in four meet criteria. So why in the hell are we not, why do we not talk about it? We also know in talking about suicide, just to give a warning is that 50 to 60% of suicides have alcohol or drug relation to it. And so that is something I feel very strongly about and both you and I are certainly advocates for suicide prevention in the profession. But if we're not talking about this, we can't truly be helping one another. And it's like, “Why are we not having these discussions?” And it's stigmatization and then it's the fear of if I come forward with this, what's our knee-jerk response is that it's going to be a performance issue. It's going to be a fitness-to-practice issue. And so what happens is that we hide it.
You just mentioned the secret and this was my story, is I hid it until I couldn't hide it anymore and I almost didn't make it Steph. But yet this could have been, people saw and I'm not saying that, but the signs were there long before I got to that point. And so if the climate was changed and we can have these open and honest conversations and say, “Wow, I've noticed I'm coming home and I'm having three or four drinks where I haven't done that before.” Because what was funny for me is I took that self, the assessment, the 20 questions that see if you're an alcoholic. And I took, I got a 19 out of 20 and it was like there's a hot, and I'm like, “Well this is bullshit, crap.” And I'm like, “Because if this was true-“

Stephanie Goss:
I don't have a problem.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
I do not have a problem, I'm in-

Stephanie Goss:
I'd be falling down at work.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Right, because I started moving the goalposts. I was like, “Yeah, I can't have a problem.” And that's the old rationalization is because I don't want to be viewed as the person in the overcoat with the bottle in the bag under the bridge. I don't want to be viewed like that, I'm a medical professional, I'm going to school, whatever. But those two things are not…we need to be able to have this conversation in a psychologically healthy and safe space. So that's what we really want to change. And changing the intervention from where there's a crisis where we have to take, where somebody is visibly affected-

Stephanie Goss:
We have to act.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
… at work and we have and we have to act. To where if we roll back the clock or if we go back, we saw those things. And this is, I think what we're going to get into today, is what are we doing in our practices? What are we doing in our workplaces to set the tone to say it is okay to come forward with these things. Are we doing things where we talk about the access to our mental health resources are there. Are we engaged with our employees? Are we somewhat vulnerable with our employees as well about our own struggles as leaders to a safe point? But do we feel safe coming forward with that? And that, the goal is, not when we talk about don't, instead of just pulling people out of the river, let's go a mile up and find out what could we do to help them from falling in the river in the first place. And that's the goal.

Stephanie Goss:
And I love that and I think as a leader and as a manager and from an HR perspective, you and I were talking before we started recording. And I was saying when I became a manager there were no classes on this. I didn't get taught this shit. Nobody said, “Hey, you should think about these things.” Being totally candid and honest, the bare-bones information that I got from an HR perspective was, your handbook needs to have a drug-free workplace policy. And that was it for years and years and years. That was how I managed was, there was one policy in our handbook that we are a drug-free workplace. Because I could then use that to performance manage problems away. So if we had to cross that bridge, we had the safety net that said, “Hey, legally as an employer I've got this in here and if this is violated, I don't have to do anything else but write the discharge and move on.”
And so I think for me a lot of it starts with getting honest about the fact that we don't talk about it and start to talk about it. Start to talk about it more, which is a passion for both you and I, like breaking down those walls because we know that stigma continues to happen because we're not talking about it. And we're not talking about it loud enough and often enough. And that's when change starts to happen and becomes radical when we start to talk about it. So for me, I think a lot of it is starting with looking at our own perspectives as leaders in a candid way. What are our biases? What are we thinking? It's human and it's okay. And I'm saying this from the perspective, even someone who has been a part of the recovery community, someone who has been touched in my own personal life by substance use disorder. And has had family impacted by substance use disorder, I still completely admit that for a long time, the bias that I had was that this is something that happens to other people.
I was raised in a good family, I was the first person in my family to go to college. This isn't something that happens to people like me, that happens to people like my family. And so I had to do a lot of work on a personal level to break down my own bias and my own self feelings but also feelings towards others. And so I think as leaders taking that first step and looking at how are we thinking, how are we viewing it? Because just statistically if we keep thinking about it from the perspective of this happens to other people, it doesn't happen in my clinic. We're going to always be behind the curve. Because the reality is it is happening in your clinic. And if you think that it isn't, if you think that it hasn't, you're wrong. It just happened in secret.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
A hundred percent. And that is interesting and this is and the well-meaning, I mean this out of a huge amount of respect. When I was at UF and we were talking about it and I asked, I said, “How many students have we had referred to Florida's physician's health program?” And they said, “Zero.” And I said, “Okay.” And this is what I'm saying, is that this is an institutional, it's just not something that's talked about. And in human medicine the data's all there. So they see it and they're taking positive actions for this and opening up the conversation. Because again, they have the surveys, they have the data. We have a couple, a handful of studies, but there was one that came out from medical students. And medical students, 32.4% of medical students met criteria for alcohol use disorder.
And there was a study that came out, I think it was in 2017 and they did one with vet students, same thing. This is to everybody in the hospital, is affected, just it doesn't, alcohol and substance use disorder doesn't go, “Oh I'm just going to affect accountants or whatever.” It's that we are human beings who were taught to do the job of veterinary medicine. So we as human beings have things that happen to us that put us at a higher risk of this being there. And that was something that I thought we might step into too, talking about adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed workplaces, if that feels right.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, I love it. So I think that is a good segue for us to talk about what are some of the, so we recognize that there are problems. We recognize that there are challenges and usually for most of us as leaders, because there still is the stigma because it is secretive. There is generally, we're finding out further down the line, like you said, we're a mile down the river. There is a crisis. Someone is actively suicidal, somebody is actively in substance use crisis, somebody has OD'ed at work or at home. And like this fellow manager that I was talking to, we're getting the call saying, “Hey, I'm not coming to work.” Then we're managing in crisis mode. And so I think for you and I, a lot of it is we need to do things better as a community, as an industry, to have resources to support the crisis mode. And that's a whole other soapbox. But I think for you and I, a huge piece of it is how can we start to turn back time?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Yes.

Stephanie Goss:
How can we wear our Time Turner necklace and flip it back a notch, and be able to look at, how do we start to impact and support the team? How do we start to look at the team as human beings recognizing that this is something that impacts a vast majority of the American population. How do we start to do things to create a safe space in our practices where people can be human, where someone can say, “Hey, I need this help.” You and I are both the kind of people that we might go up to our manager and be like, “Hi, I am in recovery and I need to go to a meeting today.” But recognizing that not everybody is going to be able to have that forwardness and how they address it with their management.
But creating this space where if somebody on our team says, “Hey, I need to go to medical, I need to go to some medical appointments over the next couple of weeks and I need to flex my schedule to make that happen.” Where we create this culture of safety where somebody can say that and we're going to support them instead of being like, “Well we've got patients to see I need you here.” How do we start to look at people as humans? And I think you have so much to share in that arena. So maybe let's take a quick break here and then we'll come back and we'll start to dig into some of the action steps. What are some of the things that we can do as leaders? What are some of the processes that we can put in place? How are ways that we can support and educate our team to be seen as human beings first. And veterinary professionals maybe second. And how do we support each other in that regard? Does that sound like a plan?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Perfect, love it.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, let's take a quick break. Hey everyone, it's Stephanie and I just want to jump in here for a quick second and say Happy New Year. I am hoping that in the new year you are thinking about spending some of your CE money and coming to join our community, if you're not already a member. We've got all kinds of great things happening in the community regularly. And one of the big benefits of being an Uncharted member, means you get access to all of our monthly workshops at no additional cost.
But if you're like, “I can't afford to do membership right now, but I would love to get in on some of the things you're doing.” Head over to the website unchartedvet.com/events because we have got a rapidly growing calendar of all of the things that are coming in 2023. Andy and I are kicking off the year with a three-part, start-the-year off-right workshop series in January and February and we would love to have you join us. You can come for one, you can come for all three, you do you, but we would love to see you there. And now back to the podcast.

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, well we are back. So we talked a little bit about the headspace and a lot of it is about just acknowledging the stigma and doing some self-reflection and some looking at how we're approaching things. And it's funny because I get asked questions a lot like this question from this fellow manager and my first response always now, and it wasn't always this way. But now my first response is, “If you had a team member text you and say, I'm in the hospital, I just found out I have cancer” what would you do? Because the response to that should be no different than the response for any other reason that somebody's in the hospital. The reason shouldn't matter. But it does, because as a society there is stigma and there is judgment. And we look at somebody who has cancer as, “Holy shit that's not something they could control.”
Like for them, this happened to them. And we don't afford that same outlook to people who are having mental health challenges or crises or a disease. We don't afford that to substance use disorder or alcohol use disorder. We look at it as they are in control of this, this is their fault. And so we look at it very punitively. And so I think the first thing from an action step perspective after we do some self-reflection is start to look at how can we, we have an incredible power to teach our team that our first response is as fellow humans and is one of empathy.
Which is you are hurting, you are in pain, you are in the hospital. How can I support you? Can I send you food? What do you need? Because it's no different. And so I think for me, it's about how do we start to set that groundwork consciously and unconsciously in our team, to look at substance use disorder, to look at alcohol use disorder, to look at mental health and disease and say, “How can we approach it from a more stigma free perspective?” This is not something that they chose. This is not something that they can control from that perspective. Yes, there are things, I can control my actions and I should be held accountable for my actions and at the same time, this is a disease process. And what would we do if one of our patients had a disease?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And I think there's a way that we can frame that conversation that makes it easier for us to have more cognitive empathy for what's going on with our team members.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, you're doing some great stuff here with your teams. Tell us about some of the framework that you're using for clinics to be able to start to look at this.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
So one of the fascinating things to me was that I found out maybe three or four years ago, maybe not even that long, actually, of this assessment that was done back in the late nineties, early two thousands. And it was a big study that was done by the CDC and Kaiser. And what they looked at is they found that people who have these experiences that are adverse, and that's a kind word and we'll go into a little bit what some of those are. But they had an assessment of 10 adverse childhood experiences that they would ask, they were yes or no questions. Did these things happen to you before the age of 18? The critical point is that our brains are still forming. And that is from a neurobiology and pathophysiology point of view, it is genuinely fascinating. Although these things happened to me, to know what happened in my brain when I was 8, 9, 10 years old.
That set the stage for some of these things that came up later in life. So this assessment is, were you ever physically abused by a family member or someone in the household? Were you ever sexually abused by someone in the household? Were you ever verbally abused? Were you ever felt to feel like you weren't loved? Was there often not enough money to pay for food? Did you have a family member who had an alcohol or substance use disorder? Did you have a family member who had a mental illness? Did you see violence in the home? Did you have a parent who was incarcerated? Those types of things. What they found, and this is amazing, is that if you had four or more of those experiences in childhood, you are seven to 10 times, seven to 10 times more likely to have an alcohol or substance use disorder.
You are 6.8 times more likely to have anxiety and when it comes to depression, five times more likely to have depression. All of these things are connected. And then we talk about suicidal ideation, 10 times more likely to have suicidal ideations. 37.5 times higher rate than someone with zero ACEs to have attempted suicide. So if we had any of our patients have risk factors that gave us those kind of numbers, as clinicians, as veterinary professionals, we would do everything that we could to minimize those. Now we're in a position in the workplace that we can't minimize those, but I want to let everybody know is that 12.5% of Americans have four more of those. So not just in the workplace, but think about, so people that we work with, we're sure they have-

Stephanie Goss:
People we interact with.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Clients that have it, that act in a way sometimes that we don't like. It's learned behavior that kept them protected when they were children. And I really came onto that when I got some bad feedback. I was like, “Dammit, I act like I was 10 years old.” And it was like this light bulb went on and I was like, “Dammit, it is.” That's part of it. And so neither one of us are mental health professionals. This is just an observation on this. So it just was fascinating to me. And so what we ended up seeing at the practice that I was at before is we had someone who went through, had an issue with feedback and I was very vulnerable and open. Now from an HR perspective, I'm not going to necessarily recommend doing this, so-

Stephanie Goss:
I'm going to stick my fingers in my ear for a second-

Dr. Phil Richmond:
So, “La, la, la, la, la.”

Stephanie Goss:
“La, la, la, la, la.”

Dr. Phil Richmond:
But we are at work practice, we were very intentional about psychological safety and vulnerability and support. And so I said, I felt the same way. And I said, what was interesting is that I had taken this assessment and had this and everybody in our clinic up until, well, not everybody in our clinic. The medical team, up to that point, we had all taken this ace. Remember four or more, you get all these things, six or more, which I have six out of 10. Six or more, we potentially will on average die 20 years earlier than the general pop or people with zero. But all these manifestations come up. Our average in our medical team was six. And so it fundamentally changed how we interacted with one another.

Stephanie Goss:
And you have a small team.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
It's smaller, yeah.

Stephanie Goss:
You're not talking about working in a hundred-person hospital?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Right. Maybe we had 10 people in the medical team.

Stephanie Goss:
Because I think for a lot of us, when we think about it and we think about this, again, it goes back to that this happens to other people. This is why I love this example from you is we think, “Oh, okay, in a big hospital where they have a hundred people, maybe a lot of the people on your medical team, this could happen to you.” When we think about, “We're a small practice and there's 10 of us, or there's right eight of us, we couldn't possibly have those numbers statistically.” And that's what I think for me, it was so impactful in hearing that. Yeah, absolutely eye opening.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And so the other thing that's interesting, so we know my source, so I've been in recovery since 2008. But I was on a podcast with a PTSD specialist that works with veterans and first responders and that. And so I was talking about my initial burnout when I was working, on my days off I was working and I was doing all this. And she goes, “Welcome to another trauma response.” So the same behaviors that helped protect it, because the alcohol and substances helped, they were a way to change the chemistry in my brain and for me to deal with that anxiety and the other things that were going on. However, overworking, workaholism, being a workaholic, those type, but what happens-

Stephanie Goss:
Staying till 10 at night in the practice.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
We reward it and we're not watching out for those people. And dammit, those are our superstars, potentially are just manifesting it in a different way. And we got to watch out for them too. And that's what we're going to get into next is how do we then have those discussions? What are we doing structurally as a practice to set the foundation so that these conversations can potentially happen? Not necessarily talking about ACEs, but just mental health in general and normalizing the discussion around mental health. Normalizing taking time off, normalizing utilizing our EAPs. Normalizing utilizing what we have at our disposal.
And then hopefully we can be a mile up the river and help our folks so that we can have these discussions so that we don't have a fear that I'm going to get fired. Or I don't have a fear that this is going to happen. And as a manager, my only option isn't creating a performance improvement plan with the thought that I'm probably going to fire this person in three weeks because they're not… Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. We all know, if there's no intervention and I can't change me with the same brain that got me into it in the first place. You can't just tell me stop doing X because it's hardwired in my brain. I need help to do that.

Stephanie Goss:
And I'm so glad that you brought that up because that is one of the things that is really, it's hard for me to see, and I see it every single day. I check in with the communities and groups in veterinary medicine that I'm a part of, and every single day somebody has made a post about, “Yep, I was here again till 10, and now I'm sitting at home and I poured myself a glass of wine and I'm going to sit here and I'm going to numb my thoughts about the day.” And we normalize that because generally the responses are, “Cheers, I'm sitting here with my glass too.” There are the, “Yeah, but we took care of the patients. Yeah but, yeah but, yeah but.” And I think that for me is one of the most important pieces is to not overlook those things that are not overtly negative. And this is an area where we don't know what we don't know.
And I'm glad that you said neither of us is a mental health professional. And this is where I as a manager had to lean into educating myself, to learning from the HR perspective, certainly. And from the legal perspective as a business person, as an employer, what do I need to do to protect my people, to protect myself? All of those things are valid. But also doing some education about just in general, what is trauma? Learning about tools and resources like ACEs, learning about psychological safety as a topic.
And I think we've come a long way in veterinary medicine in some ways towards opening our mouths and starting to have these conversations, but not far enough. So let's talk specifically about some of the things that you are super passionate about and things that we can do as leaders in our practices to start to open the doors to the conversations. And we're a mile ahead. We're looking at before we know that there's a problem, what are things that we can do to open the door to the office, so to speak. And have the honesty and the vulnerability and the safety for our teams to start to talk.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
So it's very much like when we have an emergency come in, the best thing to do is that everybody has been taught, everybody knows what their role is before that emergency walks in the door. So it's all laid out. It's all set down. We all know how we respond so that it's normalized. That's the beautiful thing about, and it's a beautiful well-oiled machine when an emergency comes, well, when we're doing all those things. And it can be a thing of beauty, why are we not doing that again? Right now, we're in such a reactive, reactionary state in veterinary medicine that we're reacting to a mental health crisis. So let's look, just like we would look if we're checking the books or we're doing that. Can we do a mental health audit of our practices, policies, systems that are in place? And so that's what we can do. We can-

Stephanie Goss:
What does that look like?

Dr. Phil Richmond:
So we can start asking ourselves just some fairly straightforward, simple questions. What's our practices mental health policy? Oh, we don't have one. Let's look into what-

Stephanie Goss:
Okay, let's start there.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Yeah, so let's say, what's the vision? What do we envision that to look like? What would we want, if we were in that spot, what would we want within the realm of HR? But there are options within that realm that we can do to support people. The US unfortunately is about five to 10 years behind every other civilized country in the world when it comes-

Stephanie Goss:
Not surprising.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Yeah, not surprising. But Canada, so I'm certified for the psychosocial risks and psychological health and safety process that is the Canadian standard. And then I work with a big group in Australia who's one of the leaders in workplace wellbeing. And so these psychosocial risks, think about it like OSHA for our brains, that's how I like to describe it. We do this stuff for OSHA.

Stephanie Goss:
I love that.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
We do, you go in, you take radiographs, you better damn well have your thyroid shield on your plate. You got to have your gloves on.

Stephanie Goss:
The gloves.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
As low as reasonably available or ALARA, I forgot what the whole radiologist, just skip that. But if we know the things that can potentially increase our risk for psychological damage, what are we doing proactively to decrease those? Are we doing things as far, or do we have role clarity? Do we have job clarity? Do we give autonomy? What about reward and recognition? Are we making sure that our teams know that they're doing a good job? Things that we intuitively know, especially in Uncharted groups. But what's cool is the data supports it, is that we need to be very intentional about crafting these things. How are mistakes handled? That's a big one when we talk about psychological health and safety. Do we have situations where technicians get lit up in treatment verbally by the doctor if they make a medical error? And I guarantee you the doctors have made errors. I mean have, that's part of… A hundred percent-

Stephanie Goss:
And how are we leading by example as leaders when we make those mistakes, whether it's as a clinician or as a leader. Are we leading with vulnerability? Are we leading with candor? Are we saying, “Hey, I screwed this up and I need you guys to know, A, that I screwed it up. But also, B, what I want to do to fix this in the future so that you don't have to feel those feelings that I'm feeling right now. Because I feel horrible.”

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And as diagnosticians, as clinicians, as medical professionals, as people who need data to make decisions, are we regularly assessing those psychosocial risks. And are we measuring the well-being of our teams regularly? Probably not. Probably not.

Stephanie Goss:
Probably not. I knew that this, as it always does, when you and I start talking, time is always the crunch. And I said to Phil, I'm like, “Listen, we got to keep it tight.” And there are people who are listening who are like, “That sounds great. And where do I even start?” And so Phil and I are going to drop a bunch of resource info-

Dr. Phil Richmond:
A hundred percent.

Stephanie Goss:
… into the show notes this week for you guys so that you can find access to learning more about some of the things we've talked about. The ACEs assessment, the mental health and wellbeing audits in your practice, things like that. So we'll give you resource info. So don't panic because we're not going to dive into a lot of specifics from the time perspective, but we'll put some of that in the show notes for all of you.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And have our leaders gone through mental health awareness training? Have we given them the tools just like everything else? Have we done that?

Stephanie Goss:
How many of us have mandatory training for our leaders? How many of us have our people assessed in QPR training? How many of us have our teams take just, I'm so glad you said the OSHA thing. There should be somebody on our team whose is CPR and first aid certified, who on our team is getting mental health education? Who is getting education in things like substance use disorder, alcohol use disorder. How are we educating ourselves, that has to be a part of the process for us if we are truly running open, honest, caring, people-forward practices. And I think that's the space that you and I both look forward to impacting the most for sure.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And so just really getting curious about some of those questions. And if we have an EAP, most practices have one and they don't know how to access it.

Stephanie Goss:
Or what's included.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And is that information, on a regular basis put out? So it's not, “Hey, we have this EAP. What the hell does EAP stand for? Okay, what does that mean?” Really going over what the benefits are during a team meeting and do we address those things regularly? Do we feel that that's important enough to put on our regular team meetings? Do we have a wellbeing update? Do we have a psychosocial risk update? Are we putting those things on the agenda to talk about?

Stephanie Goss:
I love that. And I think one of the other things that as leaders that we can think about is, Andy and I talk a lot about employee assistance programs and EAPs on the podcast. But going beyond that, when I sat down to think about this and I was thinking about what are some of the things that I learned about in my own journey. Things that wouldn't have even occurred to me as a manager to ask. Like what's included when we are providing medical benefits for our team, what's included in those benefits? Is it included for recovery support services? Can somebody go to inpatient treatment or outpatient treatment as part of our medical health plan? What is their access level to meds to treat substance use and manage addiction? Are they wildly cost-prohibitive if the insurance doesn't cover it? Does our medical services offer alternatives for pain management, like chiropractic or acupuncture or physical therapy?
Basic things like that, that are a part of the benefits that we already offer. To your point about the EAP, it's the same with medical benefits. We can be asking those questions not only knowing the answers to those questions, but making sure that we're highlighting that information for our team. So again, they don't feel secretive about it. I make no secret in my practices now. I don't take meds unless I absolutely have to. And so one of the questions that I always ask an employer is, what does the medical plan look like? I've been using acupuncture to help control pain for years. What does acupuncture or chiropractic coverage look like? Asking those questions so that it isn't a secret so that it isn't something that I feel uncomfortable having to ask about, thinking about those things. The other thing that became a passion project for me is how can we help make the community better and decrease risk factors, especially when it comes to substance use.
I live in an area of the country that has really, really high opioid use and we're up near the Canadian border and it's a systemic issue here. And one of the things that I got really passionate about was can we as someone in the community who dispenses drugs to our patients, can we get involved in drug takebacks? Can we get involved in pharmacy blue box projects where the community can bring back meds, no questions asked. And dispose of them safely in conjunction with the DEA, so that we help limit some of the risk factors. Not only for our team members in terms of making our own homes safer, but making the homes safer of our clients and our friends and family in the community. So things like that, that we wouldn't even necessarily think of that really impact how we're showing up for our team as leaders. And thinking about them as whole human beings and not just the person who's showing up to clock in and do the work for us.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And I would say, if there's one big takeaway of where to focus is that I love the concept in this group that I work with in Australia is very, very big on this concept, which is a me, we and us. So there's individual responsibility and individual things. And this is where I think human medicine got down the road of really pushing resilience training. Resilience training is excellent. Resilience training, individual resilience training will not fix systemic problems. However, and then when we talk about the me part and the we part, me as the team, what makes up a team is individuals, obviously. So we need to have people that can then, and then on a team level, can we create a situation where I feel comfortable admitting a mistake to you. Or I feel comfortable having a discussion with you and you're not going to judge me.
And some of those resilience factors go into the psychological health and safety or the psychological safety of a team. And then on top of that then organizationally is that things that are out of the hands of the employees, what are we doing as leaders and as organizations to facilitate these things? Are we doing our mental health audits? Are we looking at, is everybody taking their PTO? Are we measuring wellbeing? Are we measuring burnout in our team members? What are we doing at that level? And all of those things actually have to come together to create the, as Stephanie Goss's term that I know she loves, unicorn veterinary-

Stephanie Goss:
Unicorn practice. I love it. And I would say as I'm listening to you and I'm thinking about the moving from me to we to us, listening to this, I suspect that there are some people who are like, “Holy hell, this is so much stuff that I never even thought about. And where do I find time for this? Where do I put this on top of the million other things that I have to do as a practice leader, as a business leader?” And I think the thing that both you and I are in firm agreement is this is not a, if you were going along your merry way and you had a drug… If you were me in my early career and you had a drug-free workplace policy and that was it. That was all you did, that was the box you checked. You are not going to be able to go from that at zero to a hundred miles an hour overnight. Recognizing that this is a marathon, not a sprint.
So pick one place, whether it's starting to do some audits with the team, starting to do building, again, psychological safety also doesn't happen overnight. So you can't go from not talking about things that are personal and private and vulnerable with your team if you haven't been doing that. And you all of a sudden are like, “We're going to sit down and we're going to have a group therapy session.” They're going to shit bricks. So it's about finding the places where you can start small and try one thing. Like you said, let's talk about what happens when we make a mistake. How are we going to acknowledge that to each other? How are we going to admit it? What does that look like? Starting small, finding that first building block and then figuring out how do we layer in those other building blocks as we go.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
And on an organizational level, what is our mental health policy? We could literally just ask that question. And that can be our thing for the month is just, do we have one? Can we craft one? What might that look like? And then the other thing that I think about is when we talk about civility in practice, small things that we can do that have a ton of impact, is how would I like to be treated at work? What are three things that we could sit down as a team and say, “When we're talking to another team member, we put our phone down.” We all just have that agree, simple little things like that. And we take three of those things for how we want to treat each other in practice. And that's the step we take. And the thing is that those build on one another and then we have a win. We've done something positive for the practice, and then we just build one on another.

Stephanie Goss:
I love it. As always, you and I could sit here and-

Dr. Phil Richmond:
I know.

Stephanie Goss:
… continue this conversation for half a day. If you were listening to this and you're like, “I'm super enjoying this conversation.” And you're going to be at VMX, I'm going to drop the details on our session into the show notes for you guys, because we would love to see you there. And definitely come talk to us and tell us that you listened to the podcast. That'll make it even more special. But we will also drop resource information into the show notes and some info on how to contact Phil if you have questions or honestly, if you want to nerd out with either of us on these topics, we're always open to further the conversation. And we actually have the first veterinary recovery meeting happening at VMX as well.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
At VMX, yes, we do.

Stephanie Goss:
Which is huge and exciting. That is going to be happening on Sunday afternoon as well. And we'll drop that info in because that is something you and I are both passionate about. Breaking down the barriers so that it's not just about the licensed medical professionals as veterinarians, obviously we need to serve them. But the veterinary community goes far beyond just our licensed veterinarians. And so you and I are both passionate about providing access to recovery resources and just opening the doors to all the members of our team, paraprofessional and professionals. So that is a big win and that's happening at VMX as well. So lots of fun stuff coming in the next few weeks. It's going to be a busy few weeks for us.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Yes, yes. And I'd also say if you want to get in a meeting, an online meeting, if you're a veterinarian, the Vets for Vets program from the VIN Foundation, Bree Montana, bree@vinfoundation.org, you can get involved with that. We have a great meeting that happens every Sunday. And it's one of my favorite recovery meetings and it's just wonderful and we've got some more resources coming forth as well. So, excited.

Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, I love it. Thanks for being here, Phil-

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Thank you.

Stephanie Goss:
… and starting this conversation. I imagine that as you and I always do, this will spin into multiple other like, “How do we answer this question,” kind of episodes. But this was the first, this was great. Take care everybody, have a wonderful week. Take care of yourselves and hopefully Phil and I will see you in Florida in a few short weeks.

Dr. Phil Richmond:
Looking forward to it.

Stephanie Goss:
Take care. Well, gang, that's a wrap on another episode of the podcast. And as always, this was so fun to dive into the mailbag and answer this question. And I would really love to see more things like this come through the mailbag. If there is something that you would love to have us talk about on the podcast or a question that you are hoping that we might be able to help with. Feel free to reach out and send us a message. You can always find the mailbag at the website. The address is unchartedvet.com/mailbag, or you can email us at podcast@unchartedvet.com. Take care everybody, and have a great week. We'll see you again next time.

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