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…
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. 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.
