This week on the podcast…
Bret Canfield joins Dr. Andy Roark to take a MEATY question from the mailbag. When you have a doctor who came from a toxic clinic and now has serious trust issues with staff, how do you coach him or her through that behavior? Are you at risk of driving this doctor away? Let's get into it!
You can also listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.
Got a question for the mailbag? Submit it here: unchartedvet.com/mailbag
Upcoming Events
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More Resources From The Episode
Belbin Team Roles: https://belbinnorthamerica.com/?gclid=CjwKCAjw0dKXBhBPEiwA2bmObTTWlmfL57KtkwfIdV74o5ksSzg_Usn4bbdKrQGgztenwwRDgCTa_hoCCRcQAvD_BwE
Radical Candor TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yODalLQ2lM&ab_channel=FreshBooksUniversity
Crucial Conversations (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Tools-Talking-Stakes-ebook/dp/B093Y3N433/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=crucial+conversations&qid=1660245538&sprefix=crucial+%2Caps%2C88&sr=8-1
Episode Transcript
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:
Welcome everybody to The Uncharted Veterinary Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I am here today with the one and only, Bret Canfield. Guys, I'm going to introduce Bret in just a minute. He has been working with Uncharted for a couple years now. I like to have him on lectures and conferences. He's a fantastic lecturer. He and I are going to be breaking down questions from the mail bag. It's all about we have a project owner who is a golden retriever and we have an associate vet that's the opposite of a golden retriever and they get along well, but the staff doesn't handle this mixture of the two doctors.
Also, our non-golden retriever tends to be a bit critical when people make mistakes and it's off putting, especially to new staff members. It's a coaching conversation, guys. It is a really good one. I hope that you guys will enjoy it. Also, at the end of this episode, I mention that Bret is going to be joining me and Stephanie Goss at our Uncharted Practice Owner Summit. I'm not sure with the dates, but I'm going to tell you right now that the Practice Owner Summit is in person in December. It's the 8th through the 10th, confirming that. Yup, it is December 8th through the 10th in Greenville, South Carolina, my hometown at the Westin Poinsett. We are going to be getting together. It's only open to practice owners. It's only open to practice owners who are Uncharted members.
So, if you are one of those people, if you're both of those, go ahead and get registered. You can't get registered yet. Registration is coming. Click on your calendar. Mark yourself out of the clinic, December 8th through the 10th. If you are not an Uncharted member, but a practice owner and you're like, “I want to hang out with other practice owners,” go ahead and get your Uncharted membership. Guys, let's get on to this.
Meg:
Now The Uncharted Podcast.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the podcast, Bret Canfield. How are you?
Bret Canfield:
Fabulous. How are you doing?
Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm doing really well, man. I really appreciate you coming here and making time to work through this with me. How have you been?
Bret Canfield:
Life has been good. I mean, it's veterinary medicine so it's chaotic and it's busy and hectic and we wouldn't have it any other way, right?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Maybe short breaks. Maybe short breaks for me if we could. Turn down the volume a little bit sometimes, but for the most part, no, I agree. It's pretty good. For those who don't know you, you do a lot of things. You've been working with us at Uncharted for a couple years now, coming in, doing sessions, lectures. I have pulled you in. I pulled you in for a number of different jobs that we do because you are an outstanding facilitator and thinker. You do a great job of getting people talking, of making conversations go to good places. It's just a skill of yours that I've always admired.
I aspire to be as good a facilitator one day as you are, but you were also the director of organizational development for Summit, which is probably a side thing that you do when you're not hanging out with Uncharted and doing stuff with us. But anyway, you are a person who has really good insight. I have a question that I think you have a very specific set of skills for this question and I was hoping you'd unpack it with me. You up for it?
Bret Canfield:
I'd love to. I think you may have oversold me just a skosh, but let's give it a whirl anyway. I like it.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Here we go. Great. We got a question in the mail bag. It's from a longtime listener, first time caller. She's a practice manager. She's got a privately owned, two-veterinarian, small animal clinic. The practice owner and the associate vet have wildly different personalities. So, while they get along, we have had difficulties with new staff. So, I really like the way she sets this up. So, she describes the practice owner, I'm assuming that our writer is she, she describes the practice owner as being basically a golden retriever of a person, which I love, because that's one of my favorite breeds. She loves everyone, is always on the move, is pretty laid back, has no attention span. The staff love her and she loves to teach newbies.
When someone makes a harmless mistake and is accountable, she always tells them, “Hey, I f-ed up more than anyone. It's how you handle it that matters.” I would just put a pin right here and say, I love this person. I'm ready for it. I'm ready to go work with this vet right now. The associate is the opposite. She has a great relationship with the practice owner and with me. After a rocky six months, she now has one technician that she trusts and another that she at least likes. She came to us from a toxic clinic and she knew she had some neurosis from that. We hope that our laid back, respectful, and positive culture might help relax her some. In a lot of ways, it has.
The one thing that hasn't improved is a biggie though, she is consistently off-putting with how she treats new people. I've had multiple new people come to me frustrated and upset about not knowing how to communicate with her. The practice owner and I have both tried to talk with her about it. “If an employee makes the smallest of mistakes, she immediately doesn't trust them with anything. She will frequently complain about something little that an employee did after the fact.”
So, let's go ahead and just start with that. Things seem to be getting worse, instead of better. We 110% want everyone who works here to treat each other with respect. How do we address this? What actions can the PO and I take? That's the question that we got. I want to just go ahead and start to open that up. Bret, do you have initial ideas on this question? Have you seen anything like this before?
Bret Canfield:
Yeah, it's a great question. It's a doozy, because it involves a whole lot of different factors as a lot of our questions do. I do feel like I've seen this before. I mean, one of the things that I love and that I'm very passionate about are elements like team dynamics and communication and culture and things like that. This particular question seems to touch on a lot of those. Right off the cuff, here are my first reactions. The first thing I'm going to say is this is actually a really good thing. It just doesn't feel like a really good thing yet. The reason it's a really good thing is because you've got the two veterinarians in this practice, they communicate very, very differently.
The reason that's such a good thing is because when I've been into practices that have a really, really, really fundamentally hard time changing their culture and really struggle, it tends to be because there's several people in the clinic that all communicate the same way. Once that happens, unfortunately, it's a very narrow communication scope. So, God forbid you have a client come in that communicates differently than the way that you all communicate, you might have absolutely no capacity to deal with that person. The fact that you've got some variety of team dynamics, some diversity of team dynamics could actually be a really good thing. We'll see if you and I can unpack that in a little bit and figure out how to make it a good thing, make it feel like a good thing.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That's a very positive way to look at this. I definitely like it, right? Yeah. So, let's start to unpack this. So, I like what you're saying about diversity of team dynamics. I think that's really interesting. Let's get into headspace. So, the way we break these cases down, first thing we do is talk about headspace. The second thing we do is talk about specific action steps. What do we say? How do we say it? So, let's get into headspace. I really like your idea. I think you've already framed this in a really, really positive way of this is just a different team dynamic. I think that that's really great. I think if you identify the associate that as a problem, then anytime you label a person as a problem, you've got issues.
Bret Canfield:
Absolutely.
Dr. Andy Roark:
People don't change all that much. Behaviors can change. People don't change. I don't get that necessarily from the writer, but there's some degree of that. So, I really do like that a lot. I have a fantasy that lives in my mind is that if you set a perfect culture and you've got a really positive place, you can overcome almost any challenge with good positive team culture.
Bret Canfield:
Agreed.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I appreciate that the writer said, “She's come a long way and things have gotten a lot better in a lot of regards.” I say good. That jives with what I've seen. At the end, a positive culture does not undo past traumatic experiences or a hard-ingrained patterns of behavior. So, this all tracks with about what I see as far as the impact we can expect to make. So, I guess in headspace, what I would say is again, I think this person who's writing has already done a lot of really good things of saying, “Hey, this is something that our doctor picked up at a previous practice. That was a really bad experience and a lot of these are coping mechanisms.”
Bret Canfield:
Yeah, she's been hurt before.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Exactly right.
Bret Canfield:
It happens. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Exactly right. She's had trust violated probably in a formative time. Especially if you're a young vet and you get burned a couple of times, those lessons tend to stick with you. So, I think that just all of this is a really healthy headspace to start coming from. So, I really like that a lot.
Bret Canfield:
Agreed. Yeah, agreed. I think you nailed it. I mean, I think whenever we look at people as problems, then we're setting ourselves up for failure. There's some great literature written about the difference between a problem and a paradox and they're not the same thing. I always look at a problem as a surgical experiment. There's an issue, you find the issue, you remove the issue. Sew the culture back up, you're good to go. Most of this stuff, it doesn't work that way. This is derm. This is internal med. It's muddy, it's messy, it's diagnosis by exclusion. It's management, not necessarily just surgery. I think this is a similar situation. I don't think that this is a problem.
I think this is a paradox. I think that you've got two different people that communicate very, very differently. Both of them probably think that their style of communication is the right style of communication. So, from the headspace perspective, I think that's a big part of it. Like anything else, I think that some of what we're talking about probably relates back to expectations and agreements. I think part of what we're talking about absolutely relates to communication and team dynamics. I think part of what we're talking about always bubbles up to culture. It always bubbles up to culture. So, there's a few different ways to look at this from a few different lenses.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Talk to me a bit about expectations and agreements. So, you put that out and say some of this comes from expectations and agreements. Get me into the headspace where I'm thinking about expectations and agreements. Help me understand where you're coming from when you say that.
Bret Canfield:
For sure. I mean, whenever I look at a problem like this, when I'm trying to work with somebody who communicates differently than I am, I have a lot of expectations in my head and I might not be aware of those expectations. But if I'd like to communicate a certain way, I often don't understand or don't appreciate why somebody might communicate differently than I do, because to me, there's a right way to communicate. It's the way that I communicate and I don't understand why somebody would do it differently. We do that a lot.
So, in this case, the practice manager may have already done a bang-up job of communicating with this associate vet and saying, “Fabulous associate vet, there's 99 things that you do right. That being said, I am going to challenge you on this one. I do think sometimes you can come across as distrustful. I think that you can come across as inaccessible and I want to challenge you and work with you on that. I want you to understand that this is really important. So, as we have our conversations moving forward, I want us to agree instead of it being an expectation that only lives in my stupid little noodle, I want us to agree that this is something that is happening, that it's something that we can work on together and it's important.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I like that a lot. I would talk about how to do that when we get into action steps. I think that that's really true. It's taking this thing that's going on inside my mind as the manager and bring it out and externalizing in a place where we can all look at it in a really productive way. The other thing that I see when I read through this question and some of these little examples that came along with it, one of the things that I say and I don't know if this is the right term for it, but I think of it as a justice mindset.
So, there are people who are like, “There is one way to do it. If that person didn't do it, it's because they lack integrity. They're supposed to follow what's in their handbook and they did not and that shows a failing of their moral character. They have let our patients down.” That may sound extreme, but I see that mentality sometimes. It's about fairness and acting in a way that lets me trust you and things like that. So, what really is a minor human mistake in this person's mind becomes this person can't be trusted and more so this person has hurt me. I think a lot of us maybe go into that mindset sometimes.
I've seen people who are struggling with depression or burnout definitely go into that mindset, but I think some people live probably from past experiences, they can live in that mindset where if they feel let down, it's a one-strike and you're out policy. Now we're really into some people's psychology, but what I'll say is if you're a person who has that mindset or you find yourself going innately to that behavior, that's really career-limiting for you because everybody makes mistakes. If they get written off as a person when they make a minor mistake, then you're going to be real lonely for a long time. So, I do see that. So, we have to figure out how to work with those people.
So, that brings me around to a piece of it for me really is I may have this problem figured out about what we need to do and where we need to go, but I need to make sure that this associate vet feels very heard and that they feel understood in their behavior and they feel seen for the way that they approach these things. Because if I try to say, “Look, you are jumping to this conclusion and you're mistreating this person and that's not healthy and that's not reasonable,” I'm really dismissing this what this person's concerns are.
I'm not saying I agree with them, but I need them to at least feel heard and feel that they have a valid concern about yeah, it's true. Sometimes if you don't hold people accountable or if we don't enforce standards, then medical quality can slip down to an unacceptable level.
Bret Canfield:
That's right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That does happen. That is something that we're very aware of and you're not wrong to be thinking about that. I think just having that conversation, getting that part out into the open, that oftentimes can set that person at ease. So, I think between the two of us, I think we've really come up with a nice little combination of acknowledging this associate vet's concerns and where they're coming from, setting expectations about what they're doing and what the impact that it's having and how we want them to behave, and then also just going on and challenging them to make some improvements while also still keeping a good focus on the things that they're good at, not letting this become the focal defining point of them as a doctor.
Bret Canfield:
In fact, I'll jump into that. In my experience with team dynamics, one of the most interesting points I keep coming back to is that we often have a mentality where people have strengths and people have weaknesses. I think it's not necessarily more complex than that, but I think it's different than that. I think the truth is that oftentimes our biggest challenges don't come from our “weaknesses,” he says with air quotes. I think that our greatest challenges actually come from our strengths, either unfocused or in excess. So, I would even also look at this associate vet and say, “This person doesn't have a problem with trust. This isn't a weakness.” This person is probably and I'm totally guessing, I know very little about this person, but they're pretty good at medicine, right?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I'd make that guess too.
Bret Canfield:
Part of the reason that they're distrustful sometimes of staff is because they probably do have very high and very exacting standards of success. It probably makes them a very good clinician. So, part of the challenge here is that making sure that this person's strengths don't become their dragon. It's like you said, Dr. Andy, I think that the other challenge is that we'll sometimes look at the team and say, “Okay, I like the way this person communicates. They communicate the way I want people to communicate, but this person communicates badly or poorly or I don't like the way this person communicates.”
I think one of the mindsets we have to have in looking at this is that I think we need to honor the uniqueness, even celebrate the uniqueness of this associate vet and her approach, but I think that we have to help her become the best version of herself. So, let me put it this way. I look at this associate vet like a little bit of a cat. They're not going to trust somebody right away. They're skeptical. You got to earn everything. You got to earn their trust, earn their affection, earn their loyalty, earn their respect. And then you got the owner who's a golden retriever who seems like-
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, a golden retriever.
Bret Canfield:
I don't know you but I love you. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark:
The cat's not broken. The cat's not wrong.
Bret Canfield:
That's right. That's right. You're never going to turn a calico cat into a golden retriever and you're never going to turn a golden retriever into a calico cat. If we try to do that, there's going to be a lot of suffering.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I like that a lot.
Bret Canfield:
I think we're allowed to say is, “You be a cat but you be the best version of that.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
The best cat. Be the best cat. She's like, “You're trying to be a golden retriever. Oh, yeah, sorry. Sorry.” Yeah.
Bret Canfield:
Right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
No, that's perfect. It's great. Basically, I talk a lot about most of our strengths are double-edged swords. Most of them are. Being charismatic has strengths and it has drawbacks. This vet can make friends with anybody. Yeah. They're also always 30 minutes late because they can't get out of the exam room because they're being friendly.
Bret Canfield:
Exactly.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Everybody's got strengths that at some point become a weakness. You have people who are great at spotting potential problems. The downside is they have a habit of coming off as the Negative Nelly who craps on everything. Well, they're very good at avoiding catastrophe by seeing potential problems, but there's that downside to that same skill. So, yeah, I like that lot. One of my favorite sayings for this is don't ask a fish to climb a tree. I think that that is true too. I'll give the example that I see from this all the time is so we have a profession full of perfectionists and our perfectionists are really in a bind right now, because they got too much work to do and not enough time to do it.
This, Brett, is the perfectionist crucible, because it needs to be done and it needs to be imperfectly and there's more work than I can possibly do. If I give this to someone else, they won't do it as well as I'll do it or they won't do it the way that I do it. So, now, I as a perfectionist am really in a vice grip and there's no way out of this. It is how it feels and that perfectionism makes them a wonderful clinician but it really hinders their ability to delegate and rely on other people and to adapt to a high workload beyond how many hours they have in a day. So, anyway, but that's what I see a lot and it almost feels like that when we talk about this vet. Okay.
Bret Canfield:
Yeah, agreed.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I think that's what I got for headspace. I feel like I'm in a pretty good place to start putting together an action plan. Philosophically, anything else we need to be thinking about?
Bret Canfield:
I think we nailed it honestly. I'm going to declare victory and we can start polishing our laurels.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Exactly. I think we can just break right here and have a beer.
Bret Canfield:
We crushed it.
Dr. Andy Roark:
This is done. It's done. All right. Okay. So, let's take a break for a second and then we'll come back and do action steps.
Bret Canfield:
I'd love it. Let's do it.
Stephanie Goss:
[inaudible 00:20:13]. Hopefully, this is a big, hairy, audacious goal, hopefully, we'd be able to make you feel better and feel like you have some tools in your toolbox to help make hardships and conflict in your practice a little bit easier to deal with. So, if you would love to come and join us, head on over to the website, unchartedvet.com/events. You can see the registration for this and all the rest of the things that we have coming up, because we got really more good stuff coming now. Back to the podcast.
Dr. Andy Roark:
All right. [inaudible 00:21:53]. As veterinarians, you may love having two golden retrievers, but in our metaphor, a practice with two golden retrievers is exhausting because they run everywhere and they love on everybody. At some point, you need a cat to be like, “Hey, look, let's bring this down.”
Bret Canfield:
That's right. They're not going to be in the OR until 2:30 in the afternoon every day and you're not going to run an hour and a half late on every exam.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Exactly.
Bret Canfield:
Look, having two golden retrievers is great as long as every single client you see only wants golden retriever energy, but I doubt that that's the case.
Dr. Andy Roark:
I can tell you as a fellow golden retriever, it's not the case. There are clients that are like, “That guy's too much. We need to turn him down.” All right. Yeah. All right, cool. Let's go ahead. Let's go and make some action steps. So, you're the practice manager. You've got this doctor. What I would say, this is going to be a coaching conversation is how I see it. I don't know if you see it that way, but you've got this coaching conversation. How do you set the table, Bret? So let's get into the nuts and bolts. What does this look like?
Bret Canfield:
Yeah, great question. I would absolutely have a coaching conversation with this vet. Honestly, I would also probably have a second component, which is I would probably adopt some stuff from a holistic team perspective as well, but let's talk about the coaching conversation first. Because I think that absolutely has to happen.
Dr. Andy Roark:
All right.
Bret Canfield:
This calico cat is extremely conflict-averse based on what I'm hearing. So, one of the things that I would want to do is make sure that this person felt very, very safe. I would make sure this didn't feel like an attack. I would make sure this didn't feel like an intervention. Because I think once you get somebody into that place, they're going to hit threshold, they're going to shut down. Their fight, flight, freeze, fidget is going to kick in and they're probably not going to be receptive to the coaching.
So, from my perspective, I would probably just lay some groundwork and probably say the quick version is what we touched on earlier, which is like you do so much stuff that is going well and I hope that I've done a good job acknowledging those things. If I haven't, I'm going to work hard, because I really value you and I really value what you bring to the team, so much so that I think there is actually an area that we can do better.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, let me jump in here for a second and just say I love that you show vulnerability first. I think that that's a really important part of this conversation. I think it's a really good skill is to say, “Hey, if I haven't communicated that, it's something I'm working on is to make sure that I communicate these things ahead of time.” I love it. I think going into a coaching conversation with the ability to own anything that you can own and I don't want to say criticism, but essentially lay some criticism on yourself and say, “Hey, look. This is the thing that I'm working on. We're all trying to get better and I'm going to keep working on it.”
I think that is a great way of going first by saying I'm going to accept some negative feedback from myself and commit to working on that. That really hopefully says, “I'm going to do this. I'm going to go first. It's not me calling you in here and criticizing you. We're talking about this, but I'm going to own as much as I can and say look, I have things to work on as well.” So I just want to jump in and praise that specific point before we get too far and say, I really like the way you set that up.
Bret Canfield:
I've learned from some really good folks that if you approach any coaching conversation from an authoritarian standpoint, a command and control standpoint, it's not going to usually be well-received. I think the truth is none of us are perfect. If you can go into the conversation with that in mind, there have been even times I've sat down with somebody and I've said, “I've been thinking a little bit about this conversation and I'll be honest, I'm a little bit nervous because I don't want this to happen.
I don't want you to walk away from this being offended. I don't you want you walking away from this thinking that you're not exceptional at your job. I'm going to try really hard to do a good job and to try to prevent those things from happening. But if I screw up, I'm just going to ask for your forgiveness in advance because I don't want those things to happen. You're really important.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
I love it. Yeah, that's great. Well, man, that's gold.
Bret Canfield:
I think once you've done that, I think you just lay out the challenge and say, “Here's the behavior that I've observed.” I think again, as much as you can own it yourself, it's important, because if this person's automatically distrusting and you say, “Hey, I've gotten some feedback from the team,” their mind is immediately going to go to, “Who talked? Who squealed? Who told you what? I want to know. I have the right to face my accusers.” You do not want to open that particular barrel of monkeys.
So, I would say here's what I've observed. I've observed that you have very high standard in terms of what you expect the staff to meet, what you expect from yourself. I think that's a really good thing. I think the way that high standard comes across sometimes is I think it comes across as you being distrustful of the team. I think it also comes across sometimes as you being somewhat unforgiving of the team. Our practice manager who submitted this did an outstanding job of submitting a couple specific examples to us. I do the same thing in that conversation, because that way, it's not some nebulous thing. I would say, “Hey, for example, last Thursday, here's an encounter that I observed.”
And then I think at that point, you have to do the hardest thing for me personally, which is to shut up for five seconds and say, “Quick pause. That's where I think we are. Give me some feedback.” One of the ways I'd really like to ask that and there's a very tactical reason is I'll say, “Now, is this something that you're aware of? Is this something that you also see as a challenge for you, or is this more of an optics problem?” What I mean by that is this isn't what's in my heart. I don't feel like I'm distrusting, but the team is perceiving that I am, because it gives them an out.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I really love that. I want to validate a couple things you said and then-
Bret Canfield:
Sure.
Dr. Andy Roark:
… explain a few places that I think are important. One, I think you're right about the authoritarian approach to feedback, but God, Bret, so many of us think this is supposed to be authoritarian. I coach vets, especially vets in larger corporate groups, where they have an established evaluation process, which totally makes sense, but it is an evaluation process and it happens once a year or twice a year and people come in and they get evaluated. I'm like, “Well, then I'm the evaluator and I will evaluate you.” The whole thing feels like it's supposed to be authoritarian or militaristic, where you come in and I will tell you, soldier, what you did and what you didn't do. I think that that whole vibe sets people up for failure from the very beginning.
Bret Canfield:
Agreed.
Dr. Andy Roark:
It really needs to be conversational. So, I like that you just called that out, but I really think that that is a wild misperception in evaluating giving feedback is it's supposed to have this power inequality between the person giving the feedback and the person receiving. It's really not. The best coaching feels peer to peer even if it's not.
Bret Canfield:
That's true.
Dr. Andy Roark:
So, I really like that you said that. Again, we go back to I love you give a couple examples of how to be vulnerable of opening up and saying, “Hey, if I make a mistake with this, please forgive me and know that you're really great in your job.” I really also like very much that you pause and say, “Is this surprising? Does this feel valid in any way, or is this off base?” It's funny the way I talk about the perception problem versus the reality problem, I really like that you set it up that way. I tell a story sometimes of I was busting my butt and my wife was teaching abroad. So, she went for a couple of weeks to Ecuador and she was teaching. She's a college professor, so she went and she was teaching.
It's a really hard job, where she has to go to Ecuador and teach about biology to college students. So, she's working up for the team and she did it, but she was gone. The kids were much younger. So, I had young kids. I had a bunch of work coming down the pipes and I was working really hard. So, I just decided what I would do is I take my kids up to my parents' house for the weekend. I would take them up there and they would get great grandkid time and I would tuck away and just do work. So, I went up there and I didn't set that expectation with my parents. I just showed up with the kids and they said, “Hey, we're going to come.” They were excited.
And then I disappeared into a room and just worked up my laptop for two days. And then when I was leaving, my dad was like, “Son, I'm worried about the relationship you have with your kids.” Man, that hit me like a hammer. You know what I mean? I was like, “Oh, my God. My dad said that he's worried about the relationship that I have with my kids.” I was really appalled by it. So, I called my brother because he knows me and he knows my dad and he is my best friend. So, I said, “Hey, well, dad said this to me. Man, I'm really wrestling with it.” He said, “Andy, I've known you for 40 years, you have a great relationship with your kids. You have a perception problem. All that he saw was you showing up, dumping your kids, and going into a bedroom.”
Bret Canfield:
That's right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
He thinks this is the norm and how you live your life. You and I know that this was 100% not the norm. This is an exceptional circumstance where you changed your behavior radically because you thought that that was something you needed to do. So, he said, “You have a perception problem.” That was the best example in my life of going, “Oh, he's right. I do have a great relationship with my kids. I know I do, but my father's perception of my relationship was not accurate.”
So, I really like that you called that out and said, “Do you think this is a perception problem?” That can 100% percent be true. People will say, “But Andy, if the whole team thinks that she's curt or she's mean, then surely that's not a perception problem because everyone thinks it.” What I would say is part of culture is collaborative creation of narratives.
Bret Canfield:
That's right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Once people start to talk to each other, it is possible the team has decided that she's angry, unforgiving. The truth is she's like, “Well, I just don't know how to tell them that they didn't do it right and they're taking it really personally.”
Bret Canfield:
I think you're allowing that possibility. I mean if you say to somebody, “Look, I know what's in your heart. You're obviously a distrusting person. You obviously don't care about your team,” again, that's not going to be a good coaching conversation.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Nope.
Bret Canfield:
Dr. Andy, you got two choices, right? Let me put it this way. The choice of “Hey, this isn't actually a challenge,” that's not a choice. You do have a choice though. Is this a challenge that you acknowledge is happening in reality and that you're aware of, or is this a challenge where you're like, “That's what's in my heart. I'm not a distrusting person. I like our team so you guys are wrong”? No, there's still a challenge to be addressed. The challenge to be addressed is you are coming across as being distrusting or curt or whatever word you want to use, right?
The good news is in this particular scenario, the solution to both of those challenges happens to be the same, right? If somebody says, “Yes, I'm distrusting in my heart,” okay, let's talk about the solution. If they say, “I'm not distrusting in my heart, but I'm coming across that way,” it happens to be the same solution, which is now let's have a conversation about how to change the how, how to change how you're being perceived, how you're coming across.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That can be very collaborative too.
Bret Canfield:
That's right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
We can say, “Well, this is the perception that we're getting. What do you think?” Quite honestly, if it is a perception problem, the person who was there saying the things and doing the things probably has more insight than I do about what they might do differently. Of course, there's ways that I can smooth this over. I can be a messenger and a peacemaker and go to the staff and say, “Hey, guys, this is something that I've heard and I want you guys to hear the other side of it and let's give grace that we wish that we would receive from other people.”
Bret Canfield:
Exactly.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Again, I wouldn't say to the technicians, “How dare you miscast our beloved doctor?” I would say, “Hey, we're all doing our best. Nobody wants to feel preached at or judged. I get it. At the same time, no one communicates perfectly all the time. So, we want to make sure that we're assuming good intentions in our colleagues and the people that we work with and start with that.”
Bret Canfield:
Well, and that's why I said the second component to this I think has to be more of a holistic conversation as a team about our culture, right?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I like that you put that out there.
Bret Canfield:
There's a couple quick things to dip into. Thing number one is you have the coaching conversation with your calico vet, but then you have conversation with your team and say, “Folks, we've had a coaching conversation. Now I'm not going to get into the nitty gritty because I don't air out other people's dirty laundry any more than I would air out yours, but we've had a conversation. This is something that we're working on together. Now I need you all to hit that reset button. I need to hit that reset button, because otherwise, what you're going to get is a lot of confirmation bias.”
Once the team has decided that this person's curt, any slight example of this person being curt, they're going to have out their little clipboards and they're going to be like, “Oh, she did it again. She did it again. Oh, she was curt.” It's like time out. I love your word, Dr. Andy. We're going to give this person some grace. We're going to assume the good. We're going to recognize that this is challenging and we're going to allow this person the opportunity to be better.
The other thing I would probably do is I'd probably take the team through a workshop or maybe even a couple workshops on things like courageous conversations. You and I talk about resources so I can geek out about that all day, but there's a few established tools for, “How do we as a team get better at showing each other that we do care about each other and that we're willing to challenge each other?”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, lay it on me. What are your favorites?
Bret Canfield:
I mean first one right off the cuff is Kim Scott's Radical Candor. It's a great book. It's an even better TED Talk in my opinion. It's 14 minutes of your time well spent.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Right. I'm going to link that in the notes.
Bret Canfield:
I love it. That's a good one. I love the book Crucial Conversations. I think it's very powerful. The only thing that I'm worried about with that is that there's a lot of steps and there's a lot of meat on that bone. Sometimes when teams go through that, they start to overcomplicate these things. In my opinion, the number one most important thing about having what I call courageous conversations, the number one most important thing is to have them. Yes, there are rules. Yes, there are strategies. Yes, there are tactics, but the number one communication problem in our industry and in fact in the world, it's not miscommunication, it's not rude communication, it's not curt communication. It's the absence of communication.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, no, I like that a lot. We're in the business of fixing problems that are established, but I think sometimes if you can use the way back machine and jump back a little bit and start to lay down some different patterns of behaviors, you can make a lot of things much more easier and much easier on yourself. So, for example, one of the things that I feel like is an unfair advantage that places with good culture have is that they give a lot of feedback. The great thing is if you give a lot of feedback, then giving feedback and coaching when you get to this point is really easy because it's not a hard thing. What's really weird is when you give no feedback and now you have to have a conversation with this person. I look at you and I say, “Well, just make it casual. Try to make it not a big deal.”
Bret Canfield:
They can't.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Oh, it's a big deal.
Bret Canfield:
They got a whole laundry list of stuff that they haven't talked about for a year and it's like, “You did this.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Exactly.
Bret Canfield:
You did this, you did this. Wait, there's more. This, this, this. It's like, “Now, I feel like I'm on a trial,” right?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, exactly. Well, even some of the advice that I see people giving, I've given for giving conversations, like lower the stakes, go off-site, go out to dinner. You think that's going to lower the stakes? If you have never ever had coffee with this person offsite before, you think inviting them to go to coffee with you is not going to send up warning flares-
Bret Canfield:
To the whole clinic, right?
Dr. Andy Roark:
… and danger bells.
Bret Canfield:
All of a sudden, people are going to be like, “Hey, whatever you do, don't go out to coffee with Dr. Andy.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
That's exactly it. Yeah, totally. So, a lot of it is just if you can get in the habit of giving feedback all the time, this is super easy.
Bret Canfield:
Exactly.
Dr. Andy Roark:
People go, “That sounds awful.” Positive feedback is feedback. Again, it goes back to that militaristic command and control ideas. No, tell them what's great. Praise them for what they do. Praise them for wins. Ask them how things are going.
Bret Canfield:
That's right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Ask them how they thought the day went yesterday. What did you guys think? Hey, how did this go? Just ask them so that you can ultimately be like, “Hey, how did you think things went yesterday? What's good? Hey, what are you working on developmentally? What do you think your goals are for the next year as far as a doctor? I can make that roll off my tongue because I say crazy stuff like that all the time.
Bret Canfield:
Exactly.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Hey, what do you think about that?
Bret Canfield:
It changes the culture. What we're really talking about is microdosing communication, microdosing feedback. Instead of me waiting until I review every year to get you a giant huge honk and bolus full of feedback, how about we just say stuff every day like, “Hey, Dr. Andy, nice job”? You're like, “And, but.” It's like, “No and, no bud, nice job, hard stop, mic drop,” or vice versa. Hey, I love you. I think you could have done this one thing just a little bit better. They're like, “Tell me what.” It's like, “No, that's it. You just could have done this one thing a little bit better. You're okay. I'm okay. Everybody's okay.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
I'm going to push you on this a little bit in that when I do feedback stuff, you say, “Hey, great job,” I think the real magic is give them an example. Speak in one level more specific than that. Hey, great job doing this thing. Hey, I saw you talking with the vet student who came to visit today and you were showing them around. You've had their full attention and I just wanted to say, hey, I know you're busy. I really appreciate you doing that. That was great and you put on such a good face for our practice. I just want to tell you that.
Bret Canfield:
Agreed.
Dr. Andy Roark:
It's that one click better than hey, good job or love working with you. It's trying to hit that a little bit more specifically.
Bret Canfield:
Yeah. Well, I'm on the field a lot. I mean I'm on the floor a lot. So, one of the things I'd love to try to do is give feedback in real-time. So, even then when I say, “Great job,” I'm standing there for a minute, I'm in surgery, I'm watching a new technician or whatever, do something, do a difficult task. They do it and I'm just like, “Hey, we need to do a quick time out. That was awesome. Am I the only one who just saw that?”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
Bret Canfield:
And then you don't even need to double click on it because you're there. It's happening. You were there at that exact time. If you give somebody applause in the moment, they know what it's for. If you give them applause two days later, they're like, “What did I do again? I don't remember.”
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Well and the other thing too is you do that five times and you can say something like, “Hey, could you work on this for me?” They go, “Okay.” It's because they feel safe.
Bret Canfield:
That's right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Because you've told them that they're great five times before you told them this.
Bret Canfield:
That's right.
Dr. Andy Roark:
The other thing that I want to say, so you had mentioned before if we get the specific feedback or say, “Hey, this is the complaint that I've gotten,” so sometimes there's coaching, meaning this is generally where we need to go. Sometimes there's feedback in response to a specific thing that happened a couple of days ago. So, let's just say this person got into an argument with the vet tech on the floor. Let's just say. Well, I need to address that. So, I'm going to have to talk to them about this specific thing that happened. My big go-to and this helps me, because I'm like you, I have to twist my own arm to shut up and let other people talk. But I know how important it is. My favorite thing is the two most powerful words in management are, “What happened?”
So I just really like to say, “Hey, I heard that there was a bit of drama on the treatment room floor yesterday and that you were involved. What happened? What happened?” I coach improv comedy and I have a team that I coach. I really love this team. I went out of town. You would love this. I went hiking with my wife for a week and we just went up to the Appalachians. My cell phone didn't work most of the time and it was great. I got back and I had asked someone to coach the improv team for me while I was gone.
While I was gone, there had been an altercation at improv practice and someone's feelings got hurt. It was 100% had to do with some feedback and someone's feelings got hurt. They felt defensive or they felt it was act. They got really upset. So, I came back and I'm walking to this group of people. They've all saw what happened but I did not see it. I really have to say something about it because some people's feelings are really hurt. So, I walked in and I said, “Guys, I heard about practice last week. What happened?” That was all I said. Someone goes, “I'll go first. I think I made a faux pas.” They were like, “I think I made a faux pas when I did this.” It was great.
Bret Canfield:
That's so powerful.
Dr. Andy Roark:
It worked so well. So, again, you got to have good people who were willing to say, “I made a horrible misstatement yesterday last time, and I tried to be helpful. The way I did it, I could understand why that would make someone feel like they were being attacked, but I never meant it that way.”
Bret Canfield:
Totally.
Dr. Andy Roark:
And then we start off and it just ironed itself out beautifully in about five minutes. Everyone felt good and felt heard. I say, “Okay, let's do some improv.” That was it and that was the end of it. People talked and it was great. But that was just an example from last week of, “I wasn't there. I don't know what happened. This could be really tense. What happened, guys?” They told me and they sorted out in a meaningful way. So, I thought it was really good.
Bret Canfield:
It's a great way to guide things if you're a talker, like you and I both are. The team and I were joking around just having some lighthearted fun, because things have been so intense. One of the things we were doing is pointing out each other's verbal quirks. What are the words that you always say that maybe you don't know you say? I asked the same feedback. When it came to me, I was like, “Okay, hit me. What are some of mine?” They said, “Tell me more.” I said, “That's my version of what happened.”
So, I'll be in a conversation with them and they'll start to talk to me. It's my way of shutting myself the hell up for a second because what I want to do is I want to jump in with solutions. When I say, “Tell me more,” it's my way of saying, “I want you to work through this for a minute. Frankly, I don't have all the information I need.” I think stuff like that can work. I've one more thing burning desperately in my heart. Can I share one more thought with you on this scenario?
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, of course.
Bret Canfield:
My one other thought and this has taken this whole idea up to 11, but my one other cultural thought is that I absolutely love team dynamic tools. I absolutely love psychometric instruments. So, for a practice manager, if you haven't taken the team through something like DISC or Myers-Briggs or Insights or True Colors or Canine Colors, I can't recommend those things enough. In fact, there's one that I especially love that most people in our industry don't know about, and it's called Belbin, B-E-L-B-I-N, Belbin team roles, developed by Dr. Meredith Belbin in the UK many years ago.
The reason I like these tools so much is that once you have the team go through and it helps them identify their communication styles, et cetera, it's a very non-aggressive way to call out certain behaviors without coming across like you're criticizing somebody's soul. So, instead of saying, “Yeah, Dr. Andy, I think you're a very distrustful person,” if I can say whatever you're doing, “Hey, you're a bright red,” or “Hey, remember when we went through that thing and remember when your communication style was very heavily weighted towards this, I think that's what's happening here. I think you're zigging and they're zagging.”
It makes the whole thing much more call it scientific rather than having it be, “Hey, I'm openly criticizing your personality.” So if it's something I'm a huge believer in, if anybody ever has any geeky questions about any of that stuff, I'll talk about that stuff all day long.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes to Belbin as well. We teach DISC in Uncharted just for that same reason as that.
Bret Canfield:
I love DISC.
Dr. Andy Roark:
You get people out and there talking about their communication style. I love it, because again, everybody's got their favorite, but we teach DISC in Uncharted. Stephanie is a great implementer and teacher in DISC, but we use it a lot just because it's quick. You can recognize yourself and you can recognize other people really quickly in their style and what style they're using. And then again, I think probably the most powerful part of any of these is what you said, which is it shifts us to talking about the communication or the behavior and shifts us off of from talking about person. That just makes genuinely more productive conversations.
One last thing I want to jump back to that you brought up before we go, I love the holistic team perspective. I love going to the team after we've talked to this person and saying, “Hey, guys, we're going to have to reset button,” because you're right. Otherwise, it's confirmation bias. We've all worked really hard with someone and then sent them out and then the team immediately reacts to them based on their previous history. We just see it going right back into the old spiral, where it's like, “Okay, I've got reset button hit on this person,” but if we don't hit the reset button on the rest of the group, this pattern is going to pick right back up. I need both sides of this equation to stop pushing into the pattern and let's try to establish a new pattern.
So, I love that. I was just going to say, when we talk about a team approach, that does not necessarily mean a team meeting or a staff meeting. It might, but I think it's super awkward to bring the team together and be like, “All right, I've talked to Dave. This is what we talked about.” So I just want to be clear and say, hey, a lot of times these are private conversations, just saying, “Hey, I can't really get into details, but I want to let you know, I'm working with this person and they are really committed to trying to break out of this habit and I want to ask you to help with that. So, press the reset button, let you know and try to be supportive and open to the idea that they're trying to do better. Let's see how it goes.”
Bret Canfield:
Exactly.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Give some grace, but that can definitely be a private conversation. Usually, when we talk about things like this, there are certain people who have personality conflicts specifically and those are the people I really want to make sure I talk to, because they are going to be the ones that they're most likely to have a negative interaction with. So, for example, let's say that I have a technician on the floor who tends to take things very personally. That may be the person who's going to be who tends to be most affected by this or maybe the most vocal person who has these interactions and then goes and tells the rest of the staff or they vent about it or whatever.
Bret Canfield:
Or the most influential person. Absolutely.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Exactly right. Recruiting those people onto your side as you try to make this coaching adjustment, I think that that's a good use of time and energy.
Bret Canfield:
Agreed. Well, the truth is if we're really going to be a team, this is not clockwork, right? Like I said, it's not surgery. You can't just take the clock, pull out the part that's bad, fix it, put it back in, and not touch anything else. This is biology. This is an ecosystem. If you change one thing, you change everything. I do think it's important. As you said, Dr. Andy, to also close the loop, because one thing that happens to us a lot as leaders in veterinary medicine is someone will approach us with a problem.
We'll often go work on that problem, but as far as that original person knows, I don't know what the hell's going on. Sometimes just sitting down with somebody and saying, “I appreciate you telling me. I have had a conversation with this person. I'm not going to share the details of that conversation, but here's what I need from you moving forward,” now, we're doing a good job and we're taking a holistic approach, which I think is important.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah, that's awesome. Bret, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you online?
Bret Canfield:
Good question. I don't have the social media presence that I would like. I keep promising I'm going to do it and I keep not doing it. But between now and then, everyone can always just reach me on my email. I live for this stuff. Best email to reach me on is just bret.canfield@cast.net. Dr. Andy, please feel free to put it in the notes.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Sure.
Bret Canfield:
If I can ever be of service, I love this industry, so I'm happy to geek out over it. The challenge, of course, is getting me off the phone.
Dr. Andy Roark:
Yeah. Definitely. Well, anyway, guys, thanks for being here. Bret, thank you so much for being here. Guys, take care of yourselves, right? Talk to you later on.
Bret Canfield:
Always a pleasure.
Dr. Andy Roark:
That is our episode, guys. That's what we got for you. I hope you like it. Hope you got something out of it. Bret is fantastic. That's why we have him work for us in a variety of different ways. He's really a joy and a pleasure to be there. Let's see, anything else I want to tell you before you go? Banfield Pet Hospital, I got to remember that always in the Uncharted Veterinary Podcast. [inaudible 00:51:03] inclusivity in our profession. So, we couldn't do it without them. Always trying to thank those guys. Gang, take care of yourself. Be well. We'll cheer you on.
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