This week on the podcast…
This week on the Uncharted Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and practice management nerd Stephanie Goss are in the mailbag to tackle a question about what to do when you are supporting your veterinary assistants becoming technicians. A manager was asking about how to proceed after feeling like they were burned hard after paying for tech school for one of their rockstar team members, only to have that person resign and head to another clinic in their area within months of completing their licensing process. Stephanie felt this deep in her soul after experiencing something just like this in her practice so her soapbox might have even been on fire this time, just maybe not in the way you think. Let's get into this…
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Episode Transcript
Stephanie Goss:
Hey, friends. I am Stephanie Goss, and this is another episode of the Uncharted Podcast. This week on the podcast, Andy and I are diving into the mailbag. We are tackling a question that came to us from a manager who was wondering what to do when you're supporting veterinary assistants becoming technicians. Now, this seems like a no-brainer. We know we have a shortage of veterinary technicians in the industry. We know that we need to train from within, and yet there's some curve balls that come with this set of questions. This one was a fun one. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2:
Now, the Uncharted Podcast.
Andy Roark:
We are back. It's me, it's Dr. Andy Roark, and the one and only Stephanie can we find love again Goss.
Stephanie Goss:
How is it going, Andy Roark?
Andy Roark:
Oh, man, it's good, I think. It's good. I don't think about the world.
Stephanie Goss:
You were in the clinic today. Did you see any cute puppies and kittens this morning?
Andy Roark:
I did. I saw a number of cute puppies and kittens. Eyes on no kittens, only puppies.
Stephanie Goss:
So you lied.
Andy Roark:
Not by choice.
Stephanie Goss:
So you lied right off the bat.
Andy Roark:
I know I did. When you said puppy and kittens I'm like, “I saw cuteness this morning,” and then as I drilled into it, I was like, “Oh, I only saw puppies this morning.” Yeah, I saw a Great Dane puppy, which always I do. They make good puppies just because they're all feet-
Stephanie Goss:
They're real cute.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, they're feet and ears. I saw a Cocker Spaniel, whose ears were perfect, and I was like, “Good. Oh, thank God.”
Stephanie Goss:
“Keep them that way.”
Andy Roark:
Yeah. So a cute little dog, but yeah, it was good. It was really good.
Stephanie Goss:
Good.
Andy Roark:
So things are. All the things that matter are good. You know what I mean? It's a good time of year. How about you?
Stephanie Goss:
Things are good. We had sunshine yesterday, and it was beautiful here. We have been having peeks of sunshine, which is fantastic. It's back to rainy and foggy today, but it is sunny and it's busy. Man, it is busy. It's that time of year where you're going different directions and the days are getting longer, which just seems like you're trying to cram more stuff into the same time period.
Andy Roark:
The sun goes down late at night and it means that I feel like the night is truncated. I'll just be hustling and hustling and also just time for bed.
Stephanie Goss:
Yes. Yesterday, it's the time of year where, especially because we're so far north, once the days start lightening up, we have daylight hours. I mean, in the summertime, it's light out here until almost 11:00 PM, but this time of year, I looked up yesterday and it was 7:15 and I was like, “Oh, my gosh.” A, it still feels like daytime, and B, I got to go because I'm late to go get my kid and I was still sitting at my desk working on some stuff. So it's that time of year, for sure.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. Well, cool. Let's dig into our mailbag a little bit. You want to?
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. We have a great one. So it's funny because this is going to be one where I think people are going to be like, “Are they talking about me?” Full transparency, I could have written this word for word in a lot of ways at my prior practice. So I was talking to a manager and they had a technician resign, and it was not just any tech, but their rockstar. If you could clone them, you would want an entire practice worth of this person kind of tech. This tech happened to have just graduated tech school and passed their VTNE and gotten their license.
The big caveat is that the clinic paid for all of the things. So they helped pay for school, they paid for licensing, testing, all the CE, all the things. So that just finished, and it's only been a few months, and the tech submitted their resignation. So the manager was really, really frustrated and angry and bitter and all kinds of emotions for several reasons.
They were just like, “Dude, am I the A-hole for wanting to be angry and bitter and hacked off that we bent over backwards to accommodate this person? We supported them. We were their cheerleader. We helped them with schooling. We did all of these things and then they just up and left.”
Then they were also really, really frustrated because they were like, “This is a really great employee. This is a really great team member. I have a great relationship with them and I'm feeling really hurt that they didn't come to me and talk to me about it,” because the reasons for the resignation were that this tech said, “I need more money and more hours, and I've therefore accepted a leadership position with another local clinic that is going to give me both of those things.”
The manager friend was just like, “I'm super, super frustrated because I feel like I have an open door. I feel like we have a good relationship, and I can't believe that they didn't come talk to me about it.” So they were just like, “What do I do with this in the future because I'm hurt, I'm angry. I don't want to get burned twice. So do I create a contract? Do I not pay for school anymore? What do I do moving forward to avoid these things? How do I do better next time?”
Andy Roark:
Yeah. I see this a lot, and I think this is a really good one. I think this is going to be a really heavy head space episode and really light on the action steps, and you'll understand why when we get into it unless you have action steps. I think when you lay out the head space for me, unfortunately, I don't know that there's a whole lot you can actually do about this. I'll lay out why that is.
Let me just go ahead and give a trigger warning at the very beginning. What I'm going to say is going to hack some people off today. Some people are going to really love it and some they're going to really hate it, and I get it, and I won't begrudge anyone who says, “Shut your face, Andy Roark. I hate what you're saying.” I 100% understand why some people don't like what I'm going to say, but I do think this is really important and I got to call it like I see it, and this is definitely not a new issue that I've run into. All right?
Stephanie Goss:
Okay. Fair. Yup. Got it. Okay. Warning accepted.
Andy Roark:
Warning accepted. Now, the first piece of controversy that some people might get upset about, which is not what I was referring to, but the first thing that might hack people off that I'm going to say is right here at the beginning. I want to pause this show for one second and step up onto a soapbox that I promise it's related to. I'm going to step up on the soapbox.
Number one, we talk a lot about the virtues of our employees and our staff, and we talk about how great they are, and we should talk about how great they are, and we should beat that drum, and we should make our employees feel appreciated and things like that. However, praise and appreciation and celebration often go down the chain way more often than they go up the chain, which means a lot of owners, a lot of managers, a lot of bosses celebrate their staff like they should.
It's much less common to see celebration of bosses. You know what I mean? Appreciation should go down the chain, and so that's not it, but as the owner of a small business, I just want to say for one second, it's hard. It is really, really hard to be the person who invests into other people and puts a smile on your face and trains and grows and cheerleads and celebrates and supports and pays the bill, picks up the tab. You know what I mean?
Ultimately, just think about what would happen if the payroll came out of your own personal checking account. That's the reality for a lot of business owners. Just think about that and that pressure and that stress and trying to keep the lights on. I think a lot of small business owners quietly carry that weight on their shoulders. It's a heavy weight.
So when you have something like this where you say, “We invested in this person and we did this training and we did these things, and that person left,” I think it's important to empathize with that practice owner upfront and say, “I understand how somebody would feel this and feel this really deeply.”
So I see a lot of times these conversations go immediately into what are the workers' rights and what should the business have done and blah, blah, blah. I just want to pause for a second and just empathize with the emotions of someone who is the owner or even the manager who said, “We made these sacrifices and we reallocated these resources and we did these things and it didn't work out. I'm hurt by that. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm hurt by that.”
I think that's a very human thing, and I don't think you can have a meaningful conversation if you don't allow the owners or the managers to be human beings for a moment. So I think that's where I would start from a head space standpoint and say, “You know what?” and we're going to do that for our employee too. Don't think I'm going to villainize the technician that left and be like, “How dare that person? She owes her soul to this practice who paid for her education.” That's not true either. She's a human being and she's got needs and everybody's trying to do their best, but I want empathy to go both ways as we start to talk about this.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, for sure. My response immediately was, “No, you are not the asshole.” The reality is, look, the thing is, to your point about being human, humans experience a wide range of emotions, and emotions are not good or bad, they just are, right? It's how we're processing what is happening to us, what we're thinking, all of those things. So you have every right to feel disappointed, angry, hurt, whatever the emotion is that you're feeling like. There is nothing wrong with that. Feel it. Embrace the suck, wallow in it even for a day or two.
For me, that's the giving yourself space to be human, right? You can't stay in that place as a leader because staying in that place is how we find ourselves heading down the road of being the slippery slope that leads to toxicity, right? So I totally empathize with them and feel them. Like I said, this was literally me and I was real, real mad.
I went home that day and I was really happy for my team member. There were the conflicting emotions because like you said, Andy, I'm not going to villainize them. I'm not going to begrudge them. I understood on a human-to-human level why they were making the decision, and I still felt like crap and I went home and cried because I was sad. I was sad to lose this person that I genuinely liked. I was also angry that I had put time and energy into it. I was frustrated that I was going to have to start hiring again. All of those emotions are valid and real. So I agree with you. I think it has to start with, “That's okay,” and, “No, you're not the jerk for wanting to feel those things and even wallowing it for a little bit,” but the difference for me is how you choose to move on from there.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. I agree with that. Whenever we have conversations like this, there's a cartoon I always bring up. It's one of my favorites. It's these two veterinarians and they're arguing and one says, “What if we train these people and then they leave?” The other one says, “What if we don't train them and they stay?” I love that cartoon because that sums up so much of this.
We have a choice about, do you grow people and develop them or do you not? If you don't develop them, then you have to work with people who are not developed. If you do grow and develop them, there's a chance that their interests might take them away from your practice or opportunities will become open to them that have not existed in the past that they might decide they need to pursue. That's just the reality of the choice that we make. There's no escaping from that choice, I don't believe. So I just think that that's important to lay down.
Stephanie Goss:
I think that about the cartoon and about which choice do we make, and we think about our team members, you made the point of you want to work with someone who is developed, right? You don't want to work with undeveloped people. So here's the thing. I could do nothing for my team members and life could still happen, and they could get a job opportunity elsewhere. They could have a partner who needs to move. There's a million other reasons besides talent that would take someone away from my practice.
So if as a leader we allow ourselves, that's what I mean about the wallowing, if we allow ourselves to stay in that place of fear and anxiety and emotions that are in that vein when it comes to our team, we will never go anywhere because the reality is life is always going to happen, and whether we engage with and support and encourage and grow our people from within.
So for me, that's a big part of the head space piece is that philosophical stand that you have to take as a practice owner, as a practice manager on, do you want to work with people that you were trying to grow and develop and better or do you want to just take people wherever they're at and leave them where they're at until they leave your employee? It seems so simple, but it's also not.
Andy Roark:
Yeah. Oh, it is totally not. So the second thing I wanted to put down, which is very related to that, is it is this idea of impermanence. You said, it's frustrating this person went to another vet clinic. What if she had, this is terrible, what if she'd gotten hit by a bus? What if her spouse had moved to another town with his job and she went with him? There's a million reasons that people leave a job or what if they get injured, they're unable to do the job? There's a million things that can happen to someone that makes this not go the way that you imagined it going.
I think that part of it is holding onto that idea of impermanence just like, “I don't know. I want to support this person in their education, but who knows what's going to happen tomorrow or next year?” I think where we get in trouble is trying to convince ourselves that we have a lot of control and that this is permanent. So that's where I get into this idea with teams.
I think that this is a huge trap and a huge pain point for people who are leading teams. I have been very guilty of this. This is one of the most painful lessons in my career is I really love the people I work with and I love the people who work for me, and I care a lot about them. I've always had this idea that I would build this wonderful culture with these great people, and we would all live together for 30 years, and we would all retire on the same day. You know what I'm talking about?
Stephanie Goss:
Yes.
Andy Roark:
It's like a sitcom like Friends. We would all be there hanging out, having fun for 12 years, and then we would all be like, “All right. It's been a great career.” There would be an ending montage for each one of us going off into the sunset, and that would be it, and we will have come together and all been there for each other the whole time, and then we'll all go off our own ways, all with the same decision to do so so that no one's unhappy, but we all decide that this is where our clinic ends-
Stephanie Goss:
Together.
Andy Roark:
… and we leave together, and a new group of veterinary professionals moves in and starts the season, the next season of the sitcom. It's just new cast, and they all start over. That's this beautiful stupid idea that I have had forever. So the pain of Andy Roark is seeing my team torn apart every three years. That is what I have lived with in my life is I will get people and they will be wonderful, and then the world will change or they will change or their needs will change or what our company is doing changes, and that team gets pulled apart or it grows and new people join, and suddenly the dynamics change and the friendships shift around, and the time that we spend with certain people shifts around and it's just not what it was anymore.
I know I'm not the only one who has this experience. Think about your friends in high school and you had this friend group. Then think about your friends in college and this different friend group. Then think about when you had your first job, and then when you moved and you got a new friend group. Your whole inner circle has been torn apart and reassembled multiple different times.
That's life and that is what life is and what it's supposed to be, but gosh, we lied to ourselves. We just keep telling ourselves, “Nope, we're going to get it right, and we're going to get that friend group, and then we're all going to be the golden girls in 60 years,” like, “60 years from now, that clinic will be the golden girls. We'll be really, really old people who've been together forever.” It's not how the world works for the vast, vast majority of us.
So I think internalizing that is important and saying don't be afraid of impermanence. So if you buy into what I'm saying and you say, “Okay, Andy. I get it. As much as I want to believe I'll bring these people in and grow them and we'll bond and they will just stay here for the rest of their career, that's probably not going to happen. Well, what the heck is the point then, Andy?”
My answer to it is, I think the most zen way to look at this is to try to get yourself into a head space where you have people who come through your doors and they join your team and they have a good job and they enjoy the work and they grow as people and as caregivers and as colleagues. Then ultimately, they almost certainly move on to do something else, but you've hired new people who have come in and they're going to grow and they're going to develop. If you're lucky, you get them staggered out enough so that somebody wonderful is leaving and that opens up a hole for somebody else to grow.
Don't feel bad if you look around and you have someone who leaves, your A-plus rockstar tech, and you're like, “I don't know who's going to step into this hole.” It happens, and it might not happen the way that you think. There's this saying. The cemeteries of London are full of indispensable men. The idea, it shouldn't be gendered, but the old saying is, but the idea being, we all want to look around and say, “Boy, we've got this person. We couldn't do it without her.” Yeah, you could. You could and you would. The world would turn and you would figure it out and people would flex and shift and step up in ways you didn't expect and know that person would not be replaced, but the team itself would change and that place would get taken.
So it's just amazing where two other people would expand and cover that job, and then you would hire someone and they would not replace the person who left, but they would take workload off of the people who shifted over, and now you're like, “This team functions entirely differently.” That's normal. That's how it's supposed to happen. So those are my big things is, what if we train these people and they leave? What if we don't and they stay? Then the idea of impermanence of your team is … Our whole lives are spent trying to … We're all on a river, we're on a stream and we're all trying to gather a raft around us that is stable, that we can rely on, that just is going to take us down this raft in as much comfort as possible. Then our raft gets torn apart every two years, and then we spend two more years trying to rebuild a new raft.
Stephanie Goss:
Put it back together.
Andy Roark:
Then we do, and then it all gets torn apart again, and that's the human experience. So it is just part of it, and it's just built into having the team. So I wrote an article a year or so ago that I really liked, but it was in a response to a question basically identical to this, and I thought, “What if we could get into this place where our goal was to bring people in, give them a great place to work, grow them, run a good healthy business while we did it, and then when they left, we celebrated them and said, ‘Thank you for being here. Good luck to you on your adventures. I'm glad we were part of your growth.'”
I know doctors who have that experience. I know doctors who are just proud of the people who come up and they go on. You see it a lot in people who come in as assistants and they work and they work, and at some point they go to tech school and then they decide they want to be a tech somewhere else or in another city or an emergency clinic or they come up and then they go to vet school and they become a veterinarian and they go live in another state. Then that doctor will see that young veterinarian or that young vet tech, and there's no awkwardness about, “Oh, why didn't you come back to our clinic?” but it was rather, “I'm so proud of you.” Isn't that beautiful?
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah, it really is, and that is one lesson that I learned on a personal level, and by watching my former bosses, that was my experience at my first practice. I was growing and we hit that place where I wanted to do more things and I was ready for more things and the clinic wasn't really ready, and they could have been. I was doing a lot in the clinic at that point in time and they could have chosen to be negative or to be sad or disappointed about me leaving. Instead, they looked at me and they said, “We're really excited for you. We wish you the best of luck.”
I remember I moved towns. I was still living where I was, but I was commuting about 35 minutes then for my new position. I remember running into them at our state VMA conference. It was a few years later, and it was so good to see them, and they gave me giant hugs and they were just like, “Tell us how everything's been going. We're super excited to hear how it's been going.”
I carried that with me, that feeling of it didn't feel awkward, I felt supported, I felt encouraged, I felt believed in. I've carried all of those feelings forward with me as a manager and felt really lucky that I had that example set for me because that's how I want to make my team feel.
That's what I mean about, and this starts my action step section, honestly, is the philosophical conversation as a practice owner in particular, but as a practice manager, if you're working with an owner or medical director, sit down and have that philosophical conversation about the impermanence and the truth that we are working in an industry with a massive shortage of qualified personnel.
The reality is if we all sit around and wait for a certified veterinary technician to drop out of the sky at all of our practices to solve all of our problems, there's going to be a whole hell of a lot of us sitting there waiting forever, right? So I think we have to have that philosophical conversation about, what does growing people from within look like? It really has to start with getting on the same page about the impermanence of it because no matter what you decide to do, whether you have just a homegrown on-the-job training program or whether you're going down the road like this clinic did, where you're paying for structured school and you're supporting them in different ways, So that philosophical conversation about impermanence I think is the first place to actually start.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, I agree with that.
Stephanie Goss:
Hey, friends. I want to make sure that you know about an upcoming workshop that you're not going to want to miss. I know I say that about a lot of our workshops, but I mean it about this one. Well, I mean about all of them, let's be real, but this one holds a special place dear and dear to my heart. Two reasons. One, my friend Dr. Jen Quammen is leading the workshop. Number two, it's about technology. If you've listened to the podcast, what a techno nerd I am. I super excited to have Jen with us. Thanks to our friends TeleVet. She is going to be talking on May 24th at 8:00 PM Eastern, so 5:00 PM Pacific, about trending technology in the veterinary space.
Now, I love technology. We've talked about it on the podcast. We've had guests on the podcast. One of the conversations that has been going around and around in a lot of the groups I'm in lately has been about ChatGPT or artificial intelligence, AI. So if you've ever wondered about using AI in your practice or if you have wondered about wearable technology for pets, communication tools and techniques that use artificial intelligence or advanced technologies, those are the kind of things that Jen is going to dive into during this workshop because most of us have wondered when we've talked about those technologies if they actually will save us any time or energy or if they're just a new trend.
So Jen is going to dive into some of the things that have come to market, some of the things that are actively being used in veterinary medicine that you might not know about, and ways that we can incorporate technology into the veterinary space in a way that works with us and not against us. So if this sounds like something that you'd love to get in on, head on over to the website at unchartedvet.com/events to find out more. We'll see you there, and now, back to the podcast.
Andy Roark:
I think the second part for me in where you go is this, and this is another lesson hard learned. When I was a young business consultant, so I was practicing as a doctor and I've been doing more consulting and media and things on the vet side and for big vet companies. So I was doing some of that work early on, and I've been in practice for three years as a doctor. I was doing that and I was balancing it. I had this idea that if I worked with these companies and I really went above and beyond and I really did all that I could to help them, especially as they were getting up and getting going or getting projects started, that when the projects worked out, then they would remember or recognize the extra work that I had put in and how much I had tried, and that would come back to me and I would get more opportunities or I would at least be celebrated for, “Oh, man, Andy, you really pushed this and you did these extra things and you opened these doors.”
Stephanie Goss:
“Thanks for making this happen.”
Andy Roark:
“Thanks for making this happen,” and I really went after it and just didn't really set personal boundaries for myself because I was like, “No, they're going to be so happy when this is done. They're going to be so happy when this turns out.” What I found is that it usually didn't happen. It almost never happened. I don't think those people were being jerks. I think people are just innately self-centered and they have short memories. You know what I mean? It is a what have you done for me lately thing because that's what people remember.
So I remember being resentful early in my career because I felt like I had thrown in and did these kind things because I thought they would come back to me. Through lessons like that, I came to believe that you should not do kind things because you would want them to come back to you or you expect that they're going to come back to you. You should do kind things because you want to do kind things. Then if everyone forgets that you did the kind thing, you still feel fine with it because you wanted to do it right and-
Stephanie Goss:
Right, yeah, you were doing it.
Andy Roark:
… it was not about, “Am I going to get recognized later on? Is this going to come back to me? Am I going to benefit in the future?” I learned that lesson painfully, but it stuck with me and I still believe it, and I still do it a lot. I feel like one of the big headaches that I see a lot of leaders struggle with is appreciation programs where they're like, “We did this appreciation program and nobody cared. Nobody said thank you to us.” You know what? That's really crappy, and I totally understand, and just in this instance, the person who does that and says, “I took a whole day and decorated everybody's lockers, and I hired a masseuse to come in, and no one even said thank you.” Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. I fully understand why that would hurt.
At the same time, the healthiest place you can be is to say, “I decorated their lockers because I wanted to, because I knew I wanted to brighten this place up. It would make me happy to do it and I thought it would bring some joy into their day, and if they don't say thank you, I still did it because I wanted to do it, and I got the masseuse because I wanted to say thank you to them not because I wanted them to say thank you to me. So I just do it.”
So I really do think that that's important in how we look at just giving to other people. It's so much healthier to say, “I'm going to give, I'm going to make this sacrifice because I think it's the right thing to do and I want to do it and not necessarily because I want something in return.” So I think that that's a big part of head space.
Stephanie Goss:
Was that this is probably going to make hack people off? Was that your second?
Andy Roark:
We're coming into it. That was the first step down the path towards we're going to hack people off.
Stephanie Goss:
Okay. Just checking.
Andy Roark:
All right. Tell me when you're ready for the second step.
Stephanie Goss:
Let's go for it.
Andy Roark:
All right. So if you buy into that, the next question that people will always put to me is to say, “But Andy, this is an investment, right? This is an investment. I'm going to pay for this school and then I need to get return on my investment, and shouldn't I have them sign a contract that says that they're going to stay after they're done with this?” You're shaking your head. We both know people who do this in their practices and they're very successful practices, and they would argue with me in a heartbeat about this. I don't care because they don't have a podcast and I do. So just deal with it. I'm the one with the microphone, so here it goes.
I think the answer here is you should have clear expectations and ongoing transparency about how everybody is doing. I think that that is where I think this employee dropped the ball. I think this is where I'm going to criticize the staff member that left. I know that's where I'm going to criticize this person, but I think you have clear expectations and you talk about what you're doing and why you're doing it and what the expectations are, and I think you have those conversations.
I don't know that you want to have someone in your clinic who does not want to be there, but they have a contract that says that they're not allowed to leave. I don't know that you want that. I think the cost of culture are too high. Full stop.
Stephanie Goss:
Yes, I'm on board with you. It's very much our pick your poison, right?
Andy Roark:
Yup. It is.
Stephanie Goss:
To me, people who stay and are miserable because they are too afraid to break a contract, can't afford to break a contract, can't afford to stay working the hours or whatever the reasoning is, there's a million different reasons, that you have that choice where you keep them, and then to your point, I agree with you 100%. Full stop, there's a huge cost to culture with that or you accept the fact that you are going to pay for some things for some people who will leave, and you have to make that choice about the poison that you want to consume and that you want your team to consume, and I am in full agreement with you.
It's funny because I was not always. I was the manager for a lot of years where myself included, when my hospital paid for school and I worked in exchange for going to school, and it was normal. So it was normal for me when I was a team member, and so it became normal for me when I was a manager, and I was like, “Well, of course, if I'm making this big investment and I'm essentially on behalf of the practice acting as a bank and lending you this money to pay for school that I'm going to expect that it gets paid back, either actually paid back in cash or paid back in time served.” It sounds-
Andy Roark:
That's how you thought about your clinic was time served. I heard that.
Stephanie Goss:
Right, but it's an awful frame of mind. When I step back-
Andy Roark:
They're going to have to break a lot of rocks.
Stephanie Goss:
Yes. When I step back, I have to look at a lot of freaking fecals under the microscope to pay that back. I'm on poop duty for two years, man, but I feel this way about a lot of things now that were standard and normal when I started in veterinary medicine, and maybe I'm just old now, but I have learned new tricks. For me, the value of having good people who know that I care about them, who enjoy their job, who want to show up and give it their all and who want to work together with the team, I want that over having a body in a position because they feel a debt that they have to repay.
Andy Roark:
Well, because not even that they feel it, that it's written down and contractually they're not able to leave. When you think it all the way through and you say, “Oh, boy, do I want to have somebody who has a contract and they can't leave even though they want to?” most of us go, “No, that's not what we want.” I do think we need to have clear expectations upfront and just say, “Hey, this is a lot of money and this is a big deal and I really want you to be here. What's it going to take to do that? Let's make sure we continue to talk.”
Is there a chance that you're going to get taken advantage of? The answer is yes. This is, again, where people disagree with me sometimes, and maybe I'm hopelessly optimistic or my faith in people is too high. I don't think you close your heart. You don't think you close goodwill just because someone somewhere is going to take advantage and they will.
It's funny, this is the difference in politics is I know people who are like, “We should have so many government programs and they should all be great.” I know other people who are like, “We should have no government programs because people will take advantage.” The truth is you should have smart government programs and know that some people somewhere are going to take advantage, but the greater good overall is served, and that's it. I think that that's the healthy way to run the business is to balance between not offering programs to support people and just having programs all over the place with no metrics and no thought about what we're trying to do and, “Does this make sense?”
The path is the middle. If you work with human beings, you're going get screwed over at some point, and there's going to be somebody who's going to take advantage of the system. There is. This has to be the long game. It has to be part of your philosophy to say, “This is what we want to try to offer to our people.” Some of them are going to stay and some of them are not, but ultimately over time, you're going to end up building a great culture and you're going to build people who are loyal to be there.
I think it's important to also say, you see the emphasis that I'm putting on building loyalty with people after it's over. I really do think you have to do that because if you buy into what I'm saying, there's a lot of people out there who are like, “We're going to pay for you to get this degree and then we are not going to compensate you for having that degree because we just paid for the thing. So you're going to keep working at this lower rate because we picked up the tab for your education.”
Stephanie Goss:
“We just paid for it.”
Andy Roark:
That goes back to what I said before about people unfortunately have short memories and tend up being actually self-interested, which means it's only a matter of time until that person who's now got a degree starts to look around and somebody else goes, “Why are you there, man? You make $5 an hour or more.”
Stephanie Goss:
“I'll pay you more.”
Andy Roark:
They go, “Oh, that seems fair,” and they go. If you try to stop them from going, now you've got a resentful person under contract and that's not what you want. So it really is, it's just hard. This is the situation that we end up in. So anyway, all that to come around and say, I don't have a whole lot of criticism for what this manager did, and I think that they are 100% entitled to their feelings.
There is one thing that I would call bullshit on and say this is not okay, and it goes into a lot of how we teach negotiation up the chain when we talk to people who are working inside of practices. I do agree with this manager that the person not coming to the manager and saying, “Hey, I've been offered this other thing. I'm seeing other opportunities to earn more of a living, and I live paycheck to paycheck and this is a significant deal for me.” I do not think that you can get frustrated at this person for leaving for a job where they got paid more money.
I do, however, think that you can feel betrayed or you can feel like you were not treated fairly by this person not communicating to you that they were thinking about leaving or that they had opportunities or giving you the opportunity to try to retain them. You don't have to stay where you are, but if it really is just about the money, it goes back to what we always say, “What is kind?” Is it kind to just take another job and say, “Hey, I have to go because I've got more money”? It's kind to you and it's kind to your family and it is important, but then the kindest thing overall is to say, “Hey, I've gotten this job and it's what my family needs and I need to do this, but I like working here. I appreciate all that you've done for me. I wanted to ask if you thought there was any chance that you guys could match this so that I could get this thing that my family needs and that I need and that's available to me and still stay on.”
If the practice says, “I'm sorry, we can't pay you that,” then everybody should be sad, but no one should be angry or resentful. I do understand the anger and the resentment in this issue because they didn't feel like they were given a chance.
Stephanie Goss:
I think that's spot on. I think I don't know, and we don't want to assume in this situation, but when we said, “Okay. We don't have very many action steps,” there were two that were really closely tied together for me, and that was as a manager, I agree with you, I can totally understand all of those feelings, feeling frustrated, angry, hurt like, “I thought I had an open door and I'm shocked that they didn't come talk to me.” That is a crappy, crappy feeling. Sometimes you can have that and you can have a great relationship with your team, and sometimes it doesn't matter.
I've been in the same position where someone I thought who would've come and talked to me didn't, and when time went by and we were actually safe to have the conversation, I had a followup conversation with that person and they were just like, “I was really afraid. I was really afraid of what you would say, and so I just chickened out. I could have come to talk to you.” I couldn't have done anything more as a manager to control that, and that made me feel better just getting to that head space of sometimes you can't control what other people are going to do, and sometimes you can do all of the things right and it still works out that way.
So I think give yourself a little bit of grace, especially if you are one of those managers that is sitting down and having active conversations, and from a action set perspective, if you are a leader in your practice and you're not having regular one-on-one conversations with your team, and there's two pieces of it that are pertinent, I think, to this situation that are really important. I would say start having one-on-one conversations, and one of them is developmentally.
If you're not asking your people, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” in some way, shape or form on a regular basis and asking, “Where do they want to go? Do they want to become a licensed technician? Do they want to become a lead tech?” and that was part of this here is that this technician was like, “Hey, I'm taking a role as a lead.” Well, did you know that they wanted to be a leader? Did you know that they wanted more hours? Did you know that they needed more money? They may not have told you, but we've got to have the conversations that would lead to unearthing that information or them volunteering that information. So developmentally, where do they want to go in their career, who do they want to be when they grow up.
The other piece of it, and this is a curve ball, and a lot of managers stray away from it because we're afraid of conflict in veterinary medicine, and we're also afraid to talk about money because it's really personal, but one of the things that we need to be asking our team on a semi-regular basis is the question, “If you were offered a job somewhere else for more money, would you entertain it?” because we need to know what do our people need, right? We still may not be able to change the outcome, but we should have that knowledge and should be having conversations about money and about what we're paying our people and knowing what our pay skills are, and the way that we get to doing that hard work is by asking the questions.
So from an action step perspective, the only thing that I could really think about is if you're out there and you're like, “Ooh, this has happened to me,” and you're a manager who's not sitting down and having those one-on-one conversations with your team, I think that having those conversations and asking them the questions about where do they want to go financially in their career and where do they want to go developmentally in their career are both really, really important action steps.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, I do agree with that. I had an employee recently that I had coffee with, and I had heard at the grapevine this person wasn't really happy and that they weren't feeling included in a number of things that were going on. So I said, “Let's get coffee,” and we went out. I sat down with the person and I talked to her and I said, “You're amazing, and I want you to be here, and I really love working with you. I love your work. It bothers me that I heard from someone else that you were feeling excluded or you weren't being able to do things that you wanted to do. I wish that you had told me. I want you to reach out to me and tell me these things. I want to know.”
She said, “Well, I assumed that you were so busy. I didn't want to bring this up because I knew how much you had on your plate and I knew that you were busy. I knew you were working.”
I said, “Well, I saw you working independently and doing great and so I thought, ‘She doesn't need to be bothered, and she's busy, and I don't need pull her into a one-on-one when she's crushing it.'”
So she was like, “Well, I assumed you weren't pulling me in for these things because you didn't want me there.”
I was like, “No, I wasn't pulling in because I thought you were really busy, and I thought that you would tell me if you wanted to be a part of this.”
She was like, “Well, I didn't tell you I want to be a part of it because I thought you were really busy and you had other things.”
I was like, “Okay. Let's go ahead and let's fix this.”
Stephanie Goss:
This sounds familiar.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, “Let's fix this.” Then it was a fairly darn easy fix because I want her to be happy, and she knew what she was interested in, and I was like, “Okay,” but I didn't know and she didn't want to tell me because she made assumptions about me or the awkwardness of the conversation, and I made assumptions about her. I just say all that in that you can have wonderful people who are doing great and thriving, and we can make assumptions about our need to engage with them with the thought that they're going to come and let us know if they need something, but they make the exact same assumptions that we do about it being awkward or not being the right time or us not having time.
So somebody's got to go first. So really, that was an eyeopener for me about making sure I'm checking in with my high performers. There's a lot of people who make time to circle up to the people who bring a lot of drama, you know what I mean, or who are very vocal about their feelings, and we'll often let our quiet high performers just go, and there's a real risk to that. I was reminded of that soon, more recently.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. I would agree with that 100%. I think it's just human nature. We believe in them. This manager was like, “I would clone this person. This is my rockstar.” So you think, “All right, out of the fires that are …” especially as a manager like, “Look, dude, our job is dealing with the fact that everything in the clinic every day is on fire for a lot of us.” So you're staring at all of the fires in front of you and you're like, “Oh, look, she's not on fire. So I'm going to look at all of this stuff over here.” I think it's just that lesson of that still doesn't mean that we don't need to nurture and take tender care of those relationships. So I think that would be from an action step perspective is really carving out that time because I've had team members say that to me, “You're so busy. I just don't want to put one more thing on your plate.”
I'm like, “No, this is the thing that I need on my plate. I need to make this time. You are important. I need you to feel supported and heard, and so let's do this thing.” I think if you are a manager who has had those conversations or is having those conversations with your team, for me, that was the warning sign or the wake up call of like, “Oh, hey, look, I need to carve out time for these people and be able to sit down with my team where they have my full attention and they're not having to ask for it.” So I think that's what I want is create that space to do it and make it a natural part of your process and make everybody feel heard, but I think you're spot on. We can't leave the high performers out of that.
Andy Roark:
Sure. Well, there is a rockstar problem that a lot of places have where I see a lot of practices that are set up around having a rockstar, and then everybody else is a backup singer and the clinic is fine with that. The risk to that is, first of all, rockstars are the people who are most likely to get opportunities to go other places. If you have a little band and you have one rockstar, the specialty hospital down the road who can pay more money than you, they're going to want to meet that person. Those are the people who might get opportunities with industry because the pharma reps come in and they see this person, they go, “Wow, she's really charismatic. She's super smart. She learns fast. She does all these things.” They're going to get offered other opportunities because they're a high performer.
If you are not growing other rockstars for if and when this person leaves for another adventure, I think that you are being shortsighted. I think it falls into that impermanence thing we talked about before where they're like, “Oh, no, we've got somebody who kicks butt. We're just going to let her keep kicking butt and everybody else can just help her,” and I'm like, “She might not walk in the door tomorrow for a variety of reasons, and you missed the chance to use her to bring up and mentor other people, you know what I mean, to spread the wealth around so you have a more uniformly strong team that's more resilient.” If your team depends on an individual, that's not a resilient team. That's a team that can get decimated in its capacity for work output really fast.
Stephanie Goss:
Oh, man, this one was fun.
Andy Roark:
Oh, man. Yeah. This is one of the hard ones where I think this is almost entirely a head space thing. I don't know really what you do about it. Like I said, I wish the employee had said something, but I think we have to own the fact that oftentimes they're not going to, and you can't make people. The other thing too, and I don't know anything about this, but there is a chance sometimes the people say, “Well, I took this other job and I didn't talk to you because I was embarrassed,” or blah, blah, blah. The truth is they were unhappy in their job and they didn't want to stay here, and so they were going to leave. You'll never know that. Don't eat yourself about that. You don't know.
I think we laid down a lot of the key ideas is you got to get yourself in a healthy head space as far as we are dedicated to growing these people. We know that teams are impermanent and they're going to turnover. They just are. We're going to do training and learning and development because we want to do it, not because we are investing for an outcome down the road. You might get a great outcome down the road, but that's not why you should do it. It's a real risk if you are. The last thing is good open door conversation. Check in with your people. Try to make sure that they're doing okay. Stay engaged, all of those sorts of things.
Stephanie Goss:
Yeah. I love it. Have a fantastic week, everybody.
Andy Roark:
Yeah, everybody, take care of yourselves.
Stephanie Goss:
Bye, guys.
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