Just because you’re working in the trenches every day, doesn’t mean you can see all the dirt. Here’s an attempt to call respectful attention to what holds managers back as leaders and, sometimes, as people.

Introduction

I play a game with employees that’s called A Great Day At Work. The rules are simple enough: recall the last time you had a great day at work and tell the rest of your coworkers about it.

Interestingly, great-day-at-work stories always fall into three categories.

• Teamwork: “I don’t know, we were crazy busy, but everyone pulled together, laughed, and got the work done. It was just fun!”
• Praise: “I had a great day on Thursday when Dr. Gruber told me that he’s never had a receptionist handle client complaints as good as me.”
• Achievement: “I have been dying for a chance to place a catheter. Dr. Howell helped me do one today and I got it on my first try!”

At the end of the game, I ask participants to do something that usually leaves them looking baffled. I ask them to think of ways to make great days at work happen more frequently. Their response seems perplexing since the three things that make for great days at work seem so straight forward and simple: encourage teamwork, dole out praise, and give team members a shot at personal achievement.

But their response is not perplexing. Audience members, you, and I all know what the issue is: It´s an owner doctor or other leader that can’t see how their rules, or more importantly, their behavior, is preventing the practice from being truly great. Moreover, we might even be inclined to talk about it, but fear of reprisal and touchy egos keeps us all mum.

It’s too bad. The 5 Terrible Things About Your Practice are not just a leader´s cross to bear and not just his or her mess to clean up. They affect every staff member employed, every pet, and every client. They have the power to stop three of life’s most satisfying fulfillments: group acceptance, a sense of worth, and personal satisfaction. Everybody wins when we respectfully explore the changes that all of us can make in our journey to greatness.

Don’t Ask Me. Employees’ Fear Of Telling The Truth

A practice owner called me up with a problem. In his exam rooms, he had small, dorm-room-sized refrigerators filled with vaccines. Some employee, he didn’t know which, had left the door open to one of them overnight and all the vaccines spoiled. The following day, he had a meeting about the issue, but three days later, the same refrigerator door had been left open again and another several-hundreds-of-dollars worth of vaccines were ruined once more.

The doctor was livid. He told me that he was going to look through hours of security camera footage until he found the culprit, but something must have told him this was not the best idea. He asked, “What do you think? Should I look through the footage?”

I did not think he should look through the footage. That just seemed like a long, resent-filled road to rage. I know his team and I know his practice. Both are small enough that had there been some maverick, psychopathic refrigerator door opener, some, if not all, of the employees would have known who it was. This was probably some kind of chronic accident and the reason the team was not forthcoming with more information was not because they didn’t know what was happening, it was because they were afraid to the truth.

The truth was that the refrigerator door was open because the team was so busy, when they grabbed the vaccines, they would slam the door shut, but the slam didn’t shut the door, it made it drift open again. Everyone knew that was the issue. The problem was, if they told the owner doctor the truth, they would get another lecture on the importance of taking care of the hospital equipment. They would get that oh-god-why-is-everyone-so-incompetent look that he does all the time. They would have to endure a couple of days of his pouting. So what did they do? They played dumb.

Had the team felt comfortable telling the truth, there could have been immediate cost savings in lost vaccines, but more importantly, there might have been a discussion on how to work together less hectically. They might have figured out a way to dial down the craziness, eliminate the fridge door issue and all the other issues caused by the frantic pace. But the team was afraid to share that answer with their employer, so the gap of trust between owner and employees widened; people left the meeting feeling demoralized, talked down to, trapped; and the experience fueled the practice owner’s mistaken notion that his team wasn’t ´on his side´.

Improving Your Odds That Employees Will Be Honest With You

Employees know a lot about your business and setting up an environment where they trust that they can share that information with you could save you money, improve your business’s efficiency, and grow your practice. Here are ways to improve the likelihood that your employees will tell you the truth.

1. Work with people that you like. Honesty requires trust; usually something that has to be cultivated over time. Even with people that you love, trust takes effort, so can you imagine how hard it can be to cultivate trust with someone you don’t care for. Hiring people that you like and that your employees like makes it easier for trusting conversations to happen.
2. Listen and care. If you want answers, listen for them. Go into meeting with great questions, not great lectures. Craft your questions so that they invite answers, not defensive reactions. Listen and demonstrate that you care about what you are hearing.
3. Get a handle on your anger: A big reason why your employees are afraid to tell you the truth is because they’re afraid you’ll react negatively. Though learning that you lost 400 dollars worth of vaccines is upsetting and anger would be a normal response, expressing it is going to do more harm than good. If you are a blower-upper (no need to be ashamed, I have been a recovering one for years), seek professional help. Therapy will help you source out the real cause of your volatility and mitigate it. Still, it’s unlikely that you will ever cure the rage that flashes across your face from time to time regardless of how civilly you behave. That’s okay.  You’re allowed to be human. Have your anger, acknowledge it, do what you need to do to push past it, but when you’re done, apologize if you’ve been disrespectful. Employees might not forget, but they do forgive. Experiencing emotions in a healthy way is a great way is a great way to model the same behavior that you want in your employees.
4. Talk like a partner, not like a practice owner. Look, you are the boss, you do have all the power, but try to minimize that fact in the conversation. Use questions like, ´Are you happy with how things are going?´or ´What are your thoughts on such-and-such?´ and then react with your own ideas as a coworker, not as judge and jury. It will coax the other party to speak more frankly as a professional peer instead of as a more reserved subordinate.

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I’ll Take A Copy Of That: Your management book doesn’t need updated, it needs rewritten

Annual reviews, coaching sessions, employee training practices, and negative reinforcement policies like write ups or sending people home without pay consume an enormous amount of our time and emotional energy, and yet, in the end, are any of them really worth pursuing? What’s the payoff? My sense is that we know these systems are broken, they’re just not that broken, so we continue to swap stories of how to keep them running when in fact, they should all probably be radically rebuilt or permanently deep sixed.

Coaching Session:  Ask yourself what you are trying to accomplish with your employee sit downs. Listening? Learning more about the staff member and why they do what they do? Building a trusting bond? Clearly outlining company policies ? If any of these are your goals, I’m fully on board, but if you are trying to change behaviors like gossiping or chronic pessimism; if you are hoping that you can pep talk some staff member into being more agreeable when working with others, know that you’re likely going to fail.

Licensed therapists spend years trying to unpack the reasons why people do what they do, and those professionals have doctorate degrees. Do you really think that your receptionist Marge is going to cure Joanne of her incessant need to complain? Do you really thing that you’re going to get Sad Sack Sally to smile more? Stop wasting your time. Make the decision to live with Sally and her pouting or terminate her, but spending valuable manager and staff time on coaching her is likely a waste.

Annual Reviews: I’m always surprised to hear so many managers tell me that they believe employees love their annual reviews. Surveys of employees show otherwise. Nearly 80% of employees surveyed believe that annual reviews are a waste.

Annual reviews are a big topic so I’ve written a separate piece on the matter, but to keep you from having to flip through my site, I’ll leave you with this: After the anxiety and the time that you go through to put your annual review together; after the lengthy time you spend with an employee doing it (usually in excess of 1 hour), after you follow through with the employee… what actually got done? Was it all a preamble to make sense of a raise or, worse, lack thereof?

Employees need, nay, crave feedback, but you shouldn’t be waiting a year to give it to them. Spend time watching their behavior as it unfolds. Spy successes in real time and praise them. The process is genuine, brief, and highly effective. If you are using reviews as a way to decide on the value of a wage increase, know that this process has been proven to be pockmarked with issues. You’re better off having a clear pay scale for your employees based on tangible qualities like credentials, length of employment, duties, etc., and then managing additional concerns about pay on a case-by-case basis.

Training: Do you have a training manual? A checklist of duties that team members have to learn before they’re considered ‘trained’? Is it working?  Don’t be embarrassed if your success rate with this style of training has been marginal. Teaching people how to do a thing or understand a concept has baffled people since Sophocles. There are piles of papers written on how to help people learn, indeed the teachers that are trying to break through to your kids are employing some of them right now. Don’t borrow, steal! Don’t be afraid to shake up your employee learning experience with novel ways of teaching. Begin an exploration of that here.

Negative Reinforcement: Still writing people up? Yelling at them? Threatening them with termination? After years of being on the receiving side of threats, I can tell you that they work!  People respond to threats! They usually get the employee to do whatever you want them to do.

Unfortunately, threats come with a whole other set of ramifications. Threats are very likely to start an employee looking for another job. They create disengagement and obliterate trust.  They are the source of endless gossiping and behind-the-back sniping. They can spill over into how the employee treats clients and other team members.

Negative reinforcement is widely used in even today’s most modern companies, but the practice is likely more trouble than it’s worth.  Watching the employees scatter after you scream, “Back to work” or seeing an employee show up 10 minutes early to work for a week after you write them up for being late may be rewarding in the short-term, but that satisfaction usually gives way to disppointment as the employees scatter to other rooms to grumble about you or as the late employee returns to rolling in at ten after eight. Better to try to change behavior with good listening skills and positive reinforcement, but that too is no easy row to hoe.

Unfriggin´Believable: The dangers of victim mentality

A veterinary receptionist landed in treatment and huffed, “There’s some woman out there, right now, says she wants to be seen. No appointment. No please or thank you. Just wants to be seen now. Arrrrgh!  These people!”

Some of the rest of the staff joined in, ´They think we’re like MacDonalds. These people are unfriggin´believable!”

I realize that some of this is just bluster, but I believe there is a general sense amongst our staff that client issues are a bad thing and that clients that cause issues are bad in general. Certainly, client issues throw a monkey wrench into our vision of how we see ourselves getting through our work and our day, but they are also to be expected inside a business model that puts a phone number on the internet and invites people that have pet problems to call. In fact, everything about our business model invites some kind of curve ball to be thrown across our plate: pets don’t respond to sedatives they way we hope, they don’t recover from sedatives the way we hope, animals won’t sit still for treatment, presenting complaints are nothing like the actual problems that present upon examination, and on and on. To huff and puff every time a client or pet exchange doesn’t go as planned isn´t helpful, it’s hyperventilation.

Stopping what we do to gripe about how rotten or unreasonable pet owners are is not addressing the real problem. The real problem is that client and patient issues worry the staff that this latest unexpected turn of events will cause them to fail.

Strive for a can-do culture, not a complain culture.  If we can create an environment in which team members feel supported in their efforts to problem solve, they will not only solve the problem, but the problem will have served to give the employee another chance to shine.

You’re Baked

If you are a leader (doctor, medical director, manager, owner/former owner) you are essential to team morale. Essential. If there is something going on in your life that is preventing you from coming to work happy and eager to participate, you’re downbeat attitude is going to infect the whole team.

That sounds unfair…likely it is…still it’s true. By virtue of your position, education, and experience your are emblematic of the business´s purpose. You’re like a walking sandwich board of the mission statement and if you’re parading around with the message, It´s miserable being here, people are going to start taking it to heart.

I won’t patronize you with banal advice to stay hydrated or to go to the gym more frequently as a way to pick up your mood, though both are certainly a step in the right direction. Cutting back on any drinking or drugging would also be a positive move, but if you are down for any length of time, you should probably seek professional help.

It´s a shame that mental healthcare is stigmatized in our society. Though you may think of yourself as a raving lunatic, to an experienced therapist, you’re just a garden variety nut and in a few short weeks of treatment, you might see a marked improvement in how you think and feel. \

Why not address your down mood with the same urgency that you would if you had a significant change in your physical health? You have nothing to lose everything to gain.

You became a leader and are a leader because you have potential. Why not live up to it?

Additional Reading

Difficult Conversations

I Heard Your Approach To Gossip Sucks

Venting is Bad. Here’s Why.