Three reasons vet teams are so bad when it comes to drama and conflict… and a brief plug for my new conflict management certificate
I once heard someone say “Veterinary practices are the most dysfunctional workplaces I’ve ever seen, and I used to manage restaurants.”
The statement made me laugh, but it also really bothered me. Is this true? Are our practices more interpersonally broken than even restaurants (which I assume are highly dramatic because of people I know in food service and probably because I went through a phase of binging reality TV cooking shows)? It seems very possible.
Just think about it. Veterinary medicine is a profession filled with stressful, emotional, and/or high-stakes situations occurring in a small physical space with co-workers who are disproportionately perfectionists and/or empaths. It’s no wonder that drama and conflict might manifest here to a degree that we wouldn’t see in other industries.
But given that these conditions are fairly constant in our profession, why haven’t people gotten better at gracefully managing disagreements and conflicting needs in our clinics? Well, when we think about conflict and drama, there are three important realities that I don’t think get discussed enough. The first is that conflict and drama have become celebrated.
We live in a world where attention has become the most valuable currency we have. Everyday you and I are beset by people and organizations who desperately want our attention. They want us to think about, talk about, and return to their products, feeds, and pages. These entities know very well that conflict and drama are great for getting attention. There’s a reason why reality TV doesn’t feature even-keeled, well-adapted individuals working through issues productively. It’s because that’s boring, but no one can look away when Will Smith slaps the host of the Oscars.
Conflict gets eyeballs, and so we are going to be shown conflict as entertainment (even if the presenters act appalled) for a long time to come. You can’t convince me that this type of continuous exposure isn’t affecting how people in our society treat each other. The more time we spend watching shouting matches, the more normal they become for us. As long as conflict is being widely enjoyed and celebrated, our society will continue to drift towards it.
The second reality is that most of us are never taught how to engage in conflict in a healthy way. We are instead simply gifted the tools we saw our parents use. If our parents engaged in conflict by shouting and throwing things, that’s what we learned. If one parent always backed down to the other, we internalized that dynamic. If they never engaged in conflict in front of us, well, we got nothing.
Of course we all make our own choices, and hopefully we picked up communication skills from other places, but I don’t think any of us got formal interpersonal communication coaching in the public school system, and I don’t see many veterinary schools or practices providing this training in an organized way (more on that in a moment).
The final reality is that great conflict resolution skills are generally invisible. The best practitioners of the anti-drama arts do not wow bystanders with their skill. They instead subtly affect situations before conflict becomes pronounced so that the drama never happens. Why does the invisibility of great conflict management skills matter? Well, because we learn by watching others be successful.
Imagine that we’re not talking about conflict management but instead we are talking about dancing. Pretend for a moment that people in your life break out into dances somewhat regularly. Now, imagine that you can only see the bad dancers. Pretend that the worse the dancer is, the more visible that person is to you. Conversely, the more skilled a person is at dancing, the less likely you are to see them doing it.
How do you think this situation would affect your own skill as a dancer? If you never see people who are good and only see people who are bad, my expectation is that bad dancing would become normalized for you and that your own skills would drift in a downward direction. I think that’s what happens in our clinics in terms of conflict management and resolution.
So what do we do about it? The obvious answers to me are:
- Gently begin to hold people who stir up drama and conflict accountable
- Model and train our teams on skills that will serve them and our clinics well
- Point out, celebrate, and positively reinforce behaviors
I want our clinics to be better places to work. It’s kind of a big deal to me, and it’s something I have tried to push forward in my own weird way ever since I became a veterinarian. If you would like training for your team on conflict management, or if you would like it for yourself (possibly so you can then work with your team on it), I would like to humbly mention that I have created a new conflict management certificate with my friends over at NAVC’s Vetfolio. It includes 4 hours of RACE CE credit and is broken up into bite-sized modules that are easy to consume and retain. It also has example videos of clinic conflict and the tools I am teaching. Finally, I promise I did my absolute best to make this interesting to watch from start to finish. It’s created in the style of the Uncharted podcast that so many people enjoy, and I promise it will not bore anyone to death.
I will also mention that this certificate is free to Uncharted members. If that’s a thing you have been considering, this is one more reason to join.
You can learn more about and purchase the certificate HERE.
Regardless of where you get training on conflict, I encourage teams to talk about how they want to approach conflict, and to remember that conflict is not bad, in and of itself. Conflict is a necessary part of working together collaboratively. Teams simply need the skills to keep conflict positive, and they need experience using those skills. I hope to see more practices providing that kind of support to their people in 2025!
Best always,
Andy
