Recently I’ve been doing more executive coaching for high level leaders in veterinary companies. It’s been rewarding, and I hope to get to do more of it in 2026. There are two particularly big challenges that I see with the executives I work with, and they are basically inverses of each other. The most interesting thing about these challenges is that they persist from the treatment room floor all the way up to the C-suite.
For the executives that come from veterinary medicine, the top challenge is how to get heard and be influential when engaging with “operations people.” For executives that come from outside the veterinary industry, it’s largely about connecting and motivating the “medicine people.”
For those uninitiated in the veterinary culture, the distinction between these two types of people seems pretty straight forward. Medicine people are people who want to do medicine, and operations people are people who want to get medicine done. They’re basically already aligned, right? Well… no.
There is an inherent tension between these two groups from the bottom to the top of almost every veterinary company (and not just the practice groups). This tension doesn’t come from the strikingly different vocabulary these groups use to communicate (although that’s an immediate friction point), or from the fact that they tend to have different motivators and definitions of success. There’s inherent tension between these two groups of people because they have fundamentally different worldviews.
In general, medicine people see the world as being defined by individual patients and clients. Theirs is a compassion and care-based view of what is good and meaningful in the world. The operations people see the world as being defined by systems, targets, and goals. Their world is about smoothness, achievement, and accomplishment. Neither group is “bad,” it’s just that they fundamentally don’t understand how the other group sees their shared environment.
To some degree, and speaking in broad generalities, medicine people tend to think that operations people are kind of evil, and operations people tend to think that medicine people are kind of stupid. This is because when operations people say things like ‘we need to increase our gross revenue, cut the cost of our COGS, and we’re sending Cindy home early because our labor-to-revenue ratio is off,’ the medicine people—who are feeling overwhelmed by sick animals they care dearly about—often perceive the operations people as a bunch of Disney villains.
Alternatively, when the Chief Medical Officer raises her hand in the board meeting right after the most brilliant animal-related service plan in history has been explained—the one that will define the organization as a leader in pet healthcare—and she says, “but that’s going to negatively affect patient care, and we’ll need to increase the number of technicians we have significantly to avoid doctor burnout,” that’s when the operations people look at each other and think, “Yeah, she’s book smart, but she obviously just doesn’t get what we need to accomplish here.”
The fact of the matter, of course, is that operations people and medicine people are just people. Neither group is inherently evil, or stupid, or right, or wrong. They both want to do what’s best, it’s just that they define “best” entirely differently and see the world in completely different ways.
Here’s the important part: the way these two groups collaborate and interact with each other has, so far, defined how successful organizations are in the veterinary industry. In companies where medicine people and operations people work collaboratively from the top down, I see strong cultures, smoother change management, superior internal and external communications, and better talent acquisition and retention.
Organizations that are dominated by medical people tend to be inefficient and unfocused. Historically, this has been the norm in veterinary medicine—a fact that highlights the great potential for operational growth today. Conversely, veterinary companies dominated by operations often suffer significant morale and retention problems among medical teams. A number of practice groups last year provided stark examples: they prioritized revenue growth by making operations completely dominant over medicine, quickly losing veterinarians and support staff, which led to closed practices and hastened their demise. While less obvious in other industry segments, this negative trend absolutely holds true.
The most important thing about the vet industry is not that medicine people and operations people need to collaborate. The most important thing is the understanding that these groups have entirely different worldviews. This understanding is the only place that effective collaboration can begin.
So, my dear colleagues in the profession, let us aspire to look past the “evil” and the “stupid” and, instead, seek the balance and understanding of our two worldviews that will define the next generation of success in veterinary care.
