Ron Sosa, a Certified Veterinary Practice Manager and advocate for neurodiversity, dives deep into the operational challenges and management strategies that can help create an inclusive environment. On this episode of the Cone of Shame Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and Ron Sosa explore practical ways to manage workload effectively while being cognizant of the unique needs of neurodivergent staff. This episode is invaluable for anyone looking to enhance team dynamics and understand the nuances of neurodiversity in the workplace. Don’t miss these insights that aim to foster a supportive and efficient practice environment.
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LINKS
Ron Sosa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronald-sosa-cvpm-53453797/
Synaptic Neuro-inclusive Leadership: https://ronsosa84.wixsite.com/synaptic-leadership
Dr. Know-It-All Card Game: https://drandyroark.com/in-the-know/
Dr. Andy Roark Exam Room Communication Tool Box Team Training Course: https://drandyroark.com/on-demand-staff-training/
Dr. Andy Roark Charming the Angry Client Team Training Course: https://drandyroark.com/charming-the-angry-client/
Dr. Andy Roark Swag: drandyroark.com/shop
All Links: linktr.ee/DrAndyRoark
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Ron is a Certified Veterinary Practice Manager and a former practice owner and business director for multisite animal hospitals. He also hold certificates in Neurodiversity, compassion fatigue, veterinary business leadership, and the human animal bond. He currently serves as the Executive Director for the Uncharted Veterinary Conference., Dr. Andy Roark is a practicing veterinarian in Greenville SC and the founder of the Uncharted Veterinary Conference. He has received the NAVC Practice Management Speaker of the Year Award three times, the WVC Practice Management Educator of the Year Award, the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and the Veterinarian of the Year Award from the South Carolina Association of Veterinarians.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the cone of shame veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I am here today with my good friend Ron Sosa. Ron is a Certified Vet Practice Manager and an educator and advocate on Neurodiversity in veterinary medicine and I give him kind of hard question. I think I talked to him about wanting to support neurodivergent team members and also being honest about the workload that we have in practices And the fact that people in practice might not even know this person is neurodivergent and can get frustrated with behaviors or struggles that they don’t understand.
How do we do those two things? How do we support and also manage the individual and the rest of the team as far as their expectations so that everybody gets along and feels good and the work that we have gets done.
And so anyway, we, we get pretty deep into some of the management struggles around neurodiversity and Ron is fantastic. So anyway, if you have someone on your team who you think might be neurodivergent or who has disclosed that they are neurodivergent, this is going to be a phenomenal episode just for helping you get your head around you know, how to be a good supporter and how to work effectively with these people.
And so anyway, it just. Great conversation. Ron is so wonderful and positive and helpful. And just, I feel like I took a lot away from this episode. I hope you will too. Let’s get into it.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: (singing) This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome to the podcast, Ron Sosa, how are you, my friend?
Ron Sosa: I’m good. How are you, Andy?
Dr. Andy Roark: I am really good. For those who don’t know you, you are the Executive Director of the Uncharted Veterinary Conference. You are a certified veterinary practice manager, and your career has taken an interesting turn in the last year or two.
Because you’ve been doing a lot of writing on neurodivergence and neurodiversity in veterinary medicine and you write about it from a management perspective, which of course aligns with the Uncharted focus of running smooth teams and practices. And it’s just been really fascinating to watch you grow.
You’re doing workshops in this space and things like that. And so yours has been a career that I just creatively has really blossomed and I’m just glad, you know, as a, as the founder of Uncharted to, to get to watch it up close, but but I’ve got. I’ve got something that I’ve been kind of rolling around and I thought that you were the perfect person to talk to about it.
And so let me, let me set the stage and then kind of, kind of bring you in here. So, you know, I read a lot about running effective teams in vet medicine, something I care a lot about and, you know, for a long time. I, you know, I’ve taught SMART goals as a tool in our toolbox. For those who aren’t familiar with SMART goals it’s just making goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, meaning they have a deadline on them. And so it’s, it’s a, it’s a good way to sort of format your thoughts and make a structured goal that you can then check yourself against and make sure you’re actually doing what you intended to do and that you’re moving forward in the way that you set out to move.
And so anyway, this is sort of something that I’ve talked about for years and And kind of had it and used it. And then I saw a post from one of my friends. So Dr. Kate Boatwright is she’s writing a lot these days as well. And I think she’s, she’s pretty smart. I do enjoy her. I, she’s been on the podcast before.
And so she had this post recently about the fact that she had been teaching smart goals and someone really pushed back against her and said, boy, I really, I hate SMART goals. And she said, SMART goals the way it was put to her was, SMART goals don’t often work or don’t tend to work for people who are neurodiverse.
They just the, the format doesn’t, doesn’t make sense to them and there are better ways to format information and work with people who are neurodiverse. I know neurodiverse is a big bucket. But really, it was interesting to see this strong pushback against sort of a, a format that seemed pretty sort of common sense to me at this point.
And so I was thinking about that and I was thinking back to something that you wrote recently about time blindness and you talked about people who are neurodivergent in some instances might struggle with deadlines and just being sort of time unaware. And I thought, Hey, you know, I would like to know more about this.
And so I’ve talked a lot here, sort of setting up, setting up the the reason that we’re sort of talking. Ron, let me kind of hand this over to you. Can you talk to me a little bit about let’s start at a high level. As a CVPM, as someone who is focused on efficiency and operations, and someone who is really interested in being supportive of neurodivergence in our practices, can you talk to me a little bit about the challenges that neurodivergent people face from an operations standpoint in practice?
Ron Sosa: Yeah. I think the number one thing that gets spotted probably the most is just what you said. We talk about time blindness and time blindness is basically the inability to tell how long things take what time of day it is, how long you’ve been spending. Like think about our exam room common problems where you send a technician in and they’ve taken 30 minutes of the appointment getting a history, Any one of us can experience time blindness. So it’s like, I didn’t even realize it was in there or think of time. You drove home from work and had no idea how you got home. You know, it was that autopilot moment, right? That is time blindness where we just, our mind goes on the auto drive. We have no idea, a sense of time, how long things are taking, how long things are not taking.
We’re just doing the thing right in front of us.
Dr. Andy Roark: it’s just it’s to me. I always look at that. It’s kind of a good thing in practice, right? It means you’re fully engaged with with what you’re doing. So if I’m working on a team with someone who’s neurodiverse is How often is is things like time dialing this? How does that come into play?
Is this is this someone who is constantly? Unaware of time or like what does that look like in in in day to day practice and how I’m working with this person
Ron Sosa: Yeah. I would say that, you know, the neurotypical person, it probably happens to, you know, a few times a month, maybe, but for the neurodivergent person, we’ve got to be really, really careful. And so I would say that being somebody who didn’t, was late diagnosed, didn’t really understand myself. I would say I had been late.
Torn to the other side where I’ve been extremely overly conscious of my time. And so when I’m in an exam room, I’m going to get in and get out and getting a history, but for others, if they may not recognize how much 10 minutes is or five minutes, I do a lot for that. And so it happens all at the time.
They have no idea how long they’ve been shooting an x ray for, or taking care of a treatment on a pet or, you know, educating a client. It’s just. They have no concept of what 10 minutes feels like, because 10 minutes will feel like an eternity in one moment, and it’ll also feel like two seconds have gone by in another moment.
So there’s no consistency of what it feels like.
Dr. Andy Roark: I think a lot of people Probably feel a little bit, I don’t know, a little bit torn or a little bit trapped when we start talking about colleagues with neurodivergence because we have a very compassionate profession and I want to be compassionate and I want to set people up to succeed. And at the same time, nobody wants to be buried under work and not having appointments get seen and things like that.
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These courses are made to be taken. in groups, they have discussion questions. They are all about taking these trainings and getting them to apply to your practice, your culture. And your clients, whether it’s handling angry clients. Or being effective in the exam room. We’ve got some great training resources that you can grab and drop and use pieces of.
They’re all broken up into five minute modules to make it super easy for you to use what you want and skip over what you don’t want. Tag them onto the end of staff meetings, or just make a whole staff meeting out of the trainings. Anyway, super flexible. It’s Dr. Andy Roark.com/team training gang.
Let’s get back into this episode. And so it’s funny when I look at this post about SMART goals and, and, and my friend is getting this pushback that says, you know, this, this doesn’t work, this doesn’t help. And then I see things about like time blindness and I go, okay, I see that and I want to be compassionate. And also I don’t know how, how we run an effective team if we can’t pay attention to time or set, you know, actionable goals and hold people accountable.
Dr. Andy Roark: And, and, and, and also I would never want to have a profession that wasn’t open to everyone. And there are neurodivergent people that, that we work with who are, who’ve been absolutely, absolutely wonderful to be around. And so let me, let me sort of give you that little bit of conundrum because I know it’s something that you.
that you think about and write about a lot is, Ronic, start to unpack for me a little bit about what it looks like to provide a supportive environment and to be open and I don’t know, welcoming of neurodivergent people in our teams and also not have the rest of the staff get frustrated because we say, well this person, we’ve told them what the goal is and they, they don’t, they don’t work to it or we’ve, you know, we’ve told them what our constraints are and they’re not being met.
How do you manage those things?
Ron Sosa: Yeah, I think first we’ve got to recognize the fact that we’ve built society around the average brain chemistry, right? So, When we think about, Oh, we’re frustrated because somebody hasn’t achieved their goals. It’s because we’re, we’re being very rigid and not thoughtful about how different brain brain chemistries work.
And so, you know, I think about the smart goal and there’s something called a demand avoid, avoidance. So once you tell me I have to do a thing, it is much harder for me to want to do the thing. Whereas if I was already going to do it and I was already committed myself to doing the thing, I could, I can easily get it done.
Also with ADHD, you have the. It’s either now or not now. And so I’m either going to do it right this moment, or I’m going to forget about it until the deadline comes. And I’m going to do it in the last 10 minutes. so I think that’s part of the issue with, with smart goals is it does not unnecessarily allow for the followup needed or consistency of followup needed or the understanding of sensory needs that would preclude from being able to achieve the smart goals.
Dr. Andy Roark: Talk, talk to me more about sensory needs to achieve a SMART goal. What do you mean when you say that?
Ron Sosa: Yeah. So sensory, obviously we have our five senses, you know, we’ve got sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. And so with neurodivergent individuals, we have a heightened or desensitized sensory system. And so, you know, fluorescent lighting, I think affects most of us, but think about that lighting situation, how that flickering fluorescent ball would bother the normal person now times that by 10 or a hundred, and that’s overly affecting that person.
And so I have a sensory hypersensitivity. You know, like this, some people have the hypersensitivity to a certain smell or I always equate this with allergies when you talk about the allergy pet who has a threshold, right? They’re allergic to trees, grasses, molds, weeds, and something tips them over the edge and they have an allergy flare up, right?
So they could be allergic to 10 things, but that 11th thing pushes them over the edge. That’s how I think of sensory. We can be fine with some of our sensory inputs until you hit that 11 thing and it completely pours over and you get breakdowns. You get emotional dysregulation. You get the inability to effectively do a task.
You get all of that. Just kind of breakdown and shame kind of. Sets in because you can’t do the thing.
Dr. Andy Roark: Do you think that that usually presents in a way that people recognize it and say, Oh, well, this is sort of sensory overload, or does it present generally as this is this is a team member who’s struggling this person? I don’t understand why he’s so upset about having to work in the isolation room. And the reality is, this is a really hard environment for him.
Let’s just say. But I don’t, I mean, most of us, we’re busy, you know what I mean? And we try to, we try to pay attention to other people, but we’re generally focused on ourselves and what we’re doing. And so, yeah, talk to me a little bit about that, about, about the presentation to management or in the team where you say, okay, how do I, how do I recognize when a team member is struggling say from a conflict with neurodivergence, from sensory input overload, things like that.
Or do I, or do I just. Do I just approach this person as an individual who’s struggling and help me, help me sort of start to put one foot in front of the other to, to trying to, to, to work with this person effectively.
Ron Sosa: And I think as a leader, I want to treat, treat the person like a human being, but I want to be aware of the possibility of what they’re going through. And so, and the other problem is most people born in our age group are underdiagnosed, like. I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my late 20s. I got an autism diagnosis in my mid thirties, and so I had no clue I had these quote unquote sensory problems until I was more aware and educated myself as to what was going on.
So I think that just seeing someone struggling is. The leader’s job is to like, Hey, what’s going on? And they may have no clue that it’s today. It’s the, you know, the Parvo dog smell and the block cat smell, plus the lighting, plus the, the kennel saw or whatever the smells that are going on. They just don’t have a clue as why they’re necessarily overwhelmed.
And I think a lot of people can relate to that. Like, I just feel overwhelmed today and I have no idea why. I can do the same job yesterday and be completely fine. But today is overwhelming me and the caseload is not as high.
Dr. Andy Roark: That, that, okay. So that totally makes sense. And it also, it makes it easier for me to sort of approach people because you just approach them as, as people and say, okay, I see this person is struggling. Imagine, imagine for a sec, Ron, that you were coaching someone who was a manager in a hospital or a veterinarian, who was, who was a rule following person, you know what I mean, who is very much a process version of this is how we do it, and this is how we do it, and this is how we do it, and everyone, you need to get your job done, and again, I, I, those people can be really, really valuable in a, in a hospital.
I, I can imagine a situation where people who are process people or rule sort of following people might particularly struggle with working with someone who’s neurodiverse and who maybe struggles with this structure or this, I don’t you know, just, just, Has a, has a hard day for reasons that aren’t obvious to, to someone outside.
Co, coach this manager, this leader for me a little bit to help them get their head into the right place where they can start to, instead of saying, well, she’s not following the rules. She’s not, she didn’t, she didn’t do this thing. We had this clearly stated objective and she didn’t get to it. How do you, how do you start to change that person’s mindset?
And then how do you, how do you help them? To be more successful and also be more comfortable.
Ron Sosa: sure. I think, the answer I’ll give to anyone is I really feel like we need to go through some neurodiverse sensitivity training. And even if we don’t call it that, we need to just be able to understand that everybody’s brain chemistry works different. In fact, I would probably say the person who is your you know, High justice, you know, seeking person is probably on the neurodivergent spectrum themselves because most autistics need to follow the rules and neurodivergent as a whole have justice sensitivity where they have a complete sensitivity to Need to follow the rules, need to be fair.
We need to have the same setting applied to each person. And it’s just not the case. Like every individual is a person, every individual has their own strengths and weaknesses, and we just need to treat people like people. And that’s what I would probably talk to, you know, this leader or this person who is coming up to me about the need for justice, so to speak.
It’s be like, you know, I don’t treat everybody equally. I treat everybody fairly. And I think that really goes down to what is their strengths? What is their weaknesses? How can I help them? What supports have they already received? What supports can I already, can I give them next? You know, what are they, what do they think they need versus what do I think they need?
I think there’s a lot of questions to answer.
Dr. Andy Roark: yeah, I, I, I agree with that. So if you’re working with someone who’s a neurodiverse team member, are there questions that you can ask Ron that you think help to open that conversation up? You know, it’s, I’m imagining things like are there, are there Are there days that you have noticed that you particularly struggle?
Are there tasks that are I, you know, I, I’m, I’m kind of digging at, at those types of things. I want to ask some open ended questions to have this person sort of tell me how they’re feeling or, or what their struggles are or where they feel like they get lost or bogged down.
Because if I don’t have that conversation, I don’t understand what the challenges are I can’t really support them. Have you heard questions that help sort of open those conversations up in a nonjudgmental way that allows us to support neurodivergent team members?
Ron Sosa: Yeah. I it’s, it’s hard because number one, I would say most don’t disclose their neurodivergence because of shame of their past or, you know, Shame of, will I even get the job if I do this or will I get fired if I, they think I can’t do my job. So there’s a lot of non disclosure that happens. And then what I don’t want to do is have leaders out in the vet clinics trying to diagnose their, their team.
Right. And so if we have somebody who has disclosed, then we can start to talk to them about their specifics. You know, what sensory things. have you had problems with what, what sensory things have you not had problems with? Like, I think we can very, we can ask very specific questions once we know that there’s disclosure, but if not, and we have those who have no idea that they are neurodivergent.
And so I think I have to try to go back to like treating the person like a person. And you and I have done the whole, you know, let’s just sit down and talk and see what’s bothering you. I see you’re struggling. I look, we go right to the behavior and not the person. Like this is what I’m seeing. You know, how can we work best together to achieve what it is we’re trying to achieve over here?
Dr. Andy Roark: No, that, that totally makes sense. Ron, thanks so much for just talking through this with me. I mean, this is I think you, You put this in great perspective. This is really helpful. It’s not, you know, it’s a lot of it’s just sort of a mindset change. And a lot of it’s just sort of trying to understand and go, Oh, people’s brains work very differently than mine.
And and we’re just gonna have to talk to people and try to meet them where they are and figure out you know, it’s not about right or wrong. It’s just about different and sort of come up with a solution that kind of works for everybody. Ron, you’re writing a lot on LinkedIn. Is there other places that people can find your work or should they be following you there?
Ron Sosa: Yeah. I just started writing on LinkedIn. I’ve never considered myself a writer. And then I just, Decided to write an article that I was feeling really passionate about and it’s kind of taken off. And so I will say I’m hopefully going to have a book published in the next year is the timeline, is my smart goal, so to speak. So maybe we’ll have it out by next April is the goal. But yeah, all my writing right now is usually two to five minute blog articles on LinkedIn.
Dr. Andy Roark: That’s outstanding. Thank you so much for being here, my friend. Guys, thanks for tuning in and listening. Take care of yourselves, everybody.
Ron Sosa: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: And that’s it guys. That’s what I got for you. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you took something out of it. Thanks again to Ron for being here. Guys. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave me an honest review wherever you get your podcasts. It means the world to me. It’s how people find the show. Anyway, take care of yourselves, everybody.
I’ll talk to you later. Bye.
