Josh Vaisman joins us to tackle the challenges of a struggling, disengaged team. In this week’s episode of the Cone of Shame podcast, Dr. Andy Roark and Josh dive into the symptoms of a low-spirited team and explore effective tools as well as strategies to lift morale. The discussion also covers culture renovation and whether leaders should aim for happiness or engagement in the workplace. Tune in for valuable insights on diagnosing and treating team issues to create a more positive and productive work environment. Let’s get into this episode!
You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Soundcloud, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts!
LINKS
Josh Vaisman at Flourish: https://www.flourish.vet/
Referenced Book: Culture Renovation: https://culturerenovation.com/
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
Josh believes all veterinary professionals deserve to feel fulfilled by their work, each and every day. Through his company, Flourish Veterinary Consulting, he combines more than 20 years of veterinary experience, a master’s in applied Positive Psychology & Coaching Psychology, and education in Positive Leadership and Positive Organizational Scholarship and a passion for guiding leaders to cultivate work environments in which people can thrive.
Fun fact – Josh is also an avid beekeeper who teaches beginning beekeepers how to tend to their buzzing buddies.”, 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’m here today with my friend Josh Vaisman and I got a tough question for Josh. What do we do with the lethargic, unengaged veterinary team? I hear, probably more than anything else, hey my team is just tired and I don’t know how to get them enthused about our work.
And so I take it to our positive psychology guru, Josh Vaisman and I ask him about it. And it’s a really good conversation. I hope you guys will really enjoy it. I did not hold back on Josh. I tried to ask him some, hard questions to kind of figure out where his head’s at. and I’ve sort of tried to play both sides of the issue, which is I want my staff to be engaged and enthusiastic and at the same time, I don’t know that it’s feasible for us to make everybody happy and keep them happy all the time.
And so how do I know, when we’re where we’re supposed to be so anyway that’s what we get into today guys. I hope you’ll enjoy it. Let’s get into this episode!
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 Josh Vaisman thanks for being back, my friend.
Josh Vaisman: Oh, my gosh, I’m delighted. This is the trifecta, I think now.
Dr. Andy Roark: Is this a three? Are you in the three timer club now?
Josh Vaisman: I think I might be, I feel exceptionally special today. I’m walking a bit lighter on my feet this morning.
Dr. Andy Roark: Well, that’s good. No, that’s great. You’re definitely somebody I really enjoy talking to and I always get a lot of our conversations. And so I’m really glad you’re here for those who don’t know you. You are the lead positive change agent at Flourish Veterinary Consulting. You write and speak all over the place.
I just read something that you wrote that we’re not talking about today, but you actually wrote an article on some research about differences in perceptions between veterinarians who work at private practice and in corporate practice. And I, I saw the research and I was like, this is really cool, and I saw your name in the byline, and I was like, it feels different for Josh.
But man, it just was a reminder that like, you are doing so many things and you’ve got this wide breadth of interest. That’s how you came top of mind recently. I saw this thing. I saw you working on it and I’m rolling this question around in my head.
And it was sort of that seeing your name and then thinking about the question. I was like, I should ask Josh about this. And so I’ve got a question I want to ask you today and here it is. And so, so first of all, you can validate the scenery for me or not. When I look at vet practice in today in general, and again, this is a sweeping generalization, but one of the challenges that I see again and again, I hear from the clinics that are in Uncharted and things like that is How do we keep the staff engaged when they’re tired. And so that’s the question again is, the staff is tired, we’ve been really busy, team engagement, team enthusiasm seems to be low. And that’s the question. And usually it comes from a medical director or manager or doctor, a practice owner that’s like, they don’t want to run around. We’ve all been the person who’s trying to bring enthusiasm to a group that does not want enthusiasm.
And it, it’s not fun. It’s not fun. You know what I mean? They’re like come on everybody! And they go, they just, they’re tired, and again, and now there’s the, so people will throw around the term toxic positivity. And I don’t think trying to be positive Immediately classifies you as toxic positivity. That’s writing off people’s concerns and telling them they’re being wimps but I do get the idea of when everyone’s exhausted and you’re trying to cheerfully get them to engage with work it can be a delicate line to walk. So let me stop here with my first question for you validate the scenery here.
Do you see this dynamic in practice? Do you think that teams really are tired and that engagement seems to be a challenge sort of across our profession? Is this a real problem or is this sort of a, scattered case by case scenario and you go, ah, this, those people are probably doing things that are wrong.
Josh Vaisman: Yes. So first of all, I have to share with you when you were talking about, like, the example of like trying to add enthusiasm to an environment of people who just are disinterested in enthusiasm. I pictured like people with the thought bubbles. Like they’re not saying it out loud, but you can just read on their face that they want to throat punch you.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Josh Vaisman: We, definitely don’t want to do that.
Dr. Andy Roark: It’s like in the sitcom the office You know and you just like the whole bit is michael scott is up front like all right and like like just the disengagement Of the team is just like that’s the joke. And
Josh Vaisman: Stanley in the back doing his crossword and yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: what I was thinking with Stanley in the back doing his crossword. And it’s such, but it’s so, common that’s what satire is today is, this is the staff meeting we’ve all seen. Like that’s the, it just feels so pervasive.
Josh Vaisman: Yeah, you know what? So, so here’s my, answer to your question. You asked me, do I feel like this is actually a thing? Like, are we really seeing teams and veterinary practices that are just as tired? Or is this more of a scattered kind of thing? And you know, those individuals who, those individual organizations are just doing it wrong.
I think it’s kind of a yes. You asked an or question and I think the response is actually kind of yes. So my, my Okay. Semi informed subjective take is that as a society, we are tired that there’s just been a general malaise and fatigue that probably is somewhat residual from the pandemic, and that we’ve just never really addressed.
And then on the societal level, there’s just been all of these polarizing issues and conversations over the last few years that have just added to a general psychological fatigue across the world. Now, add that, you know, sort of pool of context to a workplace, like a veterinary workplace that is inherently unpredictable, uncertain, stressful, and challenging.
Yes, of course, there’s a bunch of people who are just damn tired. I also think that we have to be clear about what we mean by engagement, because, you know, there’s sort of different phases of this. And I think often what we focus on is we focus on, you know, that, technician that’s just like, you just the whole day just hums. When you work with her, you know everything is going to go great. The two of you jive. You have the same sense of humor. You’re laughing about shit all day. Like it’s, just awesome. And you work with her and you can see the energy and enthusiasm she brings. This is clearly an example of an engaged person.
I think sometimes when we think of disengaged people, we think of people who are what Gallup would refer to as actively disengaged. We think of the people who are, you know, they’re in the corners and they’re farting around on their phone. They’re complaining behind closed doors about the practice. You know, they would take the next opportunity that came through the door in a heartbeat and they would have no problem leaving us in the dust.
Maybe we’ll get a two week notice. Maybe we’ll get a two day notice. Maybe we’ll get a text message. I’m not coming into work anymore. Right? Like we think of that as disengaged people. That is a small percentage of a large group of human beings. Most people who fit in the disengaged are people like, you know, we’ve all been in this situation.
We’ve all had a job where we show up on time. We do everything that’s asked of us. We generally do a pretty darn good job. But we are not excelling. We are not bringing our whole selves to work. We’re not getting something personally of value out of that work other than maybe, you know, the paycheck in eight hours out of the day or ten hours out of the day occupied.
And actually a very large percentage of people generally fit into that group. And it’s hard to see them as disengaged, but the impact that it has at the organizational level is sweeping and difficult to pinpoint. And that I think is, I don’t want to say universal, but it’s common. It’s common where you have a veterinary team who, they generally show up on time, they generally do a pretty good job, they generally support and help each other, but they’re not bringing their whole selves to work.
And I think that’s the real question that we need to ask is, what do we do with a group of people like that? How do we shift them, which is just one notch up on the spectrum, from disengaged to even mildly engaged and enthused?
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, so, I like this a lot. Let me call it one thing real quick that you said that really lines up with sort of this worldview that I’ve had for a while is this idea that there are so many issues in vet medicine that are societal issues like the, I think you’re probably spot on in that disengagement or just tiredness.
I don’t think that’s a vet medicine problem. I think that is a society problem. And you also just, you just nailed it perfectly in that I will always say, veterinary medicine is a unique industry with unique challenges. And so, we can experience society wide problems, trends, stressors. And then we also things that we have to do.
So, it probably looks a little different than other places. But, I don’t think that we as individual people are all that different than probably other industries. I don’t think we’re as different as we’d like to think that we are. I think that our days are different because of our challenges and, what the way that medicine is.
Let me ask you this. Okay. So, so now we’re getting to this. When I generally am presented, there’s a couple of management questions that I get presented with and what is they come to me and they say, well, I, we’re seeing these behaviors as in these problems and they’ll laundry list off a couple of problems.
Okay, and in these rare instances, often I can kind of look at those things and say, well, none of these things are actually the problem. These are all symptoms of this other problem. So for example, I mean, you and I’ve talked about this before. there there are things when think about like psychological safety in practice and psychological safety is just the belief that the employees have that they have a voice.
And that they can be heard, that they are safe to communicate what they are feeling, where they are, what’s going on, and that they will be heard. And so, if you don’t have psychological safety, the outcome is not people walking around complaining about psychological safety. It is, it’s, gossiping.
It’s, you know, it’s sort of this back channel chatter. It’s it’s people disappearing during the staff meetings and not engaging and things like that. And so they’ll lay down all these things and I’ll say, Oh, ultimately your problem is not ineffective staff meetings. That is a symptom of this other underlying sort of condition that we need to work on.
When you talk to me about this sort of lack of engagement, not bringing their whole self. And then you say, you know, it’s sort of, it manifests throughout the organization. Josh, what are the symptoms of that look like in, in practice? So when people are this, they’re like, they’re doing enough and they’re working away enough and I’m looking at a team, like, what are the flags that I can look for and sort of say, yeah, I get that no one here is not doing their job and I’m still concerned about your group. Like what, does that look like?
Josh Vaisman: Yeah, I mean, I think it probably shows up a bit differently, but I’ll play off of 1 of the things that you just said. You said you pointed to staff meetings as you know, sometimes oftentimes it’s not that you have ineffective staff meetings is that the ineffective staff meetings are the symptom of a greater problem.
I think you can see examples like that when you have a team that is generally disengaged. Staff meetings can feel wholly ineffective. You know, I recall times, gosh, I wish that I would have known this stuff and recognized this when I was running veterinary practices. How many times did I run a staff meeting where I stood up in front and I talked at a group of people and would never hear anything in return. You know, what questions do you have? Silence, you know, you could hear the drip of the, uh, you know, the lactated ringers off in the back of the hospital from the hospitalized patient. Like, so I think those are signs of disengagement.
You just see people, they don’t, quote, step up. They don’t want to offer things beyond what’s, you know, sort of the minimum requirement. You might hear a bit of quietude, you know, sometimes you walk into a hospital and you can feel, we’ve all had this experience. You walk into a practice and nobody on the team says a word to you, but you know exactly what mood is permeating through that building.
And it’s generally not a good one. Like, you can feel that, right? Sometimes you walk into a hospital and the first thing you hear is laughter from the back of the building,
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah.
Josh Vaisman: but both of those are signs of what’s happening within that team. One of them is probably a bit more of an engaged team. The first one is probably a highly disengaged team. Sometimes you’ll walk in and you hear nothing. It’s just quiet. Quietude can be a sign of disengagement as well.
Dr. Andy Roark: But, but not always though, right? Like, like I worked at, I worked at, I worked at a practice where, I think I really liked this practice. And it was a really well run practice. And one of the texts to me at one point was like, Oh man, You’re the oddball here. And I said, why do you say that?
I was like, I was doing relief work. And she was like, she’s like, I love you, but you roll in here and you’re telling jokes and you’re talking to people. and only at that point did I kind of look around and realize that no one else was talking. And it wasn’t, and the thing was, I was telling jokes and laughing, but I was, because I was comfortable.
If this was a toxic place, I would, you know, I feel the, I feel that, and I can read the room, but it’s just, they weren’t unhappy, they’d smile, but they think it was one of those sort of self perpetuating cultural things, is they, they kind of had an introverted, quiet practice, and that’s who they hired, and they were all very happy, but they were not, like, that place was, you know, Quiet, like that you would just hear the soft rock classics playing over, you know, over the intercom but that was all the sound that was there Yeah, unless I was there in which case, you know, there’s finger guns and sound effects
Josh Vaisman: Here comes Dr. Andy Guns N Roses Roark walking in the building.
Dr. Andy Roark: Exactly right. Yeah, I think they had me there about once a month and that was probably about as much as they could take
Josh Vaisman: That’s the dose. It’s all about dosage. Andy, it’s all about dosage.
Dr. Andy Roark: It’s exactly right. It’s exactly right. But again, great practice. Just, they they were just quiet.
Josh Vaisman: And, this is, what’s important about this is that it’s very easy to spot a highly engaged team. It’s very easy to spot a really pissed off, upset, disengaged team that in between is a bit more challenging and it’s going to show up a little bit differently depending on the culture, the type of personalities, the type of practice, all of those things are going to influence that.
And so I think it behooves those of us in leadership to be cognizant of those things and I do think that this is one of those things, you know, I’d like to be very evidence based in the stuff that I do, but we are not solely evidence based creatures. We are creatures with both a big brain and a big heart and I think we need to learn how to balance trusting both of those effectively.
When it comes to things like disengagement as a leader, I think this is one of those times when you can probably. Not in all cases, but in most cases, learn to trust your gut. If your gut is telling you there’s something off with this team, then probably there’s something off with this team and you may not be able to point to the tangible evidence of what those symptoms are, but your gut is telling you something and it’s worth pursuing and getting curious about.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. That makes sense.
Hey guys, you know, probably the number one plea for help that I get from medical directors, from practice managers, from practice owners, from lead technicians, and especially lead CSRs is, “Hey, Andy, help me, help my staff to deal with angry and complaining clients. They need ways to help these people because angry clients, complaining clients, they need help is what they need. And, our people aren’t empowered or they aren’t trained in how to do that.”
And so why isn’t there more training for this? Why aren’t there more resources that make teams good at dealing with angry and complaining clients?
Well, the number one reason really is, the way that feels natural for your team, the skills that they have that they would bring into the situation, they’re different in every practice. So there’s not a bullet pointed. This is how you do it way.
Which is why I end up in this place where people are like, “Andy How do I do this?”
Listen, I made a course. It’s called ‘Charming the Angry Client’ and it is my course meant for teams or groups to work together on all about dealing with angry and complaining clients.
I use what’s called the Davidow model of organizational response, which is a super peer reviewed, empirically tested way of addressing angry and complaining clients. And, I break it up into pieces so that it’s easy to digest. You can scatter it across a number of meetings. It is made to be watched with a couple people together. And then there’s discussion questions about how do we do this in our practice? What does this look like for us? What, when, think about a time that this happened and we saw it. How did we handle it?
Ooh, I also put a bunch of example videos in there of me being an angry client. So I will just give it to ya. As here’s Andy with his pet, and he is upset, and then you can pause it, and then you can talk about right there, “What would we do with this? How would we handle this, guys?” And it is a great, low stakes way of getting your team to talk about what they would actually do.
Guys, there’s nothing more powerful than your team. Talking about what they would actually do and comparing notes, sitting and getting lectured at is nothing close to your team, whether it’s just your CSRs, whether it’s four of your technicians working together, whether it’s a whole staff meeting and a manager or owner or medical director leading the meeting and being the facilitator guys, I put a whole facilitator guide in there too. There is a whole hour long broken up in a module section on how to run an active training program using this course.
And that’s all laid out there and how I do it, how I work with big groups, how it works, small groups, all that information is there. Anyway, it’s called Charming the Angry Client. It is on the Dr. Andy Roark website. I’ll put links directly to it in the show notes. Guys, I hope you will enjoy it.
I think it’s really valuable. It is honestly the most popular course I have ever put online. Grab yourself a copy. I hope you’ll get a lot out of it. Let’s get back to this episode.
Talk to me a little bit about diagnostic tests here, right? Because there’s probably a lot of people out there who, most of us do not, are not rolling with a culture that we’re like, this is amazing. I wish we were. Most of us are not rolling with the cold, but most of us are also not in toxic dumps either, you know, we’re well, I don’t know, kind of in the middle.
You know, which is where all the action sort of happens is, you know, it’s sort of in the middle. So I kind of imagine it’s sort of like physical therapy, right? When they bring you in and you say, Well, I don’t know, I think my shoulders kind of messed up. And they have you do the different exercises in the range of motion and go, Well, I think I think this is our problem.
So why don’t we sort of through Josh Vaisman’s physical therapy, you know, assessment phase and how do you figure out where the actual problems is? And it seems like it can just be a, I don’t know, they’re just not really that into it. And how do I, get away from that?
Josh Vaisman: Yeah. So, diagnostics, I think, are incredibly important. I’m a huge advocate for you know, the sort of general organizational trope that we are what we measure. And if this kind of a thing is important. If engagement or team happiness or I don’t know, general enthusiasm about the workplace.
Those kinds of things are important. We need to find a way to measure it because we have to benchmark it. It’s no different than taking care of a patient. You know, we want to get during a wellness. We want to get baseline blood works, so that when things go awry, we have something to compare it to and strive, you know, or aspire to return to.
And so I think finding ways to measure it are really important. Measurement, Andy, we could spend hours talking about ways to measure it but finding some way to measure it, routinely. That’s another thing. I know that there are organizations that do like, you know, the Q12 once a year. They’ll do like a an ENPS or, you know, assessment periodically.
Annually is not sufficient. Twice a year is probably not sufficient. Daily is too much. Weekly might be too much, depending on how we’re doing it. The whims of I don’t know, the emotional and psychological experience of a team ebb and flow frequently. And so if we’re taking a singular measurement once a year, first of all, people are going to mostly feed us bullshit.
If they see that all you care about is checking in on this once a year by a survey, They’re not, that’s not going to enhance engagement. That’s going to show you how disengaged they are with the responses you get. Secondly, every single assessment, every measurement of the human experience is subject to recency bias.
And so when you ask somebody, how has the last year been? What they’re really thinking of is, how is the last week been? And so you just, one, once a year is not enough. I think that two ways of measurement are really critical in organizations that I see success with this. Number one is something quantitative.
So something like blood work, whether it’s a survey or an assessment tool, a pulse check, but something that’s being done regularly that’s targeted around the thing that you really value in the human experience in your workplace. Secondly, relationships. You mentioned before we started recording, you said that I’m calling you out here, I hope this is okay. You said that
Dr. Andy Roark: I hope it’s okay too. I don’t know. Let’s see where this goes.
Josh Vaisman: One of if not the most influential things in an employee’s experience is the relationship that they have with their boss. That, that the person in charge of us has the most influence of it. There’s actually quite a lot of data that supports that belief. We see that consistently when people are, when we measure job satisfaction, the largest predictor of job satisfaction, at least according to one study, is actually not the job itself.
It’s the relationships at work. And when people are scoring, how do you feel about the relationships at work? 86 percent of the variance in that score, 86 percent of what they’re thinking about is not the relationships with their peers and colleagues. It’s the relationship with their boss. That’s the influence that we have.
So if we’re not taking an active role at cultivating a high quality relationship that gives us high quality, two way communication, two way data of their consistent, their routine lived experience at work, that’s a measurement tool that we’re missing out on. And so I, I really, I’m a huge advocate for finding ways for managers to have sit down, structured, quality, effective one on ones on a routine basis with everybody who reports to them.
And by routine, I mean like once a month at a minimum. And that’s got to at least include some level of check in. Hey, Andy, how are you doing? How are things going since our, you know, the last time we met, you mentioned you were struggling a bit shifting from, you know, the day shift to the. The evening shift.
How’s that going for you? What’s been working? Like, just checking in. Establishing relationships creates a sense of community, which adds to engagement. It also gives you a really great way to get a good qualitative side of the quantitative data that you’re collecting.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I really like that a lot. If we’re putting this together and we’re doing the one on ones or we’re doing sort of our survey tools of kind of, what’s your, how excited about work do you feel? You know, what is your favorite part of the job?
Things like that, what constitutes a good day for you? Those types of things. And we’re starting to get some feedback. Are there general approaches that we take to start to rebuild this type of engagement? Or is it a hundred percent dictated by what kind of feedback we get?
Meaning, is there a general approach to to rebuilding engagement or is it entirely specific to what our team is telling us?
Josh Vaisman: There’s a really great book, the author of whom I’m going to forget. Now I’m looking around my office to see if I have it here. I don’t. It’s called Culture Renovation. It was written by an HR professional. He’s like the CEO or president of like the largest HR organization in the world. And they conducted some pretty extensive research on organizations that have successfully changed culture.
There’s two things about this I want to share. The first one is that as they were going through this work and doing this research and then starting to write this material, they changed the title from Culture Change to Culture Renovation. So I think that’s a really important lesson for leaders. to keep in mind when we’re trying to you know, shift the experience of energy, enthusiasm and engagement in a team.
We are not changing things. We are renovating. There are things that are working here. The team is showing up. They are doing good work. Like we don’t want to come into the house and ignore the good, you know, skeleton of the home and just work. Raise it to the ground and then build a new one. We come into a house and we say, you know what?
This room is actually working pretty well, but this room could use a remodel. And that’s what we do. So, so seek that renovation approach. The other thing from that book that I’ll share consistently across the board organizations that had successful culture renovations started with a intentional, authentic listening campaign.
So where I’m going with this is that I don’t think there’s a recipe. I mean, I think the things that I offered are sort of part of the recipe. Like, you’ve got to start by gathering the data. The data means we’re trying to gather human data. So we’ve got to get really good at getting inquisitive and listening.
And that will tell us the direction that we need to go. And then we need to be courageous enough to follow that direction if we can.
Dr. Andy Roark: All right. I was going to end here, but I’m not now I’m going to give you a really hard question to see what you come up with.
Josh Vaisman: Ooh, I love those!
Dr. Andy Roark: So here’s So so, I hear all of that and agree and I love the listening campaign, but we’ve talked, throughout this entire podcast, you and I, and we’re on the same page of rarely do we deal in extremes of everyone is miserable, everyone is happy, everything is everything is great.
One of the things that I have rolled around in my head recently is How how happy should people be? And so, so I, as I talk about this again, I say this because veterinary medicine is such a compassionate place and I, love that. And I had this journey and sort of in my career and I used to say very publicly and very frequently, I want my employees to be happy.
I want employees to be happy. And I have changed that recently, to say, I want my employees to be happy doing the work the team needs them to do. Or doing the work that we as a practice need to get done. I say that because sometimes people will be like, well, I don’t want to do this particular job.
It makes me unhappy. And I have to wrestle with that so much. And now just well, not, We don’t get to do the things that make us happy all day like some everybody has part of their job they don’t like to do and this is what the team needs to have done and you’re to do it today And you know what
I mean, and it’s just I for a long time. I had this idea, I think, that I could set a business up that was and allow delegation and collaboration to the point that everybody could kind of dodge the parts of work they didn’t like. And I really tried to do that. And at some point, Josh, I’ve come to believe that’s just not true.
And I think if you focus on, you know, the quickest way to be unhappy is focus intently on your happiness.
Josh Vaisman: Unhappiness?
Dr. Andy Roark: I mean, yeah, it’s just like, I could be more happy. Sure. You know, what’s making me unhappy right now? I can find things. And so there is part of that. So to your point of, we start with an active, engaged listening campaign.
We listen to them and we start to build. Do you have any advice for team or leaders, practice leaders, team leaders, doctors in how and how to reach that place of hearing the needs of others and keeping them in perspective and in balance with all of the other things that need to happen to say, I hear that you would be happier if your schedule was different. And at the same time,
Josh Vaisman: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: We simply with the staffing that we have right now these this is the work schedule that we have available and again, there’s we always want to try to work with people and think outside the box, but at some point somebody has to mop the exam rooms.
Josh Vaisman: There’s so many things that I want to say. So I’m going to suggest that we have a fourth get together on this wonderful
Dr. Andy Roark: A fourth? Ha ha
Josh Vaisman: and talk, talk about the cuts, but I’ll add a couple of quick things because this is a lovely and really important question that you’re asking. I very much appreciate your vulnerability in admitting how you have evolved and pivoted and how you think about happiness.
I have also gone through a similar journey. I think one of the biggest mistakes that I made as a hospital learner in the last practice that I managed was walking in on day one and essentially, I mean, I didn’t use these words, but essentially making a promise to the team, I’m going to create a space here that you will all be happy with.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yes
Josh Vaisman: There’s, you’ll notice in our entire conversation up until this question, neither of us actually used the word happy. We talked about engagement. Those are two very different psychological constructs. Happiness is often a outcome of engagement. It’s a lagging indicator of good inputs. And so I don’t think we should set our goals on lagging indicators.
I think we should set our goals on the inputs that are likely to increase the presence of those lagging indicators. And the inputs that are likely to increase that are things like thriving fulfillment, you know, as, an organization Flourish, we don’t talk about we exist, to create happiness in veterinary medicine.
We talk about we’re on a mission to ensure that every veterinary professional experiences fulfillment in their work each and every day. Fulfillment sometimes sucks. It sometimes is really annoying and frustrating. It sometimes means cleaning up, the massive blowout of diarrhea in the middle of the treatment room and almost vomiting yourself through the whole experience, right?
That is not fun. You’re not happy doing that. But sometimes those are exactly the experiences that add to joy and fulfillment. I’ll try and find this for you, Andy, and I’ll try and share it with you, but Barb Fredrickson did a really cool piece of research where she followed she basically identified folks who she referred to them as like, they’re in it for the party.
They’re in the pursuit of happiness. Right. And then people who are in the pursuit of daily meaning. So trying to experience purpose activated in their day to day life, right? Those are two, two pursuits that can be wholly occupying and both potentially worth pursuing. What she found was, the people, on average, across the group, over, I think it was a six week period that they tracked them.
They used a pager, periodically they would get you know, a beep, and then they would have to go complete a survey. And, like, one of the things they measured was the, PNAS, which is the it measures positive and negative emotional experiences in the moment, so it gives you a list of each, and you mark which ones you felt recently, that kind of thing.
She found that I’m going to forget the percentages here, but the people who were pursuing happiness were actually like 50 percent less likely to experience positive emotions. They were 70 something percent more likely to report depressive symptoms. And interestingly, when they measured they conducted blood work on these people.
The people who were pursuing happiness as their sole goal actually had significant, like statistically significantly higher levels of inflammatory markers in their bloodstream. And so the researchers at the end of this paper, they said that basically the pursuit of happiness might be about as good for you as chronic illness.
We shouldn’t, as managers, we shouldn’t be, or leaders or hospital owners, our goal should not be to make a happy team. Our goal should be to make a fulfilled team, a team that experiences meaningfulness, that experiences human connection, that gets to work in a psychologically safe space where they bring their voice to work, where they feel like they’re contributing to something meaningful, where they feel like they matter. All of those things allow space for the day to day shit that we’re all going to experience.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah, I did. That that is the perfect answer, really is. That’s exactly it is happiness is as a lagging indicator. Now, I think you’re spot on. I read recently the parable of Hercules at the crossroads. Do you remember that one?
Josh Vaisman: No. Share that with me.
Dr. Andy Roark: So, so young Hercules is traveling and he comes to the crossroads and he’s tempted down each path, or these two different paths.
And the first one promises him a life of comfort and ease. And you know, it says all of your dreams will be laid out before you. And the other one is there’s a goddess on the other path and he looks at her and says, what will you promise me? And she said, hard work. And he, chooses the goddess that says hard work and, it’s the idea of the difference in vice and virtue.
And there, but there’s, I think that there’s this I think that there’s this misconception today. I think we were, we’re being told that we should be happy all the time. we’re led to believe that we should be comfortable all the time. To me, I think that’s that, path of come this way, everything will be great. It will be, you’ll be, so happy. And I, but I think the other path I promise you hard work. I do. I don’t mean to be macho about it, but I do think that is the path because in that hard work is the fulfillment, but it’s interesting of how do you get your team, to recognize that and to, buy into, I get it, it’s engagement, not happiness. But I think that’s a question for our fourth podcast, which look at, yeah, look at Josh booking the recheck appointment. Well played, sir. And so
Josh Vaisman: Hey. Forward booking. Forward booking.
Dr. Andy Roark: Exactly. Thanks, Josh, so much for being here. Guys, thanks for listening. Josh, where can people find you online?
Josh Vaisman: Yeah, so, our website is www.flourish.vet you can find me on LinkedIn. We’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook. All the usual places.
Dr. Andy Roark: Sounds great. Awesome. Guys, check it out. I will link up Culture Revolution and some other resources in the show notes. Take care of yourselves, everybody. I’ll talk to you later.
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