Kellie G. Olah, SPHR, CVPM
As the workplace continues to quickly evolve and grow in complexity, veterinary managers may struggle to find the right leadership style for the practice—and, if that statement resonates, then here’s a look at one philosophy that many businesses are adopting: Reality-Based Leadership.
Designed by Cy Wakeman—an international speaker and consultant—advocates of reality-based leadership point out how it helps to create an environment where employees can feel empowered and engaged—and can therefore perform at their best. Not surprisingly, then, businesses that successfully implement this philosophy can become more efficient and productive. In an industry where burnout is increasingly prevalent, empowering veterinary professionals and keeping them engaged may be especially important.
As the name of the style implies, leaders play a key role in this workplace transformation by making decisions based on facts rather than assumptions or emotions. They learn how to look beyond their own preconceptions to perceive the situation as it truly exists in the moment. The veterinary industry has a strong foundation of working professionals that often see their work as a ‘labor of love’. As a result, looking past assumptions and emotions can be difficult.
To achieve this, they look in their own mirrors first, enhancing their abilities to communicate well and resolve conflicts as seamlessly as possible. They recognize when they feel defensive and set that aside for the greater organizational good. As new challenges arise, they meet them with confidence, recognizing the inherent opportunities on their journey towards achieving meaningful change and positive results.
Workplace Drama and Emotional Waste
A key component of this fact-based leadership style involves decreasing—or ideally, eliminating—drama in the workplace. “Drama” in this context can be defined as any disruptive behaviors or thought patterns that take a workplace away from achieving results instead of moving them closer to goal achievement.
Wakeman realized how costly emotional waste is to businesses when she was working with medical doctors—and an explanation of how this occurred could easily be applicable to the veterinary sphere. She was introducing medical record technology that could streamline a doctor’s daily work in meaningful ways, but the medical professionals resisted the change. In fact, she says, she didn’t only meet with resistance; she met with organized resistance.
So, she decided to collect medical appointment data, asking patients to list how much time their doctor spent talking with them and how much was spent entering data into a keyboard. Someone then suggested that she add a third data column: how much time the doctor spent complaining about either the patient or the keyboard. The average result: about two hours a day! In other words, for about two hours each day, the medical professionals were focusing on issues that they couldn’t effectively change.
Wakeman repeated her tests with nurses and then with other industries. As she continued to collect the data, she found that the average amount of daily emotional waste was closer to two and a half hours. That’s per person, per day! Now, multiply that by the number of days in a year—and the number of people at your veterinary practice—and the amount of emotional waste is likely to be massive. Then, place a dollar amount on that wasted time.
Although the amount of lost time and wasted money was shocking to Wakeman, she also saw it as an opportunity. And, when some people tried to blame this phenomenon on the millennials’ working style, she refuted that claim by saying that this isn’t a generational issue; it’s an ego issue.
She also notes how many styles of leadership actually lead to situations that fuel drama. Reality-Based Leadership, meanwhile, encourages leaders across the organization tiers to set aside their egos to truly focus on organizational goals. It also encourages the development of workplace cultures that eliminate the proliferation of gossip, which is at the heart of significant amounts of drama. Reality-based leadership also has a focus on accountability where each person takes ownership of their own actions and facilitates problem solving.
Evolution of the Open-Door Policy
Having an open-door policy at the workplace is generally touted as an outstanding way for managers to engage with employees and understand their perspectives. So, this is a policy that many managers implement with the best of intensions as employees drop by to “just take up a minute or two of time.” Those two minutes, however, often multiply into lengthier amounts of time—in and of itself, not a bad thing—and it often involves employees venting about a person or situation. Then, at the end of the conversation, the employees often say that nothing more needs to be done; they just wanted a chance to share their feelings.
Looking at this scenario through the lens of Reality-Based Leadership, this contributed to emotional waste. Simply multiply the time spent on this activity (your time and that of the participating employee) and determine whether it brought your practice closer to its goals (likely not!), and you can see the emotional waste and its cost.
Seldom if ever do team members use the open-door policy to ask for insights into aligning their behaviors in a way that helps to contribute to business success in a more efficient and cost-effective way. Through a shift to Reality-Based Leadership, though, the manager could respond to the venting session with questions like “What ideas do you have to resolve this problem?” and “What part are you playing in this situation?” The goal is to shift the focus from emotional complaining to one on the facts—and then work towards a solution.
Implementing Reality-Based Leadership
This is a specific program created by Cy Wakeman. So, if you decide that you want to explore this type of leadership philosophy further, there are plenty of free tools and resources at RealityBasedLeadership.com as well as books written and YouTube videos created by Wakeman.
If, by evaluating what you’ve learned, you may want to implement Reality-Based Leadership principles into your practice, you may decide to introduce them to a group of leaders interested in the philosophy; then, if this still seems like a good fit for your organization, you can share the program to your team and lead by example as your practice transitions into this leadership philosophy through certification programs. At a high level, this training will involve a focus on fact-based truth instead of emotional perspectives and putting aside the ego for the good of the organization.
For this to take root in your practice, accountability is crucial—a commitment to genuinely working for the practice’s success. When an accountable person makes a mistake, they’re resilient enough to get back on track and take ownership of actions—both positive and negative ones. They are open to feedback on areas where they need to improve while remaining aware of the good aspects of their contributions. They embrace an attitude of continuous learning with less than ideal situations becoming ones where they can glean information to make them better team members going forward.
As a leader in the practice, prioritize results as you embrace open communication in ways that emphasize accountability: yours and others. Your role in the practice will be to help people eliminate emotional waste by directing their energy away from venting towards actions that can increase the practice’s return on investment of human resources and achieve success.
No leadership program will work perfectly out of the box, so expect to monitor progress and tweak as needed for success.
