During a 15-day trip to New Zealand, I was part of a tour group (a team) whose guides (the leaders) couldn’t get along. While I hadn’t been in a situation like that in decades, I reflected on how often veterinary teams find themselves torn between leaders. What went wrong in New Zealand? The leaders were at odds from the beginning. Observing their interaction from the van’s first row, I counted five factors that contributed to their inability to work together.
1. Mismatched Personalities
The tour guides exhibited specific and oppositional personality preferences. One appeared extroverted, intuitive, feeling and perceiving, while the second was introverted, sensing, thinking and judgmental. While both styles have strengths, the two leaders couldn’t find a way to get along. Their inability to hear and understand each other’s perspectives led to a lack of common ground. An example of how the conflict hurt the team arose from the guides’ behaviors. The first person was collaborative and flexible, with activities chosen based on the team’s desires. The second was inflexible and used a pacesetting style to adhere to the tour schedule despite the team members’ needs and desires. The conflict felt exhausting and unsustainable to the tourists.
2. An Absence of Trust
The leaders did not know each other, having never met before being thrown together for the trip. They approached the tour with different life experiences and no awareness of or apparent appreciation for each other and their strengths. I quickly saw how the lack of trust impaired the team. The second leader didn’t trust the first leader and constantly questioned the information provided. For example, the team lacked appropriate resources because she failed to consider the best locations for lunch breaks.
3. A Failure to Communicate
Because the guides didn’t trust each other, they didn’t communicate transparently, authentically and openly when sharing information with each other. The lack of communication sent mixed messages to the team, resulting in confusion, uncertainty and frustration. Miscommunication about daily planned activities left the team ill-prepared equipment-wise, creating a safety concern about our well-being. As a result, the team lacked trust in both leaders.
4. Unclear Role Definition
Assigned regimented responsibilities, the tour leaders didn’t have the autonomy to customize their roles to match their strengths or to share tasks. The situation created a culture defined by a lack of control and protectionist behaviors that further eroded their ability to work together. The guides weren’t empowered to create a cohesive experience, so they failed in consistent team education and other areas outside their defined roles.
5. Insufficient Upper Management
While the tour operations team knew about the communication breakdown between the two leaders, the company’s upper management never recognized the conflict’s severity. Team members could not check in with the operations team about their concerns.
How Was the Team Impacted?
Much like what is seen in veterinary practices when leaders fail to lead, the lack of alignment between the tour guides resulted in uneasiness, instability, stress and concern among the team members. The conflict was intensely uncomfortable to witness. Our team felt vulnerable because we were in unfamiliar territory and had to rely on the leaders to get us to the next destination.
Due to the leadership vacuum, team members handled the stress differently. One spoke separately to each guide, stating that their inability to find common ground had created a hostile and unsettling team experience. Two others finally reached upper management to request a change in trip leadership, which occurred two days before the trip’s conclusion. At no time did the team members collectively discuss the next steps. Those team behaviors, seen commonly in neglected or toxic cultures, indicate the formation of factions, with each subset operating under its own guidelines. That harms team dynamics because outcomes often include misunderstandings, confusion and resentment among the members.
Fixing Leadership Mismatches
If the events I described had happened in a veterinary practice, how could the leadership breakdown have been avoided? The solution starts with leaders knowing themselves and each other before they are thrust into situations where they need to work together. Here are four strategies.
1. Become More Self-Aware
When leaders understand their personality preferences, they can use self-awareness (an emotional intelligence skill) to understand how the preferences impact other leaders and their followers.
Self-awareness occurs when people understand their own moods, emotions and motivations. They are mindful of how those characteristics impact other people. When leaders recognize each other’s preferences, they can adjust their styles to be more open, less threatening and more collaborative.
2. Trust Each Other
Trust builds when someone believes another person has their best interests at heart. In a culture of trust, there is no need to hide weaknesses or mistakes; each person can be accountable for their performance without fear of shame, embarrassment or ridicule.
Trust within teams starts with the leaders. It grows with the shared belief that the leaders’ intentions are fair and truthful and that they will make decisions that support the team’s well-being and best interests.
Trust is broken when leaders’ actions cause stress and anxiety. The situation is avoided when leaders get to know and understand each other, starting with their foundations and goals, being transparent about their annoying habits, and trusting each other with their vulnerabilities.
3. Clearly Define Expected Roles
Studies have found that poor work design is a driving factor in stress and results in toxic behaviors. Work design flaws with the highest correlation to toxicity include role conflict, excessive workloads and role uncertainty.
What role conflicts exist within your veterinary practice? A common one occurs when the title “veterinary technician” is used indiscriminately. It should be reserved for team members who are graduates of an accredited veterinary technician program. Practice leaders can resolve role uncertainty between veterinary technicians and veterinary assistants by taking the guesswork out of the tasks each should do and creating areas where collaboration can occur.
4. Hold Senior Management Accountable
Senior management must step in to stabilize the team when leadership failures occur. This action starts by acknowledging that mistakes occurred. The next step is to understand what went wrong by examining the process breakdown that led to the errors and not blaming the individuals involved. Those involved play a critical role in identifying what went wrong and creating systems to prevent a recurrence.
When leaders fail to lead, their followers pay the price, whether on a hiking trail in New Zealand or within the four walls of a practice. When leaders are willing to apologize, accept full responsibility for their actions and commit themselves to learning and growing from their missteps, a teachable moment blossoms for all team members.
NEXT STEPS
How can leaders and team members understand their personality preferences and strengths? Here are a few tools.
What: Workshops using the DiSC, Insights or Myers-Briggs tests
How: Individuals take an assessment test beforehand and receive the results. Trained facilitators then teach leaders — or leaders and teams — about self-awareness and other awareness techniques.
Where: To find workshops, talk with manufacturer representatives whose companies offer such courses to veterinary practices. Many community colleges provide workshops. A third option is VetPartners [vetpartners.org], a group of veterinary business professionals, some of whom are certified in the assessment tools.
What: A simple personality assessment at 16 Personalities [16personalities.com] Why: The free resource can help an organization’s leaders understand the meaning and impact of personality preferences.
What: CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder), an assessment tool that helps individuals understand and leverage their strengths. Learn more at bit.ly/41fOx3R.
Why: Too often, personal development focuses on improving weaknesses, which overlooks existing competencies.
What: Emotional Quotient Inventory
Why: The assessment is available through various paid and free tools. I recommend EQ-i 2.0 [bit.ly/3XfXZU2] as a paid option.
COSTLY CONFLICTS
According to a Harvard Business School report posted at bit.ly/4hMnUuy, “53% of employees handle ‘toxic’ situations by avoiding them. Worse still, averting a difficult conversation can cost an organization $7,500 and more than seven workdays.
“That adds up quickly: American businesses lose $359 billion yearly due to the impact of unresolved conflict.”