What’s a Leader to Do?

Today’s business landscape is enough to induce whiplash in veterinary practice leaders. The overwhelming speed of economic, societal and technological changes has created new opportunities and challenges. In the face of innovation, followers look to their leaders to provide stability, clarity and consistency. What do leaders need to do to create the type of practice that fosters teamwork, trust and resilience?

Managing Complexity

Complexity has its origins in the pressures that create stress and operational challenges in businesses. Over the past two years, the complexities impacting veterinary hospitals include changing client expectations, labor shortages and new ways to deliver patient care. The rapidly escalating cost of running veterinary hospitals leads to higher client costs, especially when inflationary pressures result in fewer visits due to less discretionary income. Leaders must adapt to complexity by thinking differently about how they will respond to these adaptive challenges.

Recent research defines adaptive challenges as problems for which no solution currently exists. Solving adaptive challenges requires team members to work together differently, forming new relationships that often have varying perspectives and may conflict. Team members must find ways to co-create outcomes. Failing to do so could mean the collapse of the business.

Leaders enable adaptive responses to challenges by allowing creative ideas to emerge. Leaders empower their teams to manage new pressures by encouraging both pressures for change (learning, innovation and risk-taking) and pressures for stability (the status quo). When leaders embrace complexity, they can create the necessary space for individuals and teams to identify and embrace novel solutions.

How can leaders help their teams manage complexity? The key lies in acknowledging and shaping both pressures for change and stability.

Leaders’ Behaviors and Followers’ Stress

Understanding leadership means recognizing two distinct entities in the process: the leader and the follower. A leader cannot lead without followers. A Harvard Business Review article identified five ways that leaders accidentally stress and create anxiety in their followers.

1. Negative Language

A strong connection exists between leaders’ moods and the words they choose to express themselves. For example, followers can become afraid or worried when they hear “unforgivable,” “terrible” or “unacceptable.”

Leaders should be aware of their moods and listen to their messages. Alternatives to the harsh words above could be “needless,” “concerning” or “worrisome.” These convey the seriousness of the situation yet sound less punitive.

2. Irregular or Unpredictable Actions

Unpredictability and uncertainty can trigger anxiety. The very nature of veterinary medicine is rooted in the unexpected: unforeseen emergencies, co-worker absences, volatile clients. A leader who is a dependable, consistent presence helps teams manage workplace anxiety.

What actions do leaders take to be a steady influence? They prevent confusion by being transparent in their communications, minimizing the opportunity for misinterpretations. They are open and authentic in sharing information, and they act predictably, which creates constancy. These are antidotes for workplace anxiety.

3. Emotional Volatility

Leaders who regulate their moods create stability in workplaces. How leaders’ emotions impact people around them (“mood contagion”) is well-documented. When leaders are calm and composed, followers will imitate them, which helps further reduce stress in the hospital.

4. Extreme Negativity

At times, pessimism in the workplace is helpful. For example, the identification of threats allows leaders to act preemptively. On the other hand, when teams are anxious, pessimism has the harmful effects of demotivation and creating stress. Teams expect optimism from their leaders during times of uncertainty. When leaders project confidence and composure, followers are reassured and less uneasy, which lowers anxiety and stress levels.

5. Ignoring Employee Emotions

Leaders who focus on managing only their emotions miss the big picture, which is their team’s emotional state. The current reality in many hospitals is understaffing, inefficiency and increasing performance demands on employees. Leaders can modulate workplace stress and anxiety by recognizing how deeply their actions impact their followers, both positively and negatively. When leaders are empathetic, they can use understanding to let followers know they are cared about and understood.

Building Trust as a Leader

As stated earlier, leadership actions steer followership behaviors. Because the foundation for collaboration is built on trust, how do a leader’s actions influence trust? It occurs when followers believe a leader’s intentions are fair and truthful and that no hidden agenda exists. Those followers are willing to show vulnerability to their leaders. Vulnerability can be uncomfortable, and by exposing themselves, followers risk being emotionally hurt, judged or perceived as ineffective. However, when followers trust a leader, they believe the leader will make decisions that support their well-being and best interests.

Trust breaks down when:

• A leader’s actions cause stress and anxiety in the workplace.
• Leaders don’t show their true selves.
• Leaders repeatedly make poor decisions that have negative consequences for followers.
• Leaders fail to show that they care about their employees.

How can leaders cultivate an environment of trust? Harvard Business Review suggests three main drivers of trust: authenticity, logic and empathy.

Authenticity

Authenticity happens when people express their true selves at work and don’t feel pressured to act differently. Being authentic means the traits and actions shared with the people closest to you (true self) are the same ones you share with those in work or social settings (public self). Some traits and actions are positive, while some can be hurtful. Authentic leaders understand that they must harness their good traits and use self-awareness to minimize those that could be demeaning to followers. An example is humor. We all appreciate a good laugh, but not when it comes at another person’s expense.

An inauthentic leader sends a message to employees that the workplace is not a safe space to reveal who they really are. This leadership action results in followers being less willing to be vulnerable to the leader, which inhibits trust.

Authentic leaders enact and access their unique selves. They become strong role models for followers. Research has found that when people align their true selves with their actions, they experience a greater sense of meaning and purpose. This alignment positively impacts workplace satisfaction and engagement, reducing absenteeism and turnover.

Logic

Employees trust their leaders to make decisions that are in the team’s best interests. When leaders are indecisive, lack follow-through or communicate poorly with followers, trust breaks down. To maintain trust, leaders must share the reasons for their decisions while using easily understood logic. Two ways that leaders can effectively communicate the why behind new ideas and changes are through storytelling and by starting with the main point.

Storytelling is a powerful tool to help team members understand why a change is needed, such as how pets or clients will benefit. Leaders should design their stories to be short, being careful that listeners don’t get bogged down and miss the main point.

An alternative tactic is to start with the main point, or headline, and then explain the why. It could sound like this:

“We will be changing how we conduct team meetings. You have told us you find them too long and not a good use of your time. We will be using a new format, where an agenda will be posted with a variety of topics. The leadership team will choose two to cover in the meeting, and each of you will vote on other topics to decide what needs to be discussed. The top three ideas selected by the team will be added to the agenda. We will reevaluate how this is working after three months. Any questions?”

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to recognize and understand the emotional makeup of other people. A leader’s expression of empathy conveys to team members that they are cared about and valued. Actively communicating empathy involves understanding and appreciating an employee’s situation and then verbally reflecting it supportively. It might sound like, “Sue, I heard that you just had a scary experience and narrowly missed getting bitten. Thank goodness you weren’t hurt. How do you feel?”

What’s a leader to do? To create a hospital workplace where employees want to stay, leaders must recognize the role of followers in the leadership process and acknowledge the symbiotic nature of the leader-follower dynamic. This strategy includes empowering employees to embrace and challenge both stability and change. In addition, leaders must be aware of their moods. They must understand how their words and actions can be positive influences, such as building trust, or have adverse outcomes, such as provoking anxiety and stress.

Now, more than ever, leaders should practice emotional intelligence and cultivate it in their followers through self-awareness and empathy.

OTHER PERSPECTIVES

• Organizational consultant Simon Sinek: “Leaders with toxic behaviors thrive on controlling people instead of inspiring them.”
• Author and leadership coach John C. Maxwell: “A bad leader can take a good plan and destroy it, while a good leader can take a bad plan and make it work.”

MORE ADVICE FOR LEADERS

To help manage stability, consider these two actions:

• Streamline communications: What do your team members realistically need to do their job? Are you overwhelming them with information? Instead, understand your team’s needs by asking questions such as “How often do we need to have meetings?” “What is most valuable to you in the meetings” and “What are we doing today that we could stop doing?”
• Limit room for doubt: Leaders can be unclear about situations or withhold information when they don’t have the complete facts. This situation provokes anxiety within the veterinary team. Seeking to fill in the gaps, followers create their own narrative, based on their ideas and worst-case scenarios. Leaders must transparently communicate what is known and unknown, and share the actions being taken and the expected outcomes.

Change, which fosters adaptability, can be supported by the following leader actions:

• Seek opportunities: Don’t wait for a crisis to arrive before you look for solutions. Instead, understand the landscape and identify opportunities. For example, what new pet services would benefit your clients? A great place to start is by asking clients about their unmet needs, such as “What could we do to make it easier for you to be our client?” or “What do you wish you had for your pet that isn’t available?” Take note when clients ask about animal care services they have heard about. Examples might be telemedicine, alternative pharmacy platforms and direct-to-consumer marketing of pet health insurance. Make space to talk about trends during veterinary team meetings. The conversations are launching pads for innovation.
• Let go: When leaders insist on maintaining control, the unintended consequence is less buy-in from teams and stalled innovation. Research has found that individuals place a high value on things they help create. Gaining diverse input from a wide variety of team members early in the ideation process will increase belief in the initiative because they are invested in the outcome. A favorite example of mine is when leaders at one of my client hospitals agreed to participate in a clinical pilot program and designed how the team would implement the necessary changes. The program went nowhere until the leaders said, “We are committed to this. Figure out how to make it work.” The two-year pilot program was highly successful because the team was granted autonomy, which created a strong sense of ownership.