In 1971, my dad graduated from the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine. In 2014, I began working as his clinic manager and watched him grapple with rapid changes in the field. He had a keen eye for inefficiency and hesitated to adopt anything new if it added avoidable expense. For instance, he balked as the staff advocated for a Fear Free approach to reduce pet anxiety and stress during visits. Dad was old school. He relished opportunities to show new staff how to do a solo blood draw by tethering an unruly dog to the stainless-steel lift table — his “iron extern.”
We spent countless hours scrutinizing profit and loss statements and tracking key performance indicators. Metrics such as revenue by full-time equivalent veterinarian, client lifetime value, average transaction per client and inventory turnover became the foundation of our decision-making. While these indicators are essential for profitability and sustainability, authentic leadership is about people, not KPIs.
In retrospect, I was guilty of managing our numbers rather than leading our people. Our culture was broken. Working at the clinic felt like being tethered to a cold, mechanical iron extern. While we invested in reducing our patients’ fear, anxiety and stress, we failed to foster a supportive environment for our staff. Our employees were asking, “Fear Free, but what about me?”
Culture as a Competitive Advantage
Improving workplace culture is one of the most significant challenges that veterinary clinics face. A 2023 survey by the American Animal Hospital Association reported that about 30% of veterinary professionals planned to leave their jobs, with many considering exiting the profession entirely. The problem is not going away.
Our clinic was not immune to the factors driving turnover. As the region’s only 24-hour hospital, we took in many of the most severe cases. Our doctors regularly worked past their 12-hour shifts due to medical emergencies or having to triage transfers from neighboring clinics.
Somedays, economic euthanasia seemed to be our patients’ leading cause of death. We compounded the problem when we offered walk-in euthanasia. We reasoned it was challenging for pet owners to muster the courage to say goodbye, so we wanted to be there when they were ready. The staff showed unmistakable signs of burnout and compassion fatigue.
We launched internship programs with veterinary and technician schools to prepare for the predictable employee turnover. Through conversations with students, we learned that workplace culture and mentorship were more important to them than compensation.
The students recognized something we did not fully grasp. A toxic workplace culture is the No. 1 reason people leave their jobs and is 10.4 times more likely to drive attrition than pay, according to a study from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
While managing the clinic, I pursued a Ph.D. in values-driven leadership, researching how leader behavior affects psychological safety. The journey led to a paradigm shift in my understanding of authentic leadership. It’s about building strong relationships, fostering open communication, holding ourselves and others accountable, and cultivating a psychologically safe work environment.
Retired veterinarian Dr. David Hall affirmed this leadership approach, telling me: “Turnover goes down and morale goes up when you foster a safe work environment. As a huge bonus, I started to enjoy my staff when I learned to love them instead of looking at them as the enemy within. We all were beneficiaries. I’m just sorry it took me so long to figure it out.”
So, What Is Psychological Safety?
Dr. Amy C. Edmondson, a professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, defines psychological safety as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”
Psychological safety’s magic lies in its simplicity. It is an individual’s experience of feeling safe enough to exhibit vulnerable behaviors, such as asking a question, sharing an idea, admitting a mistake or speaking truth to power. Without psychological safety, people often choose the risk-free route of silence, avoiding any chance of embarrassment, judgment or retribution.
Research from the consulting firm McKinsey shows that only 26% of leaders are effective at fostering psychological safety in their teams. Many leaders mistakenly assume they have a healthy work environment because no one openly disagrees or brings up thorny issues. Instead, these cultures may be experiencing dysfunctional harmony, stifling communication, innovation and productivity.
Psychological safety is a personal experience, but its benefits for organizations are realized within teams. Because people feel comfortable working through disagreements and challenging each other, the best solutions emerge — not from a comfortable consensus but from constructive conflict and a commitment to a shared mission.
How Do You Get It?
Work cultures develop as employees make sense of their leaders’ behavior and other environmental cues. Employees who perceive leaders as well-meaning are more likely to trust them and give them the benefit of the doubt when mistakes occur. Psychological safety is rooted in whether employees believe a leader will extend the same benefit of the doubt when they fail. Over time, individual opinions of the environment merge into a shared awareness, answering the question, “Are we safe?” That perception is the foundation of the work culture.
Culture defines what is tolerated as normal and acceptable. It forms the collective expectation of how things get done. Leaders must understand their culture, as it can influence the strategies an organization can successfully implement. Since culture begins with how employees make sense of their environment, what you tolerate from your team members — and especially from yourself as a manager or owner — shapes the culture.
Psychological safety scales and becomes a defining characteristic of the work culture. When team members are free from the fear of reprisal, self-protection instincts diminish within a group, leading to better decisions and outcomes.
Leaders who aspire to foster psychological safety should keep the following tips in mind:
- Recognize the impact of leadership behavior: Be mindful of how your actions set the tone for the workplace culture. Leaders have an outsized influence on the culture.
- Develop open dialogue skills: Normalize constructive conflict. Modeling this behavior fosters trust and mutual understanding among team members.
- Practice situational humility: Admit when you are wrong and acknowledge what you don’t know. Being fallible and open creates a space where team members can risk vulnerability and share their ideas. Display genuine curiosity about others’ viewpoints.
Those simple behavioral changes pay significant dividends, as research demonstrates that feeling psychologically safe has a positive impact on communication, innovation, creativity, collaboration, empowerment, engagement and learning from failure, and it decreases turnover.
In other words, psychological safety isn’t just about employee well-being. It also fosters behaviors that benefit the bottom line.
STORY ARCHIVE
According to Flourish Veterinary Consulting founder Josh Vaisman, a close-mouthed culture does no one any good. Read Install a Psychological Safety Net at go.navc.com/43INc8k.