What are the long-term effects of ignoring toxicity and bad behavior in the workplace?

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Ignoring toxic attitudes and behaviours in your veterinary practice is easiest..right?

You are busy, your mind is on other things and you choose to walk past toxic attitudes and behaviours in your workplace. It might avoid unpleasantness in the short term, but what is the longer term impact?

Many practices have a staff member with negative attitudes and toxic actions. Does yours? You know that person who comes in at the beginning of their shift as if they have a black cloud over their head, who doesn’t even say hello to the rest of the team and whose mood is infectious so that everybody starts to feel down? They may be the same person that leaves jobs they don’t consider fun to others, takes the credit for things they didn’t do or even shifts the blame for stuff they did do. Often they are people with great clinical skills – people we think the practice can’t live without.

Ignoring the behaviour can be easy…

Walking past and ignoring these behaviours can be such a relief at the time – it avoids conflict and allows us to concentrate on tasks we enjoy. It may seem like the easiest option, especially if we don’t feel like we have the power or the skills to do something about it.

Short term gain though leads to long term pain.

Toxic attitudes can lead to toxic environments

Toxic attitudes in veterinary practices lead to toxic environments 1.  The bad behaviour of one, or a small number, can have an impact on the health and well-being of the entire team as people’s head space gets cluttered with thoughts of how to avoid either the toxic person or their wrath. They may spend so much time and invest so much emotional energy into coping with the situation that they have less energy and focus for their real job – that of looking after clients and pets.

They may lose trust, become defensive and withdraw their discretionary effort. And the simmering tension and conflict in the clinic creates additional demands on people and contributes to burnout. People start looking for other jobs or careers.

Changing your culture

Back in 2013, the Australian armed forces wanted to change the entrenched culture present in their workplace. Lieutenant General David Morrison (Chief of Army) told everybody that, “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” In saying this, he wanted each and every member of the workplace to take responsibility for the culture and to make a stand against unacceptable practices.

In your clinics – the ostrich approach may be the currently accepted way of dealing with bad behaviour. Understanding the cost of this approach, is it time to tackle it? Is it time to draw a line in the sand? Is David Morrison’s statement and message something that you could put to use in your practice?

Trying to tackle an entrenched problem can seem overwhelming.

But if we break into small achievable steps, change can happen.

  1. Be an observer in your own practice – watch closely and really notice what is happening.

  2. Draw the line in the sand – have a staff meeting and, as a group, decide on acceptable ways of conducting yourselves. Display your code of conduct prominently.

  3. Consistently hold people accountable for their actions and give them the opportunity to change.

  4. Be prepared to lose people who cannot or will not change.

My experience as a manager is that steps 3 and 4 are the hardest.

Consistency is key

Consistency can go out the door in the face of sickness, busy periods etc  – but consistency is crucial. Everybody must be held accountable to the same code of conduct, no matter their experience, position or longevity in the role.

Helping people with established and unhelpful patterns to change their behaviour can be difficult. This is unlikely to be a smooth process– it may be one step forward and two steps backwards, and it will take time. One option you could consider is to provide a course of coaching with an experienced veterinary professional – an objective outsider who can provide a safe place to explore the reasons behind the actions and support the new ways of being, without having to simultaneously manage them.  The coaching course could be part of the support you provide on a performance management plan.

And if you have provided support to meet the behavioural guidelines and it is still not happening, the next step is to make the best decision for the team, the clients you care for and your clinics productivity.

You can live without that toxic person and it probably will be a damned sight better than living with them.

1. Moore IC et al (2015) Exploring the impact of toxic attitudes and a toxic environment on the veterinary healthcare team. Front. Vet. Sci. 2:78

Our brains are malleable and we can change IF we want to.

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You can’t teach an old dog new tricks – a saying that is as old as the hills, but is it true?

The first references to the concept of not being able to teach an old dog new tricks occurred back in the 1500’s. This and the related saying, leopards can’t change their spots, are said so often that they must be true – change is impossible, especially if you have been doing the same thing for a long time. Right?

Is change impossible?

I am not so sure that we can get leopards to change their spots and I haven’t read the literature on brain change in dogs, but I am sure that we all know people that have changed – both for the better and the worse.  And we may have read popular books such as Norman Doidges’, “The Brain That Changes Itself” or watched Todd Sampson redesigning his brain on the ABC and know that we can change – that our brains are plastic throughout our life span – and that we can form new neural connections and strengthen or weaken neural pathways provided that we see a need to do so and are motivated to make the change.

I know I can learn new skills but change parts of my personality?

Ok – but what does that mean to me, I hear you say? I already know that I can learn to do a new surgery or how to better manage a diabetic or how to interpret a profit and loss statement. Well, from my point of view, the really, super exciting stuff is around the changes that we can make to parts of our personality that many of us think are fixed – things like our ability to communicate positively and build relationships, whether we are optimists or pessimists, our tendency towards perfectionist thinking, or the degree to which we can self-regulate.  The list of qualities that we can develop is long and growing. It also includes;

  • Resilience
  • Hope
  • Will-power
  • Compassion and Empathy
  • Self-efficacy
  • Creativity
  • Patience
  • Co-operation
  • Kindness
  • Calmness

Our brain can be like a well-worn track

Our brain pathways can be compared to the well-worn track that this 4WD that is travelling down.  If the 4WD stays on the track, then it can move quickly and easily. Likewise, our experiences to date will have created well-utilised fast neural circuits in our brains. Many of these will be very helpful and allow us to complete tasks quickly and efficiently.

The problem is that some of them may be creating repetitive patterns of behaviour that are not serving us particularly well and could even be causing us pain. It might be that we have got into a pattern of looking for the negatives in our life and barely notice, maybe even take for granted, the things that are going well.  Our pattern may be that we work harder and harder without consciously realizing it until we get to burnout. We may keep repeating the same problems in our relationships. Or alternatively, we may limit our lives by wanting to control everything and or by wanting to do the things we do so perfectly that we stay right in our comfort zone and never venture out.

Maybe it’s time to creat some new tracks?

If we want the 4WD to veer off the well-worn track and go in a different direction, it is possible but it takes a bit of work. We might need to put a roadblock up on the old track and actively clear some space in the bush for a new track to be laid down.  Just as we can move the 4WD off the track and send it in a new direction – we can deliberately starve neural pathways that are not serving us well and create new more useful pathways in our brains.

Neuroplasticity is our friend in change.

Changing to a new, more helpful path is not going to be easy – but if some of the old ones are causing problems, it is probably worth the effort.

So how do we make the changes?

  1. The first step is always self-awareness – stand back and observe your automatic thoughts and patterns of behaviour.
  2. Consciously recognize that you have a choice to act in a different way.
  3. Consider how a person that is optimisitic or a healthy self-regulator or kind etc would behave in this situation.
  4. Do what they would do.

It’s not going to be easy

Easy – huh? Of course it is not. Changing the pattern of a life-time is not going to be easy. But who wants easy?  Fulfilled, happy and excited sound way better. We will all start at different points and improve at different rates but the large, large majority of us can grow and change in many different aspects of our lives. Small, regular actions are the best to create lasting change and sometimes (maybe even often) we will need professional support to do this.  Consider enlisting the help of a coach, counsellor or psychologist.

What will be your new trick?

CLING on to your mental well-being

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Working in veterinary practice is difficult enough but if you have a day where everything goes wrong what can you do?

You know those days where everything you touch turns to stinky diarrhoea……?  What do you do to get yourself back on track?

We all have those days that start badly and just seem to continue on in the same vein. It really is as if we got out of bed on the wrong side – the dog vomits and you have to clean it up, then you find that you have run out of milk and you have a fight with your partner over who should have got it. By the time you get to work, minus your usual caffeine fix, you are already feeling that you are in for a bad day. A small extra setback – somebody calls in sick or a client questions a bill or one of your cases is not going as well as you would like – may be the literal straw that breaks the camels’ back and sets you off. You may be the type that does silence – you go quiet and look grumpy, but if anybody dares asks you if everything is OK, you say “I’m FINE” in such as way that everybody knows you are anything but fine. Or your style may be more in the violence category – where you snap at people and create distance with your words.

What can you do about it?

Does your day have to continue on like this? Are you able to get a handle on yourself and stop your mood infecting the whole workplace? It may help to consider your emotions as being like the Melbourne weather – constantly changing.  You may have started off with a shower or storm, but the sun is there, waiting to break through. Why don’t you take a few minutes to do something that makes you feel happy and allows the sun to come out?

Research has some answers…

Researchers in the field of positive psychology (the science of leading a flourishing life) have highlighted that there are many, small things that you can do to lift your mood. For example, you could take 5 minutes to go outside and watch a bird or an insect about its work OR put on your favourite piece of music through headphones OR watch a funny video on YouTube OR pat a non-judgmental furry friend.

It’s time to CLING!

Give it a go and see what a difference it can make to your day – CLING right on to your happiness or well-being and see the differences in productivity – both to you and your workplace. CLING is a neat acronym which summarises many of the evidence-based happiness interventions.

Connect – with family, friends or pets

Learn – new things

Into Action – get the benefits of exercise

Notice – be mindful and curious of the world around you

Give – take the focus off yourself and give to others

Becoming and staying successful in veterinary practice.

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How do we become, and stay, successful in veterinary practice?

It has been said that success in veterinary practice comes when we have that sweet combination of clinical ability, interpersonal and personal skills (Viner 2010). We in the veterinary industry are great achievers and we particularly love to grow our clinical skills and knowledge. Our focus on clinical acumen is understandable – but when was the last time you worked on your relationship building strategies or thought about how you could improve your resilience or contemplated what makes you happy in your professional life?

Have you even considered what success would look like for you??

It is super easy to buy into the model of success advocated by the advertising industry – the beautiful, calm people in their immaculate houses surrounded by all sorts of consumer goods. Getting this type of success will definitely make big business happy – but will it make you happy, really? The definition of success which resonates with me is one from Maya Angelou, an American poet and novelist –

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it”

Now that is what I am talking about! The question is, do you? Do you like yourself, do you like what you do and do you like how you do it? Often we get into a space of running around busily checking things off our multiple lists without even thinking whether it should be on the list in the first place – is it important, is it helpful, will it make a positive difference to us or to others?

Create some space….

Sometimes we need to create some space, to stand back and reflect……

…..to consider how happy we feel,

…..to think about what we are good at,

…..to think about what matters to us and

…..how we can make a contribution to the world.

Is it time to reflect and maybe rejig things in your life?