78: Leading with Confidence: Navigating Workplace Dynamics & Difficult Conversations

CB_78 – Renee Solo Q&A: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

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Dr. Renee Thompson:
Plants thrive and grow in a peaceful, nourished environment, right? Well, it's the same with human beings. But what if that environment is not so peaceful? What if it's toxic? Welcome to Coffee Break: Breaking the Cycle of Bullying in Healthcare – One Cup at a Time. In this podcast, you'll get practical, evidence-based strategies to help you cultivate and sustain a healthy and respectful work culture by tackling an age-old problem in healthcare: bullying and incivility. I am your host, Dr. Renee Thompson.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Hi, everyone! Welcome back to another episode of the Coffee Break Podcast. Today is another Q&A with Renee, and if this is your first time joining us once a month, it's just me, and I answer questions that I have received from leaders over the last 14 years. I've been doing this work on addressing bullying and incivility. And let me tell you, I should write another book just on common situations that leaders are struggling with and really how to resolve those issues. So, I have three that I'm going to go over with you today.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
So here's the situation. One of the leaders in our Eradicating Bullying and Incivility e-learning program okay, so our foundational program, after she finished the course, she really wanted to start a journey towards a healthy work culture by addressing disruptive behaviors because that's what this course was all about, providing leaders with the essential skills to finally set behavioral expectations and hold people accountable for professional conduct. And what she said to me was, I really want to start this initiative, but I'm not really sure how to go about it. She said, I want to present this at our next staff meeting. Can you give me some recommendations for how to approach this? I'm like, yes, okay, let's talk about this. There's a strategy that I use anytime you want to like implement something new. And I call it my left brain and right brain strategy. Okay, so here's the deal. We all have a left brain and a right brain. Okay. Like, we all know that. And actually, people think that you're either more left-brained or you're more right-brained. Now, there's some controversy over this. So if you read anything that the scientists neuropsychologists, what they say about it is we kind of use them equally. But I'm telling you in my experience, and you can probably agree with me. There are some people who do appreciate more the left brain and other people who appreciate the right brain approach.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
So, let's talk about left brain. Left brain, these are people who are very analytical, okay? They're all about logic. They're very objective. They want data. They want articles. They want proof. They want all the quantitative results from anything that you do. You have then people who are more right brained. And those are the emotional, the more creative. They love the story. And there's actually a really great article in the Harvard Business Review, and I'll make sure I put the link in the show notes about storytelling and the power of storytelling has, especially in the workplace. And what they found was that storytelling has just this remarkable ability to connect people and inspire them to take action. So I want you to think about this as I'm going through this, this leader who wanted to put, you know, take her team on a journey. You want them to connect people and inspire them to take action. And there was someone. His name is Tim O'Brien, who's well-known for his books about the Vietnam War, and he actually put it this way. He said storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is to really tell stories.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
And I'll give you a semi-personal example. When I'm doing a keynote presentation or a workshop, I always tell my coffee slurping story. And that coffee slurping story is a part of our first strategy to eradicate bullying and incivility, and that is to heighten awareness. And I tell this story, and people laugh. And then I say, you can't expect people to adapt their behavior if they're not even aware their behavior needs to be adapted. And that goes into the whole how you have to heighten awareness. Everywhere I go, people say to me, oh, tell your coffee slurping story, or, hey, do you still slurp your coffee? Okay. And if they meet my husband, who was involved in the story, they're like, well, does she still slurp her coffee? Here's the deal. They actually might not even remember that that was part of our strategy, you know, heightened awareness, but boy, do they remember this story. And I just want to reinforce that to you. If you want to change something, you want to start a new initiative; you want your people to take action. You have to consider that in your audience. And that's at work in your department. You have people who want the data. They want to know. Studies show, okay, but you also have people who want the story. So you have to do both. So this is sort of what I recommended to her. I said, this is what it looks like. You start the meeting. Okay. And you just start with studies show, and I'm just going to give you a few studies that I use. Studies show 77% of us have witnessed bullying and incivility at work. Pause for dramatic effect. The number one cause of burnout and turnover are toxic workplaces. Left brain. Left brain.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
You might want to add a specific metric from your department. Let's say you had an employee engagement survey. People pulse survey something. Pull in one of those metrics that indicates something negative, okay? You can then say studies show that when someone is working with a coworker who they either fear, who intimidates them, or they feel they've been bullied by them or mistreated by them in some way. They spend 50% of their time worrying about that incident, and they decrease their work effort. So these are all left brain, left brain, left brain, left brain, left brain. And then you say, if your mom was a patient here, or you could say your mom, your partner, spouse, child, precious grandbaby, you know, just make it relevant to your department, would that be okay with you? And then I usually end up saying, remember, the way we treat each other is just as important as the care that we provide. And then, I would always add some type of personal story. So, you're telling the story, or it's not even really a story saying, if that was your mom, would that be okay? But you're starting to cross over now into the right brain side, and then you add some type of personal story.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
When I was a new nurse, I almost quit two weeks after I started because of how I was treated by one person in the department where I was working, and if it weren't for my manager calling me the next day, which I thought she was calling me to fire me, who said, I know what happened, it wasn't your fault. You come back into work on Monday. You're a good nurse. I would have quit. And that's my own personal story. And that's true. That's what happened to me. I almost quit nursing because of one person who I was working with. And if it weren't for my manager calling me again, I thought it was calling. I knew it was going to fire me. Okay. Oh my gosh, all this time money spent nursing school, I'm going to be fired in two weeks. Actually, I was hoping to try to quit before she fired me so I could say I wasn't fired; I just quit. Okay. You know, you play the games because then it makes it real. It makes it personal. And then what I shared with her. Then, you get into whatever it is that you want to change. She wants to go on this journey to improve their culture and start addressing disruptive behavior. She wants to create a culture of respect and kindness and all of that good stuff. And actually what I suggested to her is that she tell them, I just finished this course. I just went through this experience and I realized that I need to do a better job addressing disruptive behaviors and even behaving in a more professional way myself. You know, whatever makes sense for you. I don't understand why, you know, leaders go to conferences, or they take courses, or they learn something, but they don't go back and tell their teams, hey, I just took this course on conflict resolution, and oh my God, what I learned. That is role modeling, this continuous improvement ongoing, you know, learning and the work that we do here at the Healthy Workforce Institute, we go in, we do a lot of consulting. And what helps to take the team from being very resistant, you know, helps them get away from that us versus them mentality. It's not us, it's the boss, kind of a thing, is when they recognize that their boss is learning too. That their boss, their leader, that would be you who are listening or watching right now, you don't come into leadership knowing exactly how to address these behaviors. You don't. And honestly, organizations don't do a good job teaching leaders how to set behavioral expectations and hold people accountable. That's why we do this, because we know leaders need the help.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
So, anytime you want to ask your team to take action to do something differently, you want to start a new initiative. You want to ask them to do something different. You're changing your process. Just remember that there's always people who are more left-brain or analytical, and they want the studies. They want the numbers to basically, you have to convince them why this is a good use of their time, but then you have all those right-brain people who want the story. And again, I'll put the link to the article from the Harvard Business Review in the show notes. It's a really, really good article, and it talks about the whole concept of storytelling and how powerful it is in some ways that you can actually make storytelling one of those. It's really an opportunity for you to get people to go in the direction you want them to go in. Okay. Storytelling is powerful. Okay. That was situation number one.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Here's another situation. It comes up all the time. And I just realized I hope I didn't share this one before I don't think I did. Common, very common, where you were working as a staff nurse with your peers, maybe you were in that department for a couple of years, 10 years, 15 years, doesn't matter. All of a sudden, now you're in a leadership role. You're the assistant nurse manager, you're the manager, and all of a sudden, your peers who you always had a great relationship with are now sort of your resistors pushing back, excluding you being so nice to your face but mocking you behind your back. The complainers, they complain about you and may even resort to attacking you in some way. I cannot tell you how many times I've had a conversation with a leader who said, I'm really struggling with this, so I teach them how to have the lens conversation. Now I'm telling you, it's better to have it right when it happens, right when you move into that leadership role. But what if you've been in that leadership role for six months already? Well, then, have the conversation now. You know, best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time is today. So here's the lens conversation. You get together with maybe 1 or 2 of those people, and you, in a way, call it the elephant in the room, as they say. You say, look, I get it. Yesterday, I was your peer. Today, I'm your boss. And you know it's not easy transitioning. Not easy for me. It's not easy for you. It's important for you to understand that the lens I viewed all of my decisions when I was taking care of patients was the lens based on what was best for my patients, based on what was best during my shift, best people who I was working with that shift. Okay, all of my decisions were made using that lens. What's best for my patients, my team. What's happening on my shift? Well, now that I am in this leadership role, my lens has changed. Now, the lens I view, all of my decisions are based on what's best for all of our patients. Every single person on the team 24/7.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
What that means is that the decisions that I'm making now may affect you as an individual in a negative way. It's important, though, for you to understand why. Because again, the lens I'm using to make these decisions are based on what's best for the entire department. Not just one person, not just these patients on this shift. And then you work through that and you say, any time that you have concerns, you question a decision, just come and talk to me. We'll talk through it because I'm still learning, okay? I am still learning. And it goes back to it's such a powerful way to show your vulnerability and separate that you know, us versus them is to say, you know what? This is a new role for me, and I'm learning. So if you have concerns, you have a question, come to me. Because what I don't want to find out is that you've been talking about me behind my back. We don't do that here, okay? So you're kind of like setting that expectation. You have a question, you have a concern. You don't like the decision that I make. Come talk to me with respect. Be honest and respectful. That's what I expect of you, okay? And I promise I'll do the same for you.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
It's very common to hear someone goes from a peer to somebody in a leadership role within the same department. Now, there are people who basically say, don't ever do that. You should never become a leader in a department, that you are a peer, because of this sort of conflict that happens. My opinion there are some benefits because you know the department, you know the players, you know everybody. It's not like you have to get used to, you know, new people and everybody you know is so nice and you find out they're not so nice. Like, you know, the people in the department that you've been working on for ten years. So, there are some benefits to becoming a leader in a department that you've worked, but there are challenges. And so what do you do? You mitigate those challenges by being upfront right from the beginning. And again, if you've been in the role for a year or two and you're still having these same issues, then have the lens conversation now. You know, I know it's been a year. I know it's been six months, but it's really important that we have this conversation that you understand how I make decisions now.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Okay. All right. The last one that I want to talk about, this is a situation very common. I'll give you a few examples, and then you can, I'm sure, come up with a few of your own. So a leader told me this one's … Not too, too long after the pandemic kind of peaked and then was okay and peaked. I think we had like what, three peaks? And they were giving a lot of incentive bonuses to nurses for picking up extra shifts. And one of the managers told me that she had to communicate to her nurses that they were taking away the incentive bonuses for them to stay extra. And this one nurse said out loud, okay, so with her outside voice, well, you better hope there are extra beds for you to sleep in because you'll be the one working, and she said that in front of everyone. So I had another manager say they were talking to one of their employees about something, and the employee said, well, that's not my job, just like that. Another leader was telling me it was an executive leader; she does rounds in some of the departments and may even dress up and give out candy and give out treats, and always likes to meet with her people, and somebody said to her, must be nice spending time passing out treats to people while we're working so hard. So it's like, what is wrong with people that actually say these things with their outside voice instead of like, you could say anything you want with your inside voice, but to actually think it's okay to say, that's not my job, or, well, you better hope they have extra beds so that you can sleep here because you're the one that's going to be working because nobody else is going to work now if you take away our bonuses or must be nice, having fun, walking around, giving out treats to people, chatting with people while we're working so hard.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
So what do you do? I will tell you what most of us do. It's normal. It's common. We defend ourselves immediately. And that's what this first manager did when the nurse said, oh, you better hope they have extra beds for you. And she said, do you know how many hours I work? You know, you at least get a day off. And she went on and on and on. I'm like, oh no, no, no, no. Even the, it's not my job. What do you mean it's not your job? And, you know, it's everybody's job and all of this stuff. I'm like, okay, I'm going to give you two ways that you can respond to this. My favorite way, all I want you to do is say their verbatim comments back to them. You can say, you just said, pause for dramatic effect, that's not my job. You can even rephrase it differently. Excuse me and act all confused. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Did you actually just say, that's not my job? Okay, so you can do one of two ways, but you got to be kind of dramatic about it. And when this manager actually shared that comment with me, I was doing a workshop and we were doing, you know, here are some common situations. I'm always like, hit me, what do you got? Like, what are situations that you're dealing with? And then I help them figure out.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
It's kind of one of those things where if they're telling me this happened, it happened in the past, and most likely, they did not handle it in a way that they felt was effective. So we say it's okay because chances are you're going to be in the situation again. How would you handle it differently? And I was like, well, how did you handle it? I'm telling you, we defend ourselves, we defend the situation, and then I give them a better way. So I said to her, here's what you could have said and what you could say the next time when you say, that's not my job. Again, emphasize their verbatim or like words. When you say that here in healthcare, when everything that every one of us does impacts someone's pull the mom card, mom, partner, spouse, child. Now, this might be controversial for some of you, but I told her to say, you know what? Yeah, for you to say that's not my job here in healthcare makes me think that healthcare isn't the right fit for you. Period. That's it. Maybe this isn't the right fit for you, and you know you don't want to get into. I pick up garbage. I, is everybody's job. Don't do that. Just say when you say, that's not my job here in healthcare, when everything that we do impacts someone's mom, it makes me think that maybe healthcare is not a good fit for you. Okay, now the comments. You better hope there's extra beds any time somebody says something kind of that's in a way passive aggressive, sarcastic. Oh, I'm just kidding. They might say, I want you to use their verbatim comments back. Okay, you just said, repeat exactly what they said. Was your intention to upset me? Did you say that to make me feel bad or to threaten me? You put it back on them because, like I said, what we do is we defend ourselves, and we get, oh, hey, you know, I've been working hours and, you know, don't do that. Put it back on them, make them defend themselves. So what you just said, was your intention to hurt me, was your intention to upset me? Or you could even just say, what was your intent? Why would you say something like that to me is another way that you can respond. I just want you to think about some of these situations where someone says something really nasty to you or says something I think, like ridiculous. And you can even say, you know what? I'm not going to respond to that and turn around and walk away what that implies. Oh, I can oh, I can respond to that, but I'm choosing not to. So that's another approach.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
So the person who was passing out treats and talking to people must be nice. She taught me this once, I think. And we were talking, and she said, here's how I responded. You know when he said, must be nice. Passing out treats. She's like, it is. I love it. It's my favorite thing to do, even if it means I'm going to have to stay late now to get my work done, even if it means I have to take time away from my family to get my work done. This is so important to me. Thank you. So it's like kind of zinging them back, but in a way that isn't zinging them back. But you know, when somebody says, must be nice, it is nice. It's my favorite thing to do, even if it means I have to stay late today. It's worth it because I love spending time with my people. So the bottom line with this, when people say things that are so ridiculous, don't take the bait. Do not defend yourself. Address it. And you know the few ways that I recommended, but just don't take the bait. Even if you just have to say I'm offended by that comment; I'm not willing to respond to that comment. Turn around and walk away. It is far better for you to do that than to get into an argument with someone and defend yourself because when you do that, you actually lose a little bit of credibility. Okay, I know it's not easy to do, but I'm telling you, it's a little bit of practice. Pick a few situations, even if it's just to use their verbatim comments back to them; you can get to the point where you're like, yeah, I'm not going to play that game with you. Peace out. I'm out of here. Again, like, I'm not doing this.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Okay, well, those were three different situations, very different, that I wanted to share with you today. And if you actually have a situation that you want me to share a solution on this podcast, all I want you to do is email us at [email protected]. So, in the show notes, you will find that article from the Harvard Business Review. You'll find a link to our Eradicating Bullying and Incivility course and a few other resources that we have that we recommend for leaders who are truly trying to address disruptive behaviors by setting behavioral expectations and holding their people accountable. I want to thank you for being here. Some of my favorite, favorite Times where I get to just sit down and think about how I can help you and so many other leaders who are really struggling with this issue right now. So I want to thank you for being here, and I'll see you all next month. Take care everyone.

Dr. Renee Thompson:
Thank you for listening to Coffee Break: Breaking the Cycle of Bullying in Healthcare – One Cup at a Time. If you found this podcast helpful, we invite you to click the subscribe button and tune in every week. For more information about our show and how we work with healthcare organizations to cultivate and sustain a healthy work culture free from bullying and incivility, visit us at HealthyWorkforceInstitute.com. Until our next cup of coffee, be kind, take care, and stay connected.

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