Hear Randy explain why small moments of recognition and genuine conversations make the biggest difference for engagement.

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Transcript

Hi everyone, it's Randy Hall with VetLead, and thanks for joining me for this audio session that gives you a couple of extra tips when you think about engagement and how you, as a leader, can cause it and drive it in your practice.

It's so interesting when I watch leaders do this inside veterinary practices—how things start to change pretty quickly and also pretty dramatically. I just wanted to share with you some of the things that I think people have tried that have worked in the veterinary profession, places that I've seen people create more engaged teams of people.

We talked a little bit about it in the video this week, but this concept of hiring fully engaged people is really important, and I wanted to spend just a couple of minutes on it. It really is using—and we explore this a lot inside our hiring tools for VetLead—what we call behavioral interviewing to look at their patterns and habits of engagement when you hire them.

So I'm going to ask questions like, "Hey, tell me about a time you've had to contribute to a change in the workplace. How did you do it? What ideas did you have? How did you move it forward?" What's key in there is I'm going to use questions like that to go look at the patterns and habits that they have from their past, not their picture of how they're going to be on their best day.

They may say, "Well, usually when a change happens, I try to get on board and help out a lot and think of new ways to keep it going and make it work." Well, that may be how they intend to operate, but I'm going to go look for specific examples of where they did operate that way. If I can't find any, then this is a less effective candidate when I think about their ability to come in and be engaged.

Sometimes people run into challenges just sharing their thoughts on that, and that's okay. But usually, if they've done some things that made a difference relative to how change happened—for example, in their practice—and you can find ways they were engaged in it, then the likelihood of them being engaged in your practice is greater.

So we're playing the odds. We're scoring these questions and saying, "Hey, I can find places where this human can tell me real historical stories of how they've engaged in change." Those are hard to make up in the moment, and so we now have a picture of a track record of their engagement in other ways. That's what I'm looking for when I hire people. You can learn more by going to our hiring playbook and downloading that and working through it in terms of sets of questions. But yes, we want to start there on engagement. Let's hire fully engaged people.

But we also have to be, as I mentioned in the video, a fully engaged workplace. That means I'm going to put systems and processes and habits in place, and I have to do these on a regular basis.

I know hospitals that have been able to reorganize their structure and now have regular—sometimes even monthly—one-on-one coaching conversations with everybody in the practice. If we're built so that we've got maybe one manager trying to coach 20 or 30 people, it doesn't work. It's impossible to do. So we've got to think about how do I either help shift leaders or other supervisors or other people in the business also become effective at coaching? And again, lots of resources where you can do that here at VetLead.

But if I've got a high-quality coach, I am more engaged. It's that simple. If that human has practiced this process of coaching people to the point where they're adding real value to me, then I'm going to be more engaged in that system and with that group of people. So I want to think about that.

Huddles are great ways that I've seen people sort of create engagement. They can come in in the morning and even talk in the huddle—in a three or a five or a 10-minute huddle—about who wants to learn what today. What are we going to do today that helps us move a little bit forward as a team? What are our goals for this morning based on what we have on our plates or on the schedule? What are some of the things that we're going to do to sort of support each other because it looks like it's going to be a crazy day?

We can use a huddle to drive engagement in ways that we often just don't try or haven't built habits around yet that allow us to. If we have huddles, we already have a vehicle for doing some of this. This is a place we can give feedback too. We can, in the huddle, sort of recognize people who went over and above yesterday or who learned new things or who improved the way they showed up or whatever they did. I want to be specific about it and say, "Hey, when you did this yesterday, that really mattered."

There's places where people use the first 30 seconds or the first two minutes of their huddle just for people to give shout-outs to those around them that have done good work or that helped them through something—being specific, not just "that person's a good teammate." That's nice, but when we're specific, people can sort of duplicate what they did before, and that's important. So huddles are a really important way for us to build that level of engagement just because of the way we pay attention to the five things we talked about in the video, and we use the huddle as a place to execute on some of those habits that we want to have as a leader that increase engagement in our system.

Meetings are another one. If we have staff meetings or we have places where people show up for the meeting, occasionally I'll see veterinary hospital meetings that really just look like a laundry list of things we need to do different or that we did wrong or that we shouldn't do again. That's not very engaging. Nobody gets excited about that.

It doesn't mean we can't have a few minutes of a meeting devoted to some things everybody needs to know about where we've sort of discovered some patterns that aren't helpful for us. But we want to spend most of that time on maybe even breaking people out and saying, "All right, I want you three or four to go over here and think about: if we wanted to improve our client experience in the next 30 days, what will we try? If there was one thing that we could do that would cause clients to go home and tell their neighbors that we were more amazing than any veterinary hospital they've been into, what would it be? And how would we start?"

Just little things. I'm not looking for big, massive overhauls. I'm looking for constant progress because big, massive overhauls don't often work, and there's so much behavior change associated with them that people can get worn out pretty quickly. So I'm going to look for one or two things we're going to test and learn over the next 30 days.

I'm engaging people when I do that because they get to contribute. They're adding more value. We have clarity around what we're headed toward or what we want to try together as a team. All kinds of things that can start to feed into a fully engaged group of people.

So just wanted to share a couple of tips with you as you think about leadership: high-quality coaching, regular feedback, regular support, using our vehicles like huddles and spaces where we have conversation available to us. Meetings can be that too. All kinds of ways that we can think about contributing to a really highly engaged workplace.

We, as the leaders, get to go think about them, get to go build them, get to go try them, get to go conceive of something that makes our workplace better and different. That's what leaders do. So thinking about how we contribute to that as leaders actually increases our own engagement. I've never seen a fully engaged team of people with a disengaged leader, so we've got to do things that kind of reinvigorate ourselves as well.

Hey, thanks for being here for this audio, and I appreciate you listening to me and also being part of VetLead, where we're building a community where people can come together and create a happier profession through high-quality leadership and consistently improving leadership in our practices. So thanks again for being part of it. I'll talk to you soon.

How Small Steps Lead to Big Engagement

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