Let’s not mince words: Mean people suck. With all due credit to the entrepreneurs who thought to put that slogan on a bumper sticker, the truth is that most of us already knew it was true because we’ve experienced it firsthand. We’ve learned to shy away from those folks around us who, like vampires, tend to suck the life, the fun, and the energy out of every situation. You know the kind of people we’re talking about: whiners, losers, and jerks.
When you come across one of these energy drainers, you can’t get away fast enough, and even when you do, it leaves an awful taste in your mouth. Like when you run into someone we might call a whiner in the break room: Someone who, no matter what, has something negative to say. Heck, the company might have just announced a company-wide bonus, and this person would find some way to turn it into a negative. “You can bet the executives probably paid themselves more than they deserved,” the whiner might say.
A loser, on the other hand, is the person who pops up when you’re late getting into work because you blew a tire on the freeway, the person who feels compelled to chime in and tell you how much worse he or she had it. “Oh, well I had four flat tires and a blown gasket,” the loser says, while you sigh and wonder what a gasket is anyway.
As bad as whiners and losers are, jerks may in fact be the worst of all. These people are toxic and corrosive—a negative influence on others. To give you an idea of the kind of person we’re talking about, consider an experience Britt had a few years ago. As head of Medical City, he received e-mail all the time from the nursing staff, about everything from shift duties to changes in benefits. After one such change in the benefits plan, Britt received a flurry of e-mail from the staff. The tone of most of this e-mail was, as you would expect, fairly formal and respectful. But one nurse—let’s call her “Nurse Ratched”—was, to put it plainly, just rude. Taken aback by the note, Britt, who didn’t know Nurse Ratched particularly well, thought that she must have been having a bad day, so he gave her a pass and simply wrote back, asking for some clarification of the point she had raised.
Wouldn’t you know it? Britt got a response from her that was even snarkier than the first. Now, Britt may be a bit old-fashioned, but even workers of a younger generation should know better than to flat-out insult the CEO of their hospital. A bit peeved at this point, Britt took the initiative to have a chat with the chief nursing officer to find out what was going on with Nurse Ratched that might explain her rude behavior.
You won’t be surprised to hear Britt quickly found out that the CNO had been having problems with this nurse from the day she was hired. Not only was she disrespectful to her colleagues, she was downright mean and condescending to patients. “So why haven’t you fired her?” Britt asked his CNO. “Do you have the paperwork to back up her problems?” The CNO explained that she did have the paperwork, but she was short-staffed as it was, and this nurse covered a particularly busy shift.
It can be difficult to fire an employee, even if you have good reason. There is always a way to rationalize or find an excuse about why you should keep someone. But, as Britt explained to the CNO, if you had a loved one who needed care at the hospital, would you want this nurse attending to him or her? Of course not.
After that meeting, Britt invited Nurse Ratched for a visit in his office along with a representative from the human resources department. Doing his best to put a positive spin on the situation, Britt explained some of his concerns about Nurse Ratched’s behavior. Rather than an apology or even an explanation, he only got more grief in return. Seeing the situation for what it was, he stood up, walked around his desk, and (as politely as he could) told Nurse Ratched that he was firing her immediately due to her excessively negative behavior. Nurse Ratched went as pale as a ghost and quickly tried to backpedal with a stream of apologies. But it was too little, too late. The only thing left to say was “Good-bye, Nurse Ratched.”
You wouldn’t believe the reaction of everyone at the hospital when they learned that Nurse Ratched had been let go. The news spread like wildfire, and it was almost like the feeling you got as a kid on the last day of school. People seemed to be physically relieved to see her go. One employee even suggested we throw a party to celebrate her departure. We can only imagine what her patients felt. This story goes to show you that whiners, losers, and jerks are not just problematic in and of themselves—they can actually create a ripple effect of negative energy that, in the end, creates bad experiences for their colleagues and, in turn, patients and customers. As Tom Royer, past CEO of CHRISTUS Health in Irving, Texas, told us:
Where we are successful, we have the right people [working for us]. Where we are not successful, we have the wrong people. If we are 99 percent correct in what we do, and you are the one patient who is the other 1 percent, that’s not good. The biggest barrier is the tolerance of mediocrity [in our people]. There’s nothing worse than good people becoming mediocre.
When people are comfortable in their mediocrity—when they put in little effort at work and simply plod along, day after day—there is still hope to turn them around and remind them that working in health care is a calling.
But whiners, losers, and jerks are worse than just mediocre; they have a negative effect on the workplace. They don’t buy into the idea of becoming engaged with their work, and they probably never will. Find them now, and weed them out as soon as possible.
Let’s be honest: All of us at one time or another have been prone to tasting a morsel or two of gossip, which is often dished out in a very negative manner. What we don’t realize is that we are actually feeding those folks who serve up that negative gossip; they thrive when they have an audience for their vitriol. These people are hardwired to whine and complain and draw undue attention to themselves. With mean people, it’s all about me, me, me. This brings up an interesting parallel for those of us who work in health care: Can you see the similarities between this kind of behavior and an infectious disease? Meanness is a toxic behavior, and it tends to spread quickly. So what might you do to combat such an illness? Why, you’d eradicate the source—by whatever means necessary.
At BerylHealth, for example, there was a call center manager who was brought on mostly due to her impressive work history at other organizations. Knowing that the BerylHealth team was growing, Paul and the other senior leaders thought her experience working in bigger call centers would help them scale faster and more efficiently. Boy, were they wrong. Unfortunately, it took them a while to figure it out. You see, the woman—let’s call her “Sally”—knew how to interact with the senior leaders and was always e-mailing metrics and statistical information to show that she was on top of things. But back among her team, she was a command-and-control leader of the worst kind, and she made the experience of those working with her a sheer misery.
It soon became clear to Sally’s peers in other departments that something was wrong. It wasn’t until the employees took a stand and approached senior management about Sally a year later, though, that the gears were put into motion to get her out of there. In this case, BerylHealth got lucky when its employees stepped up to the plate to help the organization expunge a cancer rather than simply getting sick of it and leaving—something that happens all too often in organizations. And losing great people because we as leaders are afraid or ignorant of the behaviors of those few bad apples is something an organization simply cannot afford—especially these days, when it is hard to find and keep great people. Once we have found superstars, we don’t want to lose them.
Let’s be clear: No one enjoys firing someone (at least, they shouldn’t), especially in an economy like the one we’ve been suffering through, where there is little guarantee someone can land another gig. We also have to face the fact that Sally was our mistake: If we had done better work up front, we wouldn’t have hired her and therefore would never have been forced to let her go. But regardless of whose fault it is, there are times when letting someone go is a necessary evil—when it benefits the whole of the organization. As Gary Newsome, CEO of Health Management Associates in Naples, Florida, put it, “High performers will disengage if we allow mediocrity to exist. ‘B’ players need to show signs of being an ‘A,’ and ‘C’ players should be moved out.” For the good of the overall group, it’s the only solution.
We’re playing with live ammunition here, folks, and you don’t have time to mess around. The longer you wait to make the decision, the more likely it becomes that the disease will spread. That means you have to act as quickly as possible when you know you have a problem child in the house. And that’s what makes it hard sometimes, because you’re not dealing with a department or something that’s widespread. It’s just one person. And if that person can’t or won’t make the necessary changes, he or she has to go.
That, of course, is when the excuses and the enabling come into play: We hate firing people, so we give malcontents extra attention and multiple chances, hoping to turn things around. We’re here to tell you that this is a big mistake. By hemming and hawing, you’re actually harming yourself and the organization as a whole. Everyone can see that you’re coddling a problem person, a person no one likes to work with anyway. You need to make the move to get rid of the bad egg, pronto.
When you are an organization trying to implement a culture of engagement, to give everyone a fair shake you have to be willing to bring everyone together and tell it like it is. You may have to call an organization-wide meeting (as Paul has done at BerylHealth from time to time) where you state, in very clear and simple terms, that anyone who wants to work for the organization has to follow certain rules when it comes to his or her behavior toward one another. “We are on a mission,” Paul will say. “If you don’t believe in that mission, we would like you to leave. And if you refuse to leave, we will hunt you down and root you out.” No more Mr. Nice Guy!
Tony Armada, CEO of Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, put it a little more gently:
Those 10 to 15 percent of your employees who are totally disengaged are detrimental within your organization. We spend too much time on those individuals instead of spending time with the solid performers.
The point is, you simply cannot allow any individual to hold your organization hostage or pose a threat to the kind of culture you are trying to build. Sometimes leadership means being willing to stand up and make the tough decisions, to demonstrate the moral courage to say good-bye to the whiners, losers, and jerks.
Let’s not overlook the kind of stakes involved in these decisions. Consider that the lifetime value of a single patient to a hospital is some $250,000. Well, what do you think happens when someone like Nurse Ratched treats that patient? In the wake of a poor patient experience, that patient will not be coming back the next time he or she gets sick, which means you just lost a valuable long-term customer—and probably the rest of the family, too.
It’s humbling to think that a single individual could wreak such havoc with the future of your organization. But given the new realities of health care, where patients have more choice than ever before, as a leader you can’t afford to ignore, overlook, or rationalize keeping your bad apples. The risks are simply too high.
Think about a story our friend, Dr. David Feinberg, CEO of UCLA Health System, told us about his dad, who, at age seventy-five, decided to get hip surgery. But rather than get the procedure done at his son’s hospital, the elder Mr. Feinberg went to a rival facility, a place he had gone before. Although David had tried to get his dad to spend his recovery time at home, Mr. Feinberg refused to let David pay for it, so he stayed in the hospital instead. But it took just a single night before David’s cell phone rang: It was his father, and based on the lousy experience he was having in recovery with the nurses, he wanted David to come help him get out of there. “I’ll never come back here again!” Mr. Feinberg yelled into the phone. Translation: That hospital just lost a longtime customer.
Let’s not forget the great power of choice that patients have over where they go to receive care and the providers from whom they receive it. Just a single bad apple among your staff could end up becoming a major financial liability for the organization.
And we don’t mean to pick on just nurses. Physicians, more than ever, are being made accountable for their actions and attitudes toward not just patients but colleagues as well. We heard a story about a crew of nurses who found a way to stand up to a particularly abusive doctor by simply surrounding him and, even as he yelled at them, standing silent—a practice they called a “code white.” As any good physician will admit, if a doctor’s attitude becomes a threat to patients or coworkers—regardless of how skilled a physician he or she might be or how much revenue his or her services generate for the hospital—the hospital leadership has to stand up and make the decision to let that person go.
This same line of logic applies to anyone in the organization, even if he or she doesn’t deal directly with patients. “I won’t hold on to anyone who is a negative influence, no matter how much money he or she makes for the organization,” Dr. Feinberg told us. Why? Think about the sort of daisy-chain effect a single bad encounter can have. What if, for example, a nurse is having problems with the printer at her station? But when she calls up the IT department, the guy she talks with is rude and disrespectful. (You can almost hear the first question: “Are you sure it’s plugged in?” Bah.) Can you guess what happens next? Maybe the nurse then has to interact with a dietician on the floor, and because the nurse is so ticked off at the IT guy, she vents by letting the dietician have it, coming at her with both barrels. The dietician might then pass all this negative energy along to another colleague or, worse, directly to a patient. Do you see where we’re going here? The negativity goes viral and becomes a threat to literally everyone.
You simply can’t make excuses for whiners, losers, and jerks, regardless of what role they play in your organization. Mike Packnett, CEO of Parkview Health, would back us up on that:
By our nature, as leaders in health care, we are rescuers. But we can’t afford to rescue people anymore; if we do, we can’t get to where we need to be. I think, over the last couple of years, we’ve done a lot better job of really understanding that we can’t rescue everybody, that we can’t transform everyone. I think we, as leaders, have to help those folks get to where their fit is.
What Mike is saying, quite diplomatically, is we have to let those folks go.
Unfortunately, many leaders begin to make excuses when it comes to firing an employee, principal among them that the HR department is somehow a nuisance or a barrier to getting things done. One executive Paul met at a conference, for instance, blamed his HR department for dragging its feet when it came to letting people go, forcing him to wait up to two years before he could fire someone. In his words, HR was “the enemy.” We’re here to inform you that if you believe this, you’re missing out. The folks in HR aren’t mere paper shufflers to be ignored and vilified. Instead, they should be among your closest allies. In fact, a vibrant HR department is a cornerstone of the future success of every organization.
When he started out at his hospital in Dallas, Britt found that the human resources department was located four buildings away from the main hospital, across a skybridge and hidden in an office building. Really? The most important resource is our team, and here we have a group of professionals banished to beyond the beyond? How can we expect to access their expertise and call upon their support as we navigate through various challenges when it comes to an organization’s most important asset: our people? Britt relocated the entire human resources department to the main building, where it moved into a recently vacated patient care area. You can bet that move sent a huge message to the rest of the team about the importance of the human resources professionals.
Your HR department not only offers guidance when it comes to your team, but it ensures compliance with all sorts of regulations. When your HR people ask for documentation on an unsatisfactory employee, it’s not that they want to become a barrier—they just want to protect the organization against any legal entanglements. Getting fired should never come as a surprise to anyone. Everyone has the right to know where they stand; before it comes to a dismissal, an employee’s file should always have the proper documentation to support your position. The most challenging cases, though, involve an employee who is highly skilled in a technical area but has poor team and behavioral skills. As Steve Moreau, CEO of St. Joseph’s Hospital of Orange, told us, “Those are the people who are harder to get rid of, because the team values their insights. But if you don’t get rid of people who are disruptive and problematic for team performance, you’ll destroy team culture.”
Let’s not overlook the fact that terminating someone’s employment is a major life change for that person, on par with going through a divorce. You shouldn’t take such decisions lightly—that’s part of remaining true to your commitment to living as a caring organization. Having an HR partner who helps you approach that process with as much respect and compassion as possible can turn a difficult event into a positive experience for the organization as a whole.
That said, if your HR people have lost their sense of balance about what’s most important—the organization, not their procedures—then you may have to consider changing them out as well. We know that sounds harsh, but it’s the simple truth.
We also need to rely on our HR team to be our first line of defense—an early-warning system of sorts—against the onslaught of whiners, losers, and jerks. That means asking the question, “How did a person like Nurse Ratched ever get in the front door in the first place?” We also need to be willing to ask, “What can we do to ensure it doesn’t happen again?” That’s not to imply that the responsibility for finding the right people is HR’s alone. In fact, an effective leader has the critical function of rallying everyone on the team to this cause.
Knox Singleton, CEO of Inova Health System, told us:
I think one of the light bulbs that’s gone on for us is that we often hire a sow’s ear, shall we say, and then try to develop the person into a silk purse. I think the high-performing service organizations have really shown that with a fair amount of front-end discrimination—not of the improper type, but of the proper, healthy type—you can actually identify and selectively hire folks who really have a personality and a heart for service.
If we as an organization can do a better job screening applicants for jobs, after all, we won’t have to go through the distasteful process of letting someone go. That means working harder not just to, as the old saying goes, “put butts in seats,” or even to find the most skilled candidates around. No, what we as an organization need to do is find the folks with the right skills who also fit the culture we’re trying to build. All too often we become blinded by the big names and resumes loaded with experience, but we fail to dig deep enough to find out what a person is really like to work with. That’s why Alan Channing, CEO of Sinai Health, starts the evaluation process—and the introduction to team culture—as early as the new employee orientation:
We’ve thanked a few people even before orientation is over and said that it won’t be a good fit. So we set the expectation and pattern early on. People comment on how friendly everyone is. I haven’t asked people to do that. It is just what we’ve become. When you are working in a team that is sharing that kind of behavior, you either get with the program or you don’t stick around.
Because ensuring a good fit is so important, Britt’s organizations have traditionally shied away from hiring contract nurses. Nothing against the nurses themselves, as most are highly skilled and hardworking. But independent contractors don’t have any skin in the game, so to speak, in terms of buying into the organizational culture. They won’t be around for long, so why should they participate in the hardship fund or even the annual Christmas tree ornament exchange? Those partnerships tend to cost the organization more in the long run.
At BerylHealth, the goal is to bring someone on board as part of a lasting relationship, to welcome him or her as part of the family. Job applicants go through a rigorous series of interviews, in a variety of situations and locales both inside and outside the office, that allow the organization to get a better sense of the person and how he or she interacts with others and connects with the organization’s mission, vision, and values. This interview process isn’t just a top-down effort: Each candidate meets with people at all levels of the organization as a way to gauge how well he or she will mesh with the company culture.
To begin this evaluation, it can be useful to ask a candidate about his or her favorite and least favorite experiences with former employers; the answers can tell you a lot about the person’s ability to be a caring coworker. Your HR department can provide a healthy list of evaluative tools that make for a more insightful look at the person you may be inviting to join your team. Personality tests are a really effective tool—an early-warning system of sorts—to help spot the rotten apples through the camouflage of an impressive resume. There are also numerous recruiting tools and assessments of clinical skills that might just add that important point of information you need in making a decision. Do yourself and the rest of your team a favor by taking a long look at the results of these tests. Nobody is perfect, so keep your expectations in check. But always remember that the cost of bringing on the wrong person is just too high a price to pay.
The same principle even applies to volunteers, those people willing to donate their time and energy to taking care of patients. “Wait a minute,” you’re probably saying. “Are you telling me you’d fire a volunteer? Are you sure you guys aren’t the jerks here?” Well, we’ll leave the jerk issue aside for a moment and focus on the first question by sharing a story. Back when Britt worked at Medical City, there was a brilliant director of volunteers named “Lindsey,” whose job was to supervise some four hundred to five hundred volunteers—a small army, to be sure. Most of these men and women had received care at the facility or had seen their loved ones treated there, and these folks tend to wear their hearts on their sleeves when they show up, because they truly want to give back. But just as you find with employees, there are also volunteers who come in with a “me first” attitude. They are more interested in doing what they want to do rather than doing something that might actually be helpful.
In one case, an individual who showed up to volunteer had a mean streak and a sense of entitlement—perhaps fueled by the fact that her parents were major donors to the hospital. That created a sticky issue for Lindsey. She wanted this woman out, but could she risk severing the ties to important funders? To her credit, however, Lindsey made the wise and difficult decision to tell the volunteer that her services were no longer welcome at the facility. And, as we saw in the Nurse Ratched story, the other volunteers seemed to get an amazing boost from this turn of events because they, too, didn’t enjoy working with this particular woman. We know it might sound a little extreme, but you need to put even volunteers through your screening process. Making sure they fit is essential to the organization’s cultural health and harmony.
Let’s be honest—every organization will have some number of disengaged employees. The key, as Dane Peterson, CEO of Emory University Hospital Midtown, told us, is to create a culture where the engaged employees significantly outnumber the disengaged, perhaps by a four-to-one or even a five-to-one ratio. “When this happens, the disengaged go quiet and lose their negative impact on the culture,” he pointed out. That should be one of your goals as a leader: to reduce the impact of your disengaged employees so you can spend more time with the engaged ones.
Let’s pause for a moment. Look what we’ve gone and done by spilling a few thousand words sharing these negative stories. We’ve fallen into the same trap that so many organizations do when they allocate far too much time and energy tending to the whiners, losers, and jerks, rather than celebrating their star performers. Let’s remember what we have said in a prior chapter about our belief that most people are, in fact, good people. That goes double for anyone working in the health care field—those people who possess huge hearts and a deep caring for their fellow man. Those are the people we want to support, cultivate, and work with. Dane Peterson had this to say in addition to his prior comments:
My overall feeling about disengaged employees is that I try not to think about them or spend an inordinate amount of time with them. The job is too difficult to have the disengaged suck the life out of you. Instead, spend time with your engaged employees to find out what needs to be improved.
Case in point: The mother of two patients—twin boys who were born premature and being cared for in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit—wrote to Britt in a personal e-mail:
Hi, Britt.
I want to share an incredible story about one of the nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit, Thao. I spoke to Thao on the phone last Tuesday and happened to mention that in two days, we would be celebrating our ten-year wedding anniversary by enjoying a meal out. When Jeff and I walked in the NICU doors that Thursday, the first thing Thao said was, “Happy anniversary!” We were shocked that she had remembered.
While we were there visiting, she asked us where we were going to dinner. Well, fast-forward a few hours to the end of our dinner. The waitress asked us if we wanted dessert, and we said, “No, thank you.”
The waitress then said, “Well, Thao called and is buying you dessert for your anniversary.” Thao had called the restaurant and described to the waitress what we were wearing so she could find us. I teared up at the table, and Jeff said it was the most touching thing anyone had ever done for us. When we called Thao on the way home to thank her, she said, “You guys have been through so much, you deserve to have a special night.”
To which I replied, “Thao, you are taking care of our kids—we should be buying you dessert!”
I thought you would like to hear that story. What an amazing heart Thao has, and we are so blessed that she is taking care of our kids.
Stacey and Jeff, parents of Ben and William
Why do we spend so much time fretting and tending to Nurse Ratched when superstars like Thao—the ones who are enhancing the lives of our patients—get so little of our attention? By failing to acknowledge the efforts of those people who truly care, we risk losing them altogether because they’ll begin to wonder what the organization’s values truly are. And that can result in immeasurable costs to the organization.
Talented people want to work with other talented people. As we’ve discussed before, the majority of people in health care are kind and caring; they want to make a difference through their jobs. That’s how you build high employee engagement scores and, as a result, great patient satisfaction results. So why aren’t we spending more of our time encouraging and challenging the best rather than pandering to the worst? That’s where you as a leader come in to set the example.
BerylHealth employs a program, for instance, that actively catalogs certain employees every three months as either high-potential or low-potential workers. If a person is singled out at one or the other end of the spectrum, he or she is then assigned a senior leader, a mentor of sorts. This mentor is available to help the individual identify next steps he or she can take to improve, which allows us to make the most of the high performers and give the low performers an opportunity to get on the right track.
Over the years, it’s become apparent that the workers saddled with the “low potential” label often find themselves there mostly thanks to their attitude. It becomes the duty of their assigned leader to either coach them or, in a worst-case scenario, terminate them. The truth is, we’ve found, that negative people are often very difficult to turn around. So why keep investing our increasingly scarce time, energy, and resources in trying to do so? Why not spend those resources on the best of the best, since that’s where we get the real return on investment: the patient experience payoff? It is critical for us, as leaders, to spend more time on making our stars shine even brighter by giving them new challenges and opportunities to grow.
It’s regrettable that sometimes you’ll lose good people. The era of lifetime employment at a single organization is long past, and people are more mobile than ever. Rather than fight this truism, embrace it. It merely emphasizes our point: that you need to open up the lines of communication, invest in your stars, and quit procrastinating about making the tough decisions you know you need to make about, as Jim Collins so aptly puts it in his best-selling business book Good to Great, “getting the right people on the bus.” When the departure of good employees shakes things up at your organization, see it as an opportunity to bring in new blood and improve in an area you hadn’t previously addressed.
More often, however, you’ll find that the good people stay when the culture is right and they are a good fit; it’s the “square pegs” who remove themselves from the “round hole.” The more you emphasize your organization’s core values—and make personnel decisions based on those values—the more you’ll see people actually self-selecting themselves out of the organization. That can also mean sitting down with each of your employees and challenging them to put together a five- or ten-year personal vision, a written description about what they’re doing in the future, as if they’re already there. This can be a particularly useful exercise both for the individual and for you as a leader because you learn who sees themselves as a part of the organization for the long term.
In conducting this exercise with his employees, for instance, Paul learned that one of his executives saw himself running his own landscape business in five years. While that meant he would eventually lose this manager, Paul also knew he could help the employee develop the kinds of entrepreneurial skills on the job that would help him down the road while also helping BerylHealth in the short term. If, on the other hand, Paul had tried to clamp down on his manager’s dreams, he could have ended up with a jerk on his hands.
“Hold on,” you might be saying right now, “are you telling me that if I have a superstar working for me who wants to be some kind of landscaping da Vinci, and I don’t support him, I’ll be responsible for turning him into a jerk?” Well, not exactly. But consider what happens to people who don’t have a dream, to people who lose hope. Perhaps your superstar will never become a landscape architect. But by being on his side and understanding some of his greatest hopes and aspirations, you become something more than a boss or an employer. All of us go through different phases in our lives—maybe this is just an idea, and your superstar will find that he is better suited to staying in the health care field and on your team. The real key is to know and love the members of your team, and to respect the commitment they make to that team—even if it’s not forever.
But there are no guarantees in life. You might be the most tolerant employer ever, and encourage your employees to chase their dreams—but there’s still no guarantee that your employees will open up and be honest about their future with the company. Consider the following story from Britt’s past. One of the most dynamic areas of any hospital is the heart and vascular unit. We say “dynamic” because this area is both exciting and chaotic from a clinical standpoint, and because of that, the type of person the unit seems to attract is passionate and innovative. No kidding—there is something different about the men and women who are drawn to this field of work. Britt knows this from experience, and true to his personal values, he tried to be aware of the needs of the team members at Medical City. No losers: check. No whiners: check. No jerks: check. But in the midst of some critical changes within the unit—changes for the better, as everyone else cheered—one of the team’s key leaders—let’s call him “Steve”—submitted his resignation.
Steve left behind a team that was devastated by his surprise departure. This sudden resignation left Britt wondering how this could have happened. Just when he thought he was building teams and weeding out the dead wood in the name of the mission, vision, and values of the organization…Boom! He loses a superstar. Britt learned an important lesson that day: Everyone brings his or her previous life experiences to the game—a reality he uncovered by conducting some analysis after Steve’s departure. It turns out that Steve had, at a prior place of employment, shared his desires and ambitions with his former boss—who then promptly punished him by reducing his responsibilities. So Steve’s prior experience had taught him to keep his cards close to his chest and to reveal his career intentions only when it served his needs.
In any individual’s work history these days, nothing is linear. A career doesn’t move in a straightforward line from Point A to Point B then to Point C. Instead there is a basic migration from one position or accomplishment to the next, based on people’s fundamental behaviors and foundational beliefs. That means even when we try to encourage our entire team to be open and transparent, sometimes even the superstars bring a little history along with them—for the good and for the not-so-good. So, you can’t let one bad experience throw you off your mission. We know it’s easy to fall prey to this trap. But as we say in Texas, “Cowboy up!” Let the surprises roll off your back, and take a step forward. Continue to focus on your mission, vision, and values as you build the right team—and don’t forget to inspire, motivate, and encourage your star performers along the way.
There’s no doubt this kind of thing takes work and commitment, but it’s worth it. When employees feel confident that you have their best interests in mind, you can head off most surprises when it comes to good people leaving. Plus, it feels good to know you have contributed to someone’s personal vision, even when it takes that person away from your organization.
If you as a leader have the courage to confront your less-than-worthy colleagues over the fact that they are truly square pegs trying to fit into a round hole, it can have a counterintuitive effect: You might actually see people with smiles on their faces after they’ve been let go. Maybe some of these whiners, losers, and jerks have become bitter about their job or position yet have been too afraid to make a change in their life, which results in a kind of resentful apathy. By confronting them with the truth, you might just set them free to chase the kinds of opportunities they truly mesh with.
Phew! The topic of this chapter was a tough one to discuss. We’re glad you made it through. But we’re not saying that making personnel changes is the only challenge facing executives of health care–oriented organizations—far from it! We’re just saying that these internal issues should be addressed before moving on to the others. To learn more, turn the page and meet us in the next chapter.