SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to the Veterinary Culture Lab, where science meets real-world application. I'm Andy Davison.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

And I'm Josh Weisman. Together we'll show you an evidence-based blueprint for renovating culture in your veterinary team. One episode at a time.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

For a lot of us, hearing Can I Give You Some Feedback instantly puts us on the defensive. Turns out the way feedback is delivered is actually shaping psychological safety, trust, and retention. So let's dig into some brand new veterinary research and uncover why feedback and communication quality matter more than we think.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Hey Andy, good to be back with you recording another episode of the Veterinary Culture Lab podcast. Super excited. How are things with you?

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Right. This is something I always look forward to. Like these are always such fun conversations that we have a plan, right? But it's like a loose plan. And then the way that it always unfolds is super fun. So I am thrilled to be here. I feel like it's been a minute. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

It it has been a minute. Um, you were traveling internationally recently. Um, I was also traveling internationally recently, although slightly less exciting international travel than yours. Uh and yeah, it's I it's been it's been a hot minute since we've sat down together.

unknown 1:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

I agree. I feel like I miss our chats.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

I know, I know. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

No, go ahead, please. Tell me what's what's on your mind. What's going on?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

I was just gonna say, you're right. We've both been doing some really exciting international travel. And even though we don't have time to get into the details of all the amazing things that we did while we were traveling, I would love to hear what's kind of something that you're bringing home from your traveling experiences.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Um, to triple check on schedules.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

There you go. That is a valid thing. That is an important thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Especially when traveling internationally, it is a good idea to know exactly when things are happening so that you can plan accordingly. I learned that lesson on this last trip.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

I feel like all the dads around the world are like, well, yeah, that's what I've been trying to tell you this whole time.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

I think you're right. What about you? What is what is one small thing you're taking away from your recent international travel?

SPEAKER_01 2:27

You never know when you're going to be absolutely surprised in the most beautiful ways.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

So I think what I'm hearing here is you you never know when you're going to be sitting by a swimming pool and a baby elephant will be drinking from it.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Exactly. Under a night sky that has the Milky Way brighter and more stunning than you've ever seen it in your life.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Yes. Yep. Uh so listeners, if that doesn't give you a hint as to why Andy's international travel was significantly cooler than mine, now you have it. Uh Andy, I I wanted to share something with you that I got to experience while you were away in Africa, by the way, for those of you who haven't figured that out yet. Um, yeah, I was uh, you know, uh Greta and I constantly kind of joke about moving. Um you know, like at this point, you're probably like, yeah, right, Josh, you've been talking about this for four years now. Um but we do. We, you know, we we we joke about it and we we look at things. And so occasionally, like, you know, I'm online looking at like I wonder what it would cost to buy a small place in northern Kauai. What it would cost to get a little bit of property up in the mountains. You know, one of our uh clients owns a ranch up in the mountains, and so that kind of got us thinking. And so I was looking around and um I came across this like horse property uh that was like really quite affordable in the mountains, so like a good chunk of land, and I mean, not great, we don't have horses, but I I thought of you when I saw it. I was like, huh, you know, maybe we could do that, and then I don't know, maybe Andy and Mike could come hang out for a while, you know, they could bring Boston or Marshall out here or something like that. Yeah. Um what I discovered though is that this horse ranch was actually being sold by the former CEO of whatever company it is that makes Doritos. Like he was the guy that like was intimately involved in Doritos. And I was looking at this thing and I was just thinking, cool ranch.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

There you go. Well set up. Well set up.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, you weren't quite sure. You weren't quite sure.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

I it I didn't get it until the ranch part.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

I thought it was gonna go horse related.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

Yeah, but I was like, Doritos, there's something like that. Doritos.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

There's this is my lame attempt to take um today's uh dad joke. I'm showing the dad joke from my calendar to Andy. You obviously can't see that, listeners, but yeah, this this was today's dad joke. What did one Dorito farmer say to the other Dorito farmer? Cool ranch.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Yeah, see, see, listeners, this is the creativity and the sass that I need to deal with on a daily basis. Not only is this man an amazing dad joke teller, he can take any dad joke and make it believable. I know.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Thank you. That's very kind. I'll keep that in mind during your next performance evaluation. Um, let's let's go ahead and get to the task at hand here, shall we, Andy? I I'm really excited for today's episode in particular. Uh, I mean, I'm always excited, right? Because I like to nerd out in this stuff, but this one is cool because two reasons. Number one, this study that we're gonna discuss is hot off the presses. Like this is brand new. It was just recently released here in 2026. And it was a piece of research conducted in veterinary medicine. You know, sometimes we take studies and we kind of apply it to vetmed, but this one actually was a veterinary uh piece of research. And it's extra special because it covers new ground in an area that kind of lives in a really special place in our hearts here at Flourish. And the findings are actually really super practical for veterinary teams and for managers. Now, Andy, I I have a question I want to ask you to kind of kick things off here. But first, I want to ask you sort of a pre-question, which is when you hear things like, Andy, I'd really love to sit down and give you a little bit of feedback. What happens in your mind and in your body?

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Oh God, my hackles go up. I'm certain that I screwed up. I'm certain that I'm in trouble. It's not good.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Yeah, yeah. And that's like typically how we respond to that word, feedback, right? Like in the workplace. We think of it as like, oh God. So here's what I want to ask you to kind of kick things off. Before we really dive into the study, Andy, I want you to think of a time that a manager or a boss or someone in some position of power, maybe even back in tech school or undergrad, whatever it might be, somebody gave you constructive feedback that landed well. Like they did a good job of it. And I want to ask you, what made it land well instead of sting? What did they do that made the delivery receivable?

SPEAKER_01 7:06

This is such a good question. And it was actually a lot of fun to think about. Um, and it actually does come from tech school. That's funny that you went back there because that that that's the example that I'm gonna share is an example from tech school. And the reason that this particular situation stands out is because it was one of the times where I was given feedback and I didn't get all prickly about it. My rebellious side didn't come like flying out because it's in there, it's definitely in there.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

I have no idea what you're talking about. Right?

SPEAKER_01 7:39

It's shocker. Shocker.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

You've never, never seen any inclination of a rebellious side. But go on.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

But this particular situation, it kind of I think there's a little bit of a backstory, right? Because the person that gave me this feedback was somebody that I had developed a great relationship with already. And it was definitely a professor of mine. Okay. So it was somebody in authority. And as a student, to kind of create a connection with this person was really pretty cool. And the more I thought about it, it happened because that professor, that teacher made the effort well ahead of time, right? To create a connection and establish a really awesome professional relationship with me and with the other students in my class. My tech school class was smallish, which was awesome because we all knew each other. We all were intimately involved in our journey through tech school. And so I had known this professor for a couple of years. She knew me for a couple of years, and there was already that effort made to create that connection. So when she said, Hey, there's something I want to talk to you about, I didn't automatically go, Oh God, I'm in trouble, right? Because we had talked about stuff before, and it wasn't always bad stuff. So there was already that sort of expectation there. And when we did sit down to talk about, you know, the thing that I didn't do awesomely, it was definitely about the thing that I didn't do awesomely. It was not about me failing as a student, me not understanding the expectation, me making assumptions that weren't true, me, you know what I mean? It was about the thing that I didn't execute awesomely or well, really. And we talked about what that was. And it was a conversation. It wasn't, hey, this is what you did wrong, and this is what you need to do differently, and now go forth and be different. It was, hey, this happened and this is why it's a problem. What are we gonna do? Because we both see the value in making that change. So it was like a it was like a joint effort, right? It wasn't a principal's office sit down and tell me all the things I did wrong and why I'm such a terrible person. It was, hey, let's work together to figure out what happened here and what we can do moving forward.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

What impact did that experience have on you?

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Huge, huge. Okay, first of all, I was a student, right? So I was a wee child and I hadn't had a lot of experiences like this, right? I mean, I had had experiences with undergrad professors who you didn't know and were very, you gotta do this if you want to get an A, and parents who absolutely told you what to do, when to do it, and you never had a say, right? And so to have this experience, I think that's why it stands out to me so much, is because it was one of the first that really collaborated with me, right? And like saw me as an equal in this situation and invited me in to be a part of the solution because I was so used to being told what to do and you know, what you got to do is this, and now go do it. And that was different for me. And I think that really is one of the reasons why this stood out so much.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Yeah, that's super cool. I'm so grateful that you had that experience. And I love that because what you just described is basically the real world version of what this paper is suggesting, is the big idea that feedback quality, especially from people in positions of authority, those in status, feedback quality might actually be one of the ways that we don't just cultivate psychological safety, but that psychological safety makes employee retention sticky. And we all know about the turnover problems that many veterinary practices face. The thing is that I sometimes worry that a lot of the retention conversations that we're having in veterinary medicine become compensation conversations. We we start to really view retention as a compensation problem. Now, listen, compensation, it absolutely matters and it makes a difference. But when it comes to retention in particular, compensation is not necessarily the best lever. At best, compensation might get someone to tolerate a bad workplace for longer. We like to refer to this as like the golden handcuffs, right? Well, I hate it here, I'm miserable, I'm disengaged, but I can't afford to leave because nowhere else will pay me this much, right? Money alone, though, cannot create a workplace environment that people actually really want to be a part of. So I really come to think of compensation as hygiene. It's table stakes. It what's it's what gets you in the door. We could call better pay a justice issue, right? Like this is it's not really about retention per se, it's about justice, it's about equity, it's about what's fair. That's how I think we should frame the compensation problems that we face. Uh this study, though, points to communication as a real lever for retention and team thriving. Uh essentially, what we're saying here is that when communication excels, when it's really good, especially when it comes to the feedback loop between team members and managers, people might stay because they feel safe, supported, clear on expectations, and they have an opportunity to grow and develop. So this episode is not pay doesn't matter. That's not what we're saying, okay? It's you can't pay your way to a thriving culture. So let's dive into the study itself. The study has a very long name, as academic papers tend to do sometimes, a cross-sectional study exploring associations between psychological safety, employee turnover intention, and feedback skills in veterinary organizations. The lead researcher is somebody who we both know and we are very, very fond of, Dr. Liv Oginska. Uh, Liv is in Australia now, doing a PhD in this area. And so this was actually part of her PhD research. She had several other colleagues, um, one of which is somebody who I'm quite fond of. He's done a lot of work relating positive psychology to the veterinary space, and that's Martin Cake. Dr. Martin Cake. Uh the study asked whether that's a good name, isn't it? Yeah. Dr. Cake. Sorry. And he lives and in Australia, so it literally is cake by the ocean.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

It is. Oh, see.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Yeah. He's cool. He's cool already. He's cool. I know. Someday I hope to meet him. Um, this this particular study asked whether psychological safety was actually associated with better feedback and lower turnover intention in veterinary teams, and whether feedback quality helped to explain that link. So, how did they do this? Well, they they did a cross-sectional study that included a survey distributed to working veterinary team members and practices in both Australia and then across the UK. The survey included various validated measures of things like psychological safety, um, supervisor and coworker feedback quality, which is uh in the literature that there is at that is actually a thing and you can measure it, and turnover intention. There were a little over 360 people that fully completed the survey, of which about 65% were practicing veterinarians, and then about 31% were veterinary nurses. Now, those of you in North America don't freak out at that term nurses. Remember, these are people in the UK and Australia where they do actually use that term, right? So here we would call them technicians. Most of the participants came from small animal practice, and there was an almost even split across leadership and non-leadership roles, which is good because then we could compare those two things. Key findings here. Well, the analysis revealed that some really powerful things. First, psychological safety was positively related to both supervisor and coworker feedback quality. I'm going to repeat that. Psychological safety was positively related to both supervisor and coworker feedback quality. So when we saw high quality feedback from supervisors and coworkers, we also tended to see higher levels of psychological safety. Secondly, psychological safety was negatively associated with turnover intention. What this is saying is that when psychological safety was rated as low, turnover intention was higher. Or when psychological safety was rated as high, turnover intention was lower. Now, here's where it gets super interesting. Supervisor feedback was significantly related to turnover intention and partially mediated the psychological safety to turnover intention relationship. So what this is suggesting is that psychological safety seems to lower people's desire to leave. When we work in workplaces that feel psychologically safe, work in veterinary practice that feel psychologically safe, most of us are saying we're less likely to want to leave. And that's partly because safer workplaces tended to have better manager feedback. So better manager feedback was associated with lower turnover intention. Co-worker feedback definitely seemed to matter for psychological safety. But here's what's really interesting it didn't significantly mediate turnover intention. So this is suggesting that high-quality coworker feedback might contribute to a quote, safer workplace. When we work with coworkers who are better at delivering feedback to us, we tend to feel more psychologically safe. And therefore, we're more likely to own up to and openly discuss our shortcomings, their shortcomings, things that we can improve, so on and so forth. But that may not in and of itself directly lead to lower turnover. It was the manager feedback that seemed to really matter there. You could think of it like this it's like psychological safety is the condition of the road. It's, you know, the road that we're driving on on our little road trip to, I don't know, uh, you know, up into the Rocky Mountains or Banff Canada is one thing that's been to that cool ranch. To the cool ranch. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

We're driving to the cool ranch.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

We're driving to the cool ranch, right? So think of psychological safety as the condition of the road that we're driving on. Supervisor manager feedback, that's one of the main stretches of road that team members drive on, right? So when you work in an organization and you're not the boss, the primary road that you're driving on each and every day is the road of your boss's feedback. When our boss's feedback is good, when it's high quality, it just makes that road feel so much smoother, right? We're cruising, one arm on the on the steering wheel, one arm out, not really worrying about potholes. So when the road is smoother, fewer people are thinking of exiting that highway for another one, right? Fewer of us are thinking of getting off that road and finding a different road. Andy, you just heard me blabber on about this study. I'm really curious what stood out to you more here? The fact that coworker feedback seems to matter for psychological safety just as much as supervisor feedback, or the fact that supervisor feedback matters for both psychological safety and retention.

SPEAKER_01 18:56

Honestly, the thing that stood out to me was the coworker feedback. And I think that's because I already had an idea of how important supervisor feedback was. And I'm listening to you talk about the value of coworker feedback. And yeah, right. If we are in an environment where we feel psychologically safe with our coworkers, right? With the people that are in the trenches doing the same stuff that we're doing, supporting us directly. And we have good psychologically safe feedback opportunities between them, that makes so much sense that it would help create what, like a stronger foundation to that road. Maybe like the rebar underneath said road to cool ranch is stronger because you know that you've got a safe space with your team so that you can build up that psychological safety across the board. Now, the interesting thing that's kind of rolling around in my brain as I'm saying this is the fact that it all relates, right? So our ability to share productive, psychologically safe feedback with our coworkers probably starts with how we experience feedback from our managers and what that experience is like and how our manager models said opportunity and feedback. So I think that they're all related. I think that they all matter. I really, I think, I mean, I'm gonna throw my opinion out there. I think that it would be harder to find an opportunity or an environment where coworker feedback is super psychologically safe and everything's great and people feel good, and that rebar is strong and that foundation is good, and the feedback between supervisor and team member is crap.

SPEAKER_00 20:47

I I completely agree. And I think that that speaks to a lot of the literature and psychological safety. It is frequently referred to as a team-based localized phenomenon. And of course, the supervisor is part of that team uh and seems to be the primary driver of it in a lot of the research, but it's not the only driver of it. The team seems to matter. And so, yeah, I think you're onto something. So, this of course begs the question: how does this matter in real veterinary life? I mean, this is a veterinary study, so how does this show up in our life? What can we do with this? Uh I think we can do a lot. The first thing that I want to talk about is that leaders seem to formalize the emotional tone of a workplace. Now, that doesn't mean that they are the only ones who do it. It just means that leaders, to the point that we were just discussing, have an outsized influence over the emotional tone. Andy, because of our recent graduate program that you and I went through, we we are now familiar with some of these theories. Uh, there's a theory in applied communication that you are aware of called the constitutive view of communication. That took me a long time to say that first word, by the way. Constitutive. Uh as you know, Andy, it basically says that communication is the primary method for experiencing and making meaning of social realities, right? In the workplace, those in charge have outsized power. So what they say and what they don't say, how messages are delivered, all those kinds of things go a long way to establishing the tone and feel of the workplace climate. Now, Andy, you've worked in one or two veterinary settings in your day. In your experience, when you think about real veterinary workplaces, what are some of the small, like everyday communicative behaviors from leaders in particular? So from supervisors, managers, those in charge. What are some of the small everyday communicative behaviors from those people that, in your opinion, most quickly shape the emotional tone of a team?

SPEAKER_01 22:42

A good handful came to mind for me here. And I think that it all starts with the attitude that we show up with, you know, because that that fuels, right? That fuels your tone, that fuels your nonverbals, that fuels the energy of the vibe you give off when you walk into the room. Are you stepping in with a bit of an open mind? Are you stepping in with a bit of, you know, cranky baggage from something that happened earlier? You can usually tell, right? Your vibe is off. And I think that there's a lot to be said for that. Nonverbals are huge, right? Do you make eye contact? Do you acknowledge? Do you nod? Do you smile? And then that moves into the greeting, right? Do you say the person's name? Do you say good morning or hey, you know, how's it going, Josh? I haven't seen you in a minute. What's what's new with you? That intentional effort to connect with the person. But I also think that there's a lot of, because I'm thinking of like not so awesome, right? And emotional tones that have come from leaders and what's kind of led to that. And I think some of that can come from getting on the bandwagon of whatever the feel is in the room, right? I know for me, sometimes I would go into meetings and there was a lot of complaining. And there was a lot of, well, this isn't happening and why is that not happening? And I can't get this done and complaining, complaining, complaining. And if I jumped on that bandwagon, yeah, this is terrible. Yeah, this sucks. Then there's there's the tone, right? There's the emotional tone for the meeting. Where if I was able to go in with, okay, yeah, this sucks. And what can we do to make it suck less and make that shift? It can be helpful. So acknowledging the suck, right? But trying to move past it in a way that's productive and not just getting on the bandwagon and being like, yeah, give me that pitchfork. Here we go.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

Yeah, that all makes sense. Um, I think it's, yeah, all the things that you're talking about here, the mindset and mentality that we're bringing into the conversation is going to show up in our nonverbals and our tone, and that's going to impact the emotional tone of the people around us uh when we're in a leadership position. How we greet, do we even greet? You know, Andy, you and I are currently teaching our certificate in cultivating positive team communication program. And in in a recent lecture with the students, we talked about drive-by greetings and how often like drive-by greetings happen at work. Hey, Andy, walking right by, not even making eye contact, right? Or how drive-by greetings start, you know, happen at the beginning of a meeting. Uh, hey, team, good to see you all. Okay, let's dive in, right? Like that's that's not really a greeting. That's a like, we are here to do things, and that changes the emotional tone, all that. Um, another takeaway for me here is that feedback is really more than correcting behavior. Feedback is actually a relational tool. Like, that's really one of the, I think, the huge takeaways from this study. A technically accurate message of you've done something wrong and it needs to improve, right? Can still do relational damage. Feedback delivered without empathy, without respect, clarity, lacking support, those kinds of things, like what you were talking about earlier from a manager or a coworker is likely to reduce the psychological safety within that team environment or at least within that relationship. And when that psychological safety goes down, when it's reduced, the possibility for stumbles and mistakes go up. If we are not cultivating psychological safety with the way that we communicate, with that feedback loop and how we deliver it, we're actually creating patient safety issues, especially in busy veterinary practices, because we're making it unsafe to ask for help, to repair things, to uh admit and discuss mistakes, use them as learning opportunities. So if we want teams that stick around and deliver exceptional patient care, we really need to invest in manager communication skills. Imagine a lead technician who makes a dosing mistake that gets caught before harm occurs. Okay, cool, good. We we we caught it. It was a near miss, right? So the manager says to this technician, you need to be more careful. This can't happen again. Technically accurate statement, right? It is true. She does need to be more careful. This cannot happen again, right? The next time it could actually cause harm if we don't catch it, right? But it leaves shame. It leaves distance, it leaves silence behind. It doesn't create, to your point earlier, a conversation. Now let's insert a completely different manager. Or this manager working better, like communicating better. Okay. Same thing. Dosing mistake, got caught early. Wow. I'm really glad that we caught that. Now let's slow down a bit here together. Walk me through what was happening before this error occurred. And then let's use that to like figure out together what we can do to make sure this kind of thing doesn't ever happen again. Same issue, but very different cultural consequence. Another thing here that I wanted to point out from the study is that leaders can shape the communication climate. You said this earlier, Andy, by role modeling what good communication looks like. How leaders communicate is going to influence how the team communicates, right? While this paper focused specifically on feedback quality, the truth is our teams are watching how we communicate when things are good and when things need correction or redirection. Okay, so so those of you listening to this, you've looked over the paper. Maybe you're convinced now, right? You've heard these things. Now you're wondering, okay, cool, Josh, how do I put this stuff into action? Well, here are some ideas to help you renovate the communication culture in your practice. The first one plays off of what I just said. We need to train feedback as an essential leadership skill. I might even call it an essential leadership competency. The authors of this study concluded that organizations should assess managers' feedback skills and invest in training opportunities to strengthen those interpersonal competencies. And I wholeheartedly agree. And Andy, I think you do too.

SPEAKER_01 28:52

Heck yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:53

I'll even take it a step further and I'll say this. I think that high quality communication from veterinary leaders should be considered as important a technical skill as things like inventory management, accounting, HR proficiencies, anything else that we put in the job description for our management team. Oh, and this isn't just for managers. Progressive veterinary practices and organizations are going to assess and train these communication skills for all roles, recognizing that psychological safety is a patient safety issue, and high quality communication across roles will improve it. Secondly, measure psychological safety as preventative medicine for your practice culture. Based on this study, we could actually consider psychological safety as the lagging indicator of feedback quality. We could call feedback quality the leading indicator here, but it might also be a leading indicator of turnover. So routinely measuring psychological safety in our teams and throughout our organization, could actually be a way to improve patient safety and assess the effectiveness of our communication training program and alert us to the growing or hopefully decreasing risk of team members taking the off-ramp to another job. The psychological safety index scan, which was uh developed in partnership between Dr. Amy Edmondson, I like to think of her as the Empress of Psychological Safety, and uh an organization in the UK, a consulting firm called Ceres Change. That PSI scan is a robust platform for measuring psychological safety in teams or at the organizational and enterprise level. And benchmarking scores against, I think now it's probably well over like 30,000 teams around the world. Turns out that Flourish is actually trained and licensed to use that platform in veterinary teams practices and across entire organizations. So if that's something that's of interest to our listeners, we can absolutely help with that. But they could also just measure it themselves. There are validated brief psychological safety surveys readily available online. And we can even share them with our listeners. In fact, if you want to just email us at Flourish, you can send the email to info at flourish.vet. Uh, we are happy to share one of those validated psychological safety surveys with you and help you get started. The next thing I wanted to address is making feedback quality a key element in managers' performance reviews. And I mean, like really like actually measuring this and then making it a part of how managers' performance is assessed. If we're going to consider this a leadership competency, then we should assess it and I don't know, deliver quality feedback to managers based on that assessment. I mean, right, right? It's the whole feedback loop. This could be done, I think, by a mix of upward feedback from team members. So we can actually like survey their team members. You could do it confidentially, you could do it anonymously, but ask them, you know, to rate the quality of feedback that they are getting from that manager. We could also do this by way of observed behavior. We could make it a point to observe our managers delivering feedback and uh assess that subjectively. And then we can also use outcome measures, you know, so we could have a survey item for every direct report and team member that that manager influences or impacts, and simply ask them to rate things like my manager makes me feel respected during difficult conversations, right? Like those are ways that we can do that. Okay, Andy, I've shared with you three renovation ideas here: training for quality feedback skills, measuring psychological safety, and then making feedback part of managers' performance reviews. If a practice owner or a corporate executive came to you tomorrow and said, Andy, which one of those should I do first? Which one would you recommend and why?

SPEAKER_01 32:41

The medical mind in my brain wants to do diagnostics, right? I want a baseline. I want to know where we are before we even get started. And so I think I would probably um recommend measuring psych safety within your team first. Kind of see where you're at, see what's going well, see where things are really psychologically safe, see where maybe you need to spend a little bit of extra time and effort. And then you'd be able to implement those other ideas in ways that might be a little bit more impactful, as opposed to just assuming that you're totally, totally not psychologically safe, or that there's an absolute lack of psychological safety, or that, oh no, no, everybody feels safe. I definitely make people feel uh comfortable and relaxed in a difficult conversation. You're gonna know, right? You're gonna know the reality of what's happening in your team. And I think that is a really helpful place to start for a lot of organizations out there.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

I love that. I love that because you know, we often talk about the importance of the feedback loop. And when we're saying that term feedback loop, we're saying feedback is not just about how we deliver it, but it's also how we receive it. And what you're kind of suggesting is like if if a manager or hospital owner or corporate executive starts with establishing this diagnostic, with getting this baseline, that is a way for them to start practicing how they receive feedback because that's what that survey is. It's feedback in large part about their leadership practices and the impact that those practices are having. So it gives them this really golden opportunity to practice improving the feedback loop within their organization. I love that.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

Well, and it shares too with the team that you as a leader are taking this seriously, right? That whole modeling the behavior. This is a great way to do that. This is important to me. It's important enough that I'm willing to create this assessment. I'm willing to have these conversations. I'm willing to hear the feedback. And I think that's an important place to start.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

I totally agree. I think that's well stated. Now, of course, we're talking a lot about communication stuff here. So I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Flourish has been working on these exact kinds of things for quite some time. Uh, listeners, Andy and I both completed a graduate program in applied positive communications and conflict management. And we've used that education and some other uh areas of study that we've done to create the first ever certificate in cultivating positive team communication. I briefly mentioned it earlier. We really believe that thriving teams don't happen by accident. They're built through everyday communications and conversations. And this study just really confirms that for us. So we'll we'll share a link in the in the show notes uh to that certificate program so you can see what it's all about. Uh and uh maybe you can get registered for the next public cohort of it, or maybe your organization wants us to deliver it for your leaders, for your teams uh across the organization. We can do that privately as well. Now, there's one person, we're talking about thriving here, thriving teams, and there's one person that I know unequivocally is already thriving. Probably in his or her own special way. Andy, I think maybe you have an idea of who I'm referring to here. Vibing and thriving with Florida Man. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

Florida Man is always always thriving. I don't know that it is in the traditional sense, but it's definitely in his own magic. And this episode's Florida Man is no different. Um, our headline comes from somewhere called Castleberry, which I actually don't know where that is, but it's somewhere in Florida. That's irrelevant because the headline is amazing. Florida man leaving strip club runs himself over with his own truck.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

How is that even possible?

SPEAKER_01 36:32

Apparently, he ran over his own leg. There is a picture, which I will include in the show notes, of the man with the car door open and he's laying on the ground with the truck running him over. What? I've been in thriving.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

I been in thriving. Way to go, Florida man. Um winning again.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

Yeah, yeah. Never, never disappoints.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

Never disappoints. Castleberry. What a great name for town or city or whatever. Castleberry.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Castleberry. It sounds very noble. Full of full of Lord Florida Man.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Yeah, yeah, seriously. Lord Florida Man. Oh, I would love to see Lord Florida Man's castle. All right, that brings another episode of the Veterinary Culture Lab to a close. Thank you all for joining us again. Don't forget to subscribe. Please rate us. It definitely helps. And, you know, share this with a colleague or two if you think that they might be interested in this. Uh, other than that, we'll look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks, listeners.

SPEAKER_01 37:30

Bye, everybody. Thanks for hanging out with us in the Veterinary Culture Lab, covered by the science of workplace well-being, and brought to you by Flourish Veterinary Consulting. If today's episode sparked an idea, made you smile, or got you thinking, hey, I should totally try that. Let us know. What do you think? Be sure to subscribe, share, and remember a thriving veterinary culture is possible. And you don't have to build it alone.