ple, and those people need to be the first priority. When this happens,
when your staff is invested in your organization and its mission, I
guarantee it'll result in more satisfied patients.
On the other hand, if you put patients first at the expense of your
team's well-being, you're creating a dysfunctional working environ-
ment that's bound to impact your patients negatively. After all, miser-
able workers eventually jump ship, and high turnover adds stress to
any surgical staff. Stress, in turn, makes it more likely you'll make
mistakes and miss the little things.
Great leaders embrace bad news. From the constantly chang-
ing regulations to the complex nature of reimbursement, surgery
is rife with dysfunction. Making it work comes down to leadership.
Great leaders welcome the bad news as a tool they can use to make
the necessary changes. Learn to take a glass-is-half-full approach to
receiving bad news. Without the bad, you would never have all of the
information you need to make things better.
When I started a position as vice president of medical affairs, a
physician approached me and asked: "Whose side are you on, the
physicians' or the hospital's?" I saw right from the get-go I was walk-
ing into a dysfunctional organization where there was deeply antago-
nistic relationships among the medical staff.
The entire facility was segmented into tribes — doctor tribes, nurse
tribes, administration tribes. Whenever tribes are drawn, the organiza-
tion is doomed to fail. I tackled the problem by asking staff for help. I
held a town hall meeting, trying to get at the heart of the problem and
asking, "How can we tear down the walls that are hurting this organi-
zation?" What I found was every tribe thought every other group held
all the power. Simply bringing the problem out in the open led to solu-
tions. I knew I was onto something when a few high-powered physi-
2
Staffing
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