People who can’t trust their employer won’t stick around. People who can’t leave will no longer be effective, productive employees. This creates at the least unhappiness, and at the worst an unsafe workplace or a toxic work environment or both. So, I ask you, is this the structure you want to be building in your organization? Or would you like to learn about alternatives?

Many of us in healthcare no longer have that kind of feeling of trust. It was broken either before or during the pandemic.

I facilitate better communication. I take a situation with sticky, bumpy, icky communication (as my younger patients would say) and I make it all better. Let me elaborate. Good communication is when you have two people are sharing information about a patient, and it goes from one to another without any mistakes.

Have you ever said something and had it misunderstood? It could be something very simple, such as you’re driving and you tell someone to turn left at a certain corner and they turn a street too early or a street too late. Or, it could be something much more complex with far reaching complications, such as giving the diet to a patient. We’re usually told that it’s our tone or volume of voice that leads to the misunderstanding. However, that’s often not true.

I have seen people villianized for their different values. In the workplace, I’ve seen people told that they were in violation of a dress code or a social media policy when, in fact, no such written policy existed. I have seen people written up for doing something that was perfectly acceptable at their previous place or work, but not at their current one-even though there is nothing in writing stating they cannot do that. This is what personality differences can do. Have you ever had trouble at work because of a “personality conflict?” or a “difference of opinion?” I have seen such things cause good people to leave a position.

For many, Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five factors, of which self-regulation is only the first. The others are motivation, empathy, self-awareness, and social skills. Peter Salavey and John Mayer published groundbreaking work on emotional intelligence. They described it as two things. First, it is the ability to identify, understand and manage your own emotions. That is how are you showing up in conflict? Secondly, they said it is the ability to identify, understand and influence other people’s emotions.