9 reasons to promote positive relationships!
There are all sorts of benefits that patients, staff, and organizations experience when positive relationships are prevalent in healthcare cultures:
- Morale: Feeling cared for and caring about peers is a good feeling.
- Retention: Relationships can make or break a decision to stay.
- Counteracts bullying: People who care about each other are less likely to be abusive and more likely to apologize if they are are or are perceived to be.
- Counteracts blaming: People who are in respectful relationships with others will be more curious about why and how a mistake was made instead of self-protection as a default.
- Stress reduction: Positive connections open us up opportunities to forgive, laugh, cry, and be together in high stakes high stress work.
- Resilience: Positive relationships invite people to identify and sustain healthy boundaries while building community.
- Teamwork: Trust and effective communication in healthcare teams is more likely when people care about each other and feel cared about.
- Patient Safety: Positive relationships help teams communicate effectively.
- Patient Experience: When we feel cared about, we know what compassion and empathy feel like and are more able to offer it to others.
Can you think of additional reasons or alternative language that supports the need for healthy relationships among health staff? Given the high incidences of burnout, quiet quitting, suicide, workplace violence, excessive and relentless stress, and chronic staffing shortages, doesn’t it make sense to promote positive relationships STAT? Yet, prioritizing this is challenges for several key reasons.
4 challenges leaders face!
Even though promoting positive relationships makes sense, there are three big challenges to taking action!
- Making the time: In healthcare, everything everyone is doing is urgent to someone. Often there is acute or chronic understaffing. And a relentless presentation of patient needs. Carving out time for relationships may seem frivolous or impossible.
- Finding the money: Healthcare organizations are operating under enormous financial pressures. Hiring, training, and holding onto skilled staff, ensuring equipment and treatment supplies are up to date and working, providing care to people who don’t have insurance or ensuring reimbursement for those who do are expensive necessities. Retreats, fun gatherings, or external consulting for team-building may be too costly.
- Relationship-building skills: Many healthcare leaders and managers are experts in their clinical fields, but lack experience in facilitating, coaching, and experiential teaching that are necessary to create learning environments that foster positive relationships.
- The need for practice: Emotional intelligence and communication skills require ongoing practice with peers. Single events such as hiring a motivational speaker or celebrations like ‘Nurses Week’ are great for morale boosts, but without opportunities to practice, interactive skills and relationships are easily eroded.
1 Solution – Medical Improv!
Medical Improv is an intervention that inherently promotes positive relationships, effective teamwork, resilience, and much more. My team and I understand all of these challenges and are working hard to create affordable, time-efficient, train-the trainer options that provide practice opportunities. To learn more about this experiential training model please check out the free videos, articles, interviews and webinars available at: Medical Improv Events & Resources. You are also invited to attend this free, online, introductory:
“YES AND” 101 for Healthcare & Mental Health Care Visionaries
Jan 12th, 1-2:30p ET
Register
Feedback from previous “YES AND” 101 session:
- Grateful for the simplicity and the power of Yes AND!
- I loved this way more than I ever thought I would… Your content is brilliant!
- Really good conversation around how Yes And can add to what we do in our careers. Validating conversations vs. shutting people down.
What surprises me most is “Man” because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present; The result being he doesn’t live in the present or the future; He lives as if he’s never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived. – Dalai Lama
