Behind the Scenes at Certification - Part 2

Hey, No Ego Podcast listeners. This is Alex Dorr with the Reality Based Dream Team filling in for Cy here to frame up this episode. We were actually able to get some exclusive behind-the-scenes content of Cy at our latest Reality Based Leadership certification program, and we're really looking forward to sharing this with you because we think it's super incredible. Now, for those of you that don't know that we have a certification program or don't know what Reality Based certification is, It's our Train the Trainer program for individuals that have been interested in our philosophy, maybe using it informally in their organization. It's a way to formalize all of that approach and take it back and deliver this as your core curriculum for leaders and for staff to be able to start officially ditching the drama for good at your organization. And so it's a 3-day course offered twice a year. And what we do is we just have an absolute blast in those 3 days teaching people how to deliver the content, what's the magic behind it, how to deliver this in person to your leaders and staff in a way that's sustainable. And then we talk through all of the tools that you can use in meetings or one-on-ones to take the energy away from why we can't and put it all into how we could. And to really move away from chaos into clarity in the workplace. And to sustain that for a long time to come. One of our favorite parts of that 3-day course is usually day 2, which is what this podcast episode is all about. It's where Cy comes in and she just basically does a freestyle on anything that's on her mind, that is trends out there, what she's excited about, what are some secret coaching techniques or secret ideas that she hasn't passed on. She gives those to our facilitators. facilitators, and it just turns into a free-flowing conversation about how to take the philosophy to the next level and gets into some contextual tough examples that people have been trying to break through for a while. And we thought, in saying all of that, because it was such good content, that we would offer that to you guys so you could get a feel of what happens at certification. So again, hope you guys enjoy this. Thanks for being amazing avid fans that are out there doing great work. And And let's keep ditching the drama.

This is the No Ego Podcast where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Cy Wakeman. Because here's what we know, another difference between low and high accountables. If somebody in low accountability is suffering, it is the organization's problem. I suffer, you're not serving me. If somebody's high in accountability, they sort differently. They go, oh, I'm suffering. I want things different. What's my part and what's your part? And they go, what's my part? And then what's left over is the organization's part. Now that doesn't mean you need a crappy organization, but most of your organizations are far from, there's no danger of them being crappy. So this venting in the form of a survey is a problem. We had a culture of safety survey in a hospital. Their mortality rate was the 2nd lowest in the nation. That's how many people die in your organization. In the nation, that's pretty impressive, right? You guys know how tough this is. And it wasn't that they had some easy population. Like they had a high immigrant population. They had like bad stuff going on. Their culture of safety survey in pharmacy, right? was rock bottom. It wasn't even, it didn't even show up in the bottom quartile. It was like this place is so unsafe. Now I look for inconsistencies across datasets. There could be some places we need to improve, but we're pretty safe. I mean, people aren't dying of some of these things. So I went in and I said, well, this survey, We gotta clean up the survey. And they said, well, what do you mean? And I said, well, first of all, let's look at if people are venting in the form of a survey. So if you have a Likert scale of 1 to 5, okay, and there's 60 items on the survey, and there's people whose answers only vary between 1 and 3, that's all of their answers. Where it sucks. How can everything— this is lack of sophistication in a survey. Even in a divorced marriage, people go, well, no, she's a 5 on this, she's been a great mom, or, I mean, but if you don't have any variance, that's venting. If you're not venting, you should have full variance where some things are good, some things aren't good. So we threw out anything that had no variance and called it unsophisticated survey taking. And then we got to the real issues. Where there was big variance, we go look there. And there were some things pharmacy brought up in the culture of safety survey that needed to be fixed. But a lot of people are just saying it's all bad. They aren't sorting. So then we added accountability questions to it. And the accountability questions matched— when we only listened to mid and high accountables, They matched the data without this lack of variance. So when we threw out the 1s and the 3s, if that's all you ever answered, okay, not if you answered that, but if that's all you ever answered, and we matched that up against medium and high accountables, and it was the exact same data. And that was one of the ways we know that our accountability questions clean up your survey data. That's why when we give engagement questions, we give accountability questions. So so you can listen to the right people. Your data's corrupt. The part that's coming through the ego and not the sophisticated high self, that data given to you through the lens of ego is corrupted data. And most of you are making big money decisions based on corrupted data, if you think about it, right? So does that help with a tool that's in your books? It's called the Engage Action Planning Tool. So first of all, I struggle with working on culture because many times culture becomes the agreed-upon reasons, stories, and excuses about why we can't do something. So how do I know that? Is I go, well, let's implement this. Oh, our culture won't support that. I don't hear the bell-shaped curve where it says, oh, our culture will support that. I usually only use culture, or you hear culture is the reason we can't support it. When you try and change big culture, culture is the cumulative summation of who we are today by how we act. Now there's all this aspirational culture, but your true culture is how we act right now together. I don't know how to impact behavior with theory or posters or values or planning sessions. The only way you impact behavior is the toggle switch, self-reflection, expectations, performance management. Now, what is interesting to me is I think that as a leader I can impact a climate, but I don't know that I can impact a culture. And the cool thing about the climate is it doesn't matter what culture it goes into, the climate is the climate. This is how we are. This is how we work together. The good news is, is that any hospital I was in, I didn't have to wait for the culture to change. I just created the climate and we impacted others. And when we found willing people who loved our climate and they wanted something similar, we showed them how to do it. And then we didn't have to change the culture. We knitted together all these climates and a type of global warming happened. where suddenly it was like amoeba tag. Right. We had caught enough people that then the culture became who we were, not who others were. So I actually think the whole way we approach culture is very self-indulgent. There's a ton of work, and I'm in so many organizations, and you guys, I watch it. Everybody's values are the same. Everybody's competencies are the same. And I just went to this thing where they did, let's get together and let us decide the values. And so all of you took your own ego preference and said, well, I really think accountability needs to be one, and I think that grace needs to be one. And so they decided in this room what the culture was gonna be, and then they're like rolling it out and reinforcing. If you wanna get evidence-based, the evidence will tell you what your culture is. I call it the superculture. If you all want a super culture, get people fluent in organizational alignment, capitalizing on change, accountability. Like, that's the super culture. And a lot of people use culture as an excuse. I worked with a woman in Japan. She's like, it's just not my culture to speak up, you know, in a room full of people older than me. I go, you're a vice president. If your culture is serving you to the best of your customers and people, stay with it. But when it's not, you have to align to a superculture. And a superculture is I have an ethical responsibility to speak up even though it's not my first culture. And so the culture efforts that are going on are enormous amounts of time, energy, and money. And I get it. It's like, I get it. We can hire to that. It's like our barometer. It's who we are. For me, I would take culture out of it and say, here are expectations. These are— if you want to be part of our tribe, be this. If you don't want to be part of our tribe, that's okay. But it's our tribe. Now make sure that the things you're letting people in on aren't biased for, you know, different things. But the whole culture work is really big in faith-based and just like consensus-based decision-making. I grew up in Catholic systems. They're like, we make decisions consensus-based. I go, that's good. I will do that if everybody comes accountable to themselves to be toggled up and thinking of the patient and not thinking of themselves. But I was shocked to see at the board level what consensus decision-making did is everybody made so many deals that it brought us to the safest, lowest common denominator that everybody could agree to. And consensus is not about agreement. And most people— it's about lack of lethal objection. So that you could say, yes, it doesn't have to be what I want, it just has to be fulfilling and have nothing that I can't have, meaning there has to be, we call it lethal objection. And the other thing I would tell you is that I just see people do tons of work on their culture and I have yet to really see the evidence where that really played out in the experience of the patient or those things. But I could be naive. I don't know what you think about that. I think the work could be better done on a behavioral basis.

And so say more about your philosophy around how the world— you mentioned the 2 things are mental

processes

and how the world works. Say more about that side so I can speak to Can you speak to that?

Sure. So all I did as a leader is walk around and people were really like, they do this crap on purpose. I'm like, well, let me teach you how your mind works because you're getting played by your ego. Let's ask a question for self-reflection. Well, I don't really know that. So what's the reality? They didn't invite me to a meeting. Do you need to be at the meeting? I feel like I do. What could you do next that would make that happen? I had to teach people how their minds work. And this is a place where we've completely lost this wisdom in most of the people we work with. I was shocked because I thought, you're a scientist, you're a physician, like certainly you know how your mind works. And people had so much anger about things that never happened. They like had age-old conflicts about like made-up stories. It was just, I'm like, wow. And then how the world works, it was just this constant arguing with reality that People would— this whole third option thing, that's not how the world works. I want to stay and hate. I'm not going to pay you to stay and hate. What's your plan to get joyfully on board? Well, I'm not going to. I don't agree with the strategy. Then dialogue with me. I'm not trying to kill dialogue. What's the issue? Does it marginalize a certain population? Is it unsafe? Is it— Well, no, I just, I don't prefer it. I don't like it. Then what's your plan to get joyfully on board? I'm not gonna. Then what's your plan to transition out? I'm not going anywhere. You think there's a third option? And there's a lot of people who don't know how the world works. They actually believe I will pay them to stay and hate, stay and resist, stay and sabotage, stay and tell me 5 years from now how great it used to be. Like, stay and not do an upgrade and keep their old secret system and have shadow IT. And like, they think I'll pay them to do that. But here's how the world works. The Dalai Lama says, if you're suffering and it can be fixed, fix it. And if it can't be fixed, you've got to accept it. Let it go. Like, quit fighting. If it can't be fixed, it can't be fixed. If it can be fixed, fix it. That's so simple, right? Yet people come into my office— um, um, let's just go back. This is therapy stuff. People come in my office, I go, how's it going? I'm super Frustrated. Empathy. Gosh dang, you sound frustrated. You look frustrated. Why? What's going on? Give me some context. Alex didn't give me the information I needed, and I'm gonna be up really late tonight finishing my report. That sounds frustrating. I get it. You're frustrated. Now, sharing a feeling takes one sentence. A lot of times in therapy, you don't know what you're feeling, so we make it simple. Mad, glad, sad, or scared. Just pick any one or combo of those. Now we're done sharing feelings. It takes a sentence. Anything after that is venting. Okay? I am frustrated Alex didn't give me the information I needed. And he does this crap on purpose. And if you go back to 1986 when we merged and he got a different title than I did, it's where it all started. And he treats everybody this way. I watch him. And you know what? I happen to know his family and his mom treated people that way. And I just think, you know, they think they run the world. And he's a jerk. He is trying to discredit me so that I will have a limited ability to get promoted in the future. All of that, if you went, what do we know for sure? All of that would fall off the list. All we know for sure is I didn't get the information I had hoped for. That's it. So here's what I do in therapy. If it's fixable, fix it. If it's not fixable, don't fix it. So what would great look like? What could you do? I could go to my boss and say, Well, I could put a reminder on this calendar every month that I need that. Like, I could just put a standing reminder that just hits his calendar. Oh my gosh, that sounds fantastic. Why don't you go do that? Yeah, but I shouldn't have to. Dang it, you were almost great. That's an ego play. That's an ego play, right? We know what to do. But we made up a rule we shouldn't have to, right? People make up weird rules all the time. I should only have one boss every 3 years. I got— why are you so mad? I got a second boss this year. Well, that's just reality. You have a new boss. Yeah, but I made up a rule I can only have one every 3 years, and my made-up rule was violated. Now I will be mad. I'm like, what? So that whole thing on the mind works. So this person won't do anything to get Alex to get the information. I go, okay, then how do you feel about just letting it go? You know, I probably overreacted. I'll provide some grace, mercy, tolerance. He doesn't do it often. It's just been a heavy week. Awesome. The more you can let go of, the happier you're going to be. I love grace, mercy, tolerance. I just think it's a great way to walk through the world. Right? So let it go. Is that your strategy? You're either going to fix it or let it go. There's only 2 options in my office. Yeah, I'm going to let it go. So then I test you. I go, well, then what else would you like to talk about? See, we're letting it go. Well, he shouldn't get away with it. Oh. So we're not letting it go. Okay? Now, how the world works is there's only 2 options. How humans work is they want a 3rd option. I don't want to impact it and I don't want to let it go. I want to vent on it. I want to complain about it. I want you to sit here while we do this. If I do that, I misrepresent the world to you. People make good decisions when they get good information, and your information about the world— so motivation comes from having a direct relationship with reality, right? I eat too much, my jeans are tight. Direct relationship. Every day, right? Good feedback. Most feedback shouldn't come from you. It's all biased. It should come from me not interfering with your relationship with the world, right? If I go, I think you're putting on a little weight, now I'm the enemy. But if I just allow you to experience your own genes, you'll figure it out. You'll buy new jeans, or you'll lose weight, or you'll suffer. Like, it's all okay. So the way we interfere with people's direct relationship to reality is 2 ways. One, their own ego corrupts their data, so we have to use self-reflection and tools. 2, we corrupt their data by enabling them, like giving them a 3rd option. There's, there's, you know, people would say to me, what do you do with that why did they do that for you and not for me? It's not 'cause people like me. A lot of people that worked for me, I don't know they ever described me as she's so lovable. I mean, I was really good to them, but there's a few people who that was not their first come to mind. But I didn't need to be loved, I needed my patients safe. Mm-hmm. Our billboard said you'll get good care here, and so I'm like, I'm not gonna apologize. But what would happen is people would float to my unit, And they'd go, yeah, thanks for coming in. We're gonna assign you to 6 Southwest. And they would say, who's the leader? They'd go, Wakeman's up there. And they'd go, well, I have to run to my car first, and then I'll run up there. Well, why do you have to run to your car? Well, she won't let me on the unit without proper dress code, and my scrubs are too long, and she hates scrubs that drag on the floor and just carry MRSA from room to room. She hates that. So I have to go to my car. I have to put different scrubs on. They would adjust their behavior To me, but the other leader would say they're unleadable. I'm like, no, you enable them. Now, I'm not mean to them. I'm just like, oh my goodness, it looks like you're about to endanger one of my patients. I, by license, need to stop that. So go put different scrubs on. I'll give you options. You can safety pin them up. I've got safety pins here. You can staple them. You can Scotch tape them. You can do 100 things with those scrubs except wear them dragging on the floor. Right? Docs come in. I'm like, have you read any journal articles lately about ties? They're like, what are you talking about? I go, you're killing me with this tie. How often do you wash your tie? Well, we don't. You deliver babies in that tie. Like, what would make you think you should put on that infected tie? Like, we can't have ties here. Like, go get scrubs on. Right? I sit next to people on the plane. In scrubs. Yeah, they fly all the time from Atlanta outward, like to DC and stuff. And you know that they're a med device rep who was with somebody in surgery, and it's just more comfortable to like— uh-huh. I'm like, this guy went to sit down next to me and I go, were you in surgery today?

Yeah, I, you know, we placed like 4 knees.

Well, thank you for that. Can you go change? Like, I don't want to sit next to whatever you— you're endangering me, right? And I say it nicely, but I'm like, we enable. Believe it or not, 2020 is quickly approaching. It is time to jump in to be part of our amazing Ditch the Drama tour for 2020. I'm telling you what, you guys, you have You've got to move quickly to get in on this opportunity for a full day with yours truly. I haven't done this in the past. I am basically doing a tour on a mission to ditch the drama in 2020. I'm coming to 4 cities. There's 4 places you can join me: Houston, Denver, Indianapolis, and Raleigh, North Carolina. And I'm telling you what, this starts in February with Houston. The Ditch the Drama tour that you're not going to want to miss. It is where I'm going deep in the philosophy. This isn't just training. I'm going to present the core philosophy in some really new ways, some really mind-blowing ways to see our philosophy. But then we are going to go deep into not only your questions— this will be your time to give me questions that I will answer. I'm also going to directly coach some of you, and we'll pick them that day. I'm going to coach some of you to come up on stage with me, and we will work you through A typical dilemma that you find in your workplace. This is it, folks. Tickets are only $399 right now. We want to fill the auditorium up. $399 tickets right now can be yours, but you got to jump on realitybasedleadership.com/dtd2020. That's DTD, like ditch the drama. So realitybasedleadership.com/dtd2020. And at that price, folks, bring your whole team. This is your chance to get everybody on board with living a drama-free lifestyle at work and at home. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Sy Wakeman.