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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez with the Outcomes Rocket, and welcome back to our podcast once again. Today, I have the privilege of hosting an incredible friend and an amazing leader in healthcare. Her name is Dr. Renee Thompson. She is the CEO and founder of Healthy Workforce Institute and works with healthcare organizations to cultivate professional workforce by addressing bullying and incivility. I’ve learned a lot from Dr. Thompson, and I know that you can too, in this podcast. Renee has authored several books and is one of only 30 nurses in the world who have achieved the prestigious certified speaking professional designation. And, in 2018, she was recognized as one of LinkedIn’s top ten voices in healthcare for her contribution to the global online healthcare community, and in 2022 and ’23 was identified as a top five nurse influencer on LinkedIn. So with that intro, Renee, so glad that you’re here to talk to us about a very important topic.
Renee Thompson:
Yes, thank you so much for having me, Saul. It’s always a good day when I have an opportunity to talk to a large audience about, yeah, let’s do something to address bullying and incivility in healthcare. So, thank you for having me as a guest.
Saul Marquez:
It’s a pleasure. And look, I’ve learned a lot from you on this topic of bullying and incivility. I was shocked, right? And so I want you to share what you’ve shared with me, with the audience, and dig into the work of how you guys are making a difference. Before we do, though, I wanted to ask you, what is it that inspires your work in healthcare?
Renee Thompson:
Well, I got into healthcare, I think, like many of us, where I was fascinated by the human body. I mean, I love science, and I think about things like the PH of your blood, 7.35 to 7.45. I mean, that’s the range, anything above or below, and you’re dead. So I think, how aren’t we all dead? So I love the human body, I’m fascinated by science, but many of us also, we choose to work in healthcare because we want to serve, we want to make a difference in the lives of other people, and working in healthcare allows us to do both. We get to focus on the science and treatments and health, but then we also get to focus on serving. And, you know, I’ve been a nurse for almost 32 years now, and I’ve pretty much done everything you can do as a nurse. I mean, from bedside nursing, I’ve been an educator, I worked for a managed care company, I worked for a home care company, I’ve been a frontline manager, executive, pretty much everything. And I realized about 12 years ago that it didn’t matter where I were, or what role I had, I swear there was always someone else or a group of people who made it their mission to make my life difficult. And I thought, you know, working in healthcare is hard enough without your coworkers making it harder, and we’ve been talking about bullying and incivility for decades, but what are we doing about it? So I took a leap of faith, quit a great job that I really loved, to start this company with an intention to really eradicate bad behavior in healthcare.
Saul Marquez:
Well, I think it’s amazing, Renee, and kudos for you for taking that leap. The need is there, and I’m so glad that you did. You about to say something?
Renee Thompson:
No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m like, yes, no, I’m … at least two. Although there are some days I’m thinking, why did I choose this topic? It would have been easier for me to build a company, you know, trying to teach other people how to insert IVs or something, you know? Why did I choose this? It’s not easy, that’s for sure.
Saul Marquez:
It’s not easy, but it’s much needed, Renee, and so I’m so glad that you’re doing it. And I know a lot of the leaders that you work with to scale this type of education and coping strategies, just planning to help organizations and their teams do better, they’re thankful that you did. So I mean, this morning I was talking to a nurse executive’s assistant, and she was telling me stories that, from violence, physical to emotional. And so, let’s dig in, right? How does Healthy Workforce Institute add value to the healthcare ecosystem?
Renee Thompson:
Well, I’ve already mentioned that I got to that point where I realized that we’ve been talking about bullying and incivility for such a long time. Even as a student nurse, you know, there’s this phrase, the nurses eat their young, we all knew it pretty much from day one. And there are so many studies out there, and there’s all this research taking a look at the negative impact disruptive behaviors have on pretty much everything: employee retention, performance, outcomes, the bottom line, but nobody was doing anything about it. And so our approach and how we add value is we are absolutely evidence-based. We are all about the research, we do our own research. However, what makes us different, and how we add the best and greatest value is we actually provide practical solutions, strategies to actually address these behaviors. So, for example, I am well known for my scripting and actually telling a leader, okay, say these words to this person when they do this again, or taking a look at someone in an executive role. When you say you support your leadership team, what does that mean? Can you get crystal clear? Because you can’t just say, oh, I want you to hold all your people accountable for professional conduct, and I support you with this, without clearly articulating what that means. We are super practical. We have strategies that are simple to do. They do, at times, require a healthy dose of moral courage to do them. You know, it’s very uncomfortable to confront someone about their behavior because, you know, it’s just a psychological reality that all human beings avoid pain, and if confronting someone causes me pain, I’m not going to confront them. And as a leader or as a coworker, that is basically teaching somebody how they can treat you. And so everything that we do is designed to make it as simple as possible for people to start confronting disruptive behaviors and, you know, really setting behavioral expectations as a norm.
Saul Marquez:
I love that, Renee. And it’s practical, right? The key word is the practicality.
Renee Thompson:
Yes, I know that’s what I always wanted. I was a frontline leader and had no idea how to deal with bad behavior. Some of my employees acted in ways that were shocking to me. I actually thought I was, for people who are older on the podcast, listening, Candid Camera, or newer, Getting Punked by Ashton Kutcher, I kept thinking, this cannot really be happening. And the problem, Saul, was that I was so ill-equipped, I had no idea how to deal with their behaviors, and as a result, I ended up quitting after about a year and felt like a failure for a long time. And I realized that as I got older and wiser, I wasn’t a failure, I just wasn’t equipped with those practical skills and tools that I needed to address these behaviors. And that’s part of the reason why I do what I do now, because I never want anyone to feel like a failure like I did.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you, Renee. Folks don’t feel like a failure. Oftentimes, the reason it’s not working out is because you don’t have the right systems or the right process in place. And look, me and my team, we have the pleasure of working with Renee. I actually think you are so great at process. Folks, I’ll just be open, like Renee.
Renee Thompson:
Yeah, do it.
Saul Marquez:
To me and my team on our process, our podcast onboarding, and it’s been so helpful. It’s really forced us to stretch and grow internally, and I love you for that, so thank you for sharing that with us. You are the queen of practicality and getting it done.
Renee Thompson:
You are so right, and I appreciate that, even though it was uncomfortable for me. I only like to share good things with people and give applause and celebrations, but when, I’ve realized over the years that, first of all, I have to practice what I preach. I cannot be telling my leaders, and you know, that respiratory therapist at 2:00 in the morning, okay, this is how you need to handle this situation. You need to be honest and respectful and give the feedback even though it is uncomfortable. I can’t do that if I’m not willing to do that myself. But then, when you take a look at what’s your intent? My intent is to make it better for other people. So my intent in giving you the feedback was making it better for me as a customer, but also making it better for you because we all have blinders up when we just go about our day because we see the world very myopically, you know, through our own eyes, but it’s to put yourself in the eyes of someone else. So thank you, I really appreciate you sharing that too.
Saul Marquez:
Oh, yeah, for sure. And you know, I heard something the other day that’s really stuck with me, and this is really kind of on the theme of what we’re talking about, saying the right thing when you need to say it. I didn’t know this, and I don’t know if you know this, Renee, but the word nice, the etymology, the Latin root of it is ignorant.
Renee Thompson:
Really? I did not know that.
Saul Marquez:
And so when you think about being nice, you’re actually being ignorant to something that you have to say. And then, I thought about it further and I said, there’s a difference between being nice and kind; because you can be kind and address the issue at hand, and I just love that, because it does get to, we have a responsibility to our customers, to our patients, to our employees, to do what’s best for the company, for the patient, for everyone. And so this nice thing really caught my attention and I wanted to share it with you because …
Renee Thompson:
Oh my gosh, okay, now I’m going to go down the rabbit hole and look into this because that’s just the way I am. But it reminds me, because we do work with a lot of leaders, I would say over, when you look at healthcare and all the different roles and all the different hierarchies and the levels, we primarily work with those frontline leaders. Whoever an employee, a nurse, a tech therapist says is their boss, that’s who we work with. And what I try to help them to see is that their job, their goal is not to make everybody like them, not to be everybody be nice to them, but it’s rather to have them respect you, and they respect you when you’re giving them honest and respectful feedback, when you’re having the uncomfortable conversations with them, and they’re not just being nice, which really makes sense because being nice is actually ignoring their behaviors or ignoring their performance. It makes so much sense, like mind-blowing.
Saul Marquez:
Like, I mean, my mind was blown and this is so appropriate for the topic at hand because.
Renee Thompson:
Yes.
Saul Marquez:
And you know this better than any of us, Renee, like nurses are kind, like kind souls, and they shouldn’t be nice because nice is ignorant and.
Renee Thompson:
Yeah, that’s almost like an oxymoron, right?
Saul Marquez:
It is, it really is. Okay, so look, I think practicality is at the core because when you talk to a group of nurses, frontline leaders, you leave them with things they could use right away. What else would you say you guys do different or better than what’s out there for teams and organizations looking to do more with this topic?
Renee Thompson:
I will say when I first started this company 12 years ago, it was me. It was just me. I wanted to be a keynote speaker. I’m a good speaker, and especially in front of an audience, I’ve been an educator for, you know, I swear my whole life, and I started to realize that getting on a stage or doing a workshop with an organization doesn’t really solve any problems. I mean, it adds to my revenue, and, you know, now I have this growing company, but it’s not really serving healthcare organizations like I originally thought it would. I almost see it as a check-the-check box. So you can bring us in and do a workshop, and then the problem is organizations see that as, oh, we brought in an expert on bullying, done, check the check box, and what makes us different now is it’s rare that we ever do that. It is rare that I ever agree to go into an organization and just do a workshop because again, we know that that is not enough. And what makes us different is our, and this came from me being an educator, I like to layer the learning. So we start step one, we may do an in-person or virtual workshop, and then we have a step two like three months later. Then we might enroll some leaders into we have an online academy. We always say it’s everything you need to, you know, cultivate a healthy work culture. We have a variety of e-courses, some of them are hybrid, so they get some face time with me live, and some of them are just purely, you know, it’s both synchronous and asynchronous. And then we do consulting for organizations that they know they have a problem, they want to fix it right the first time, so we do a deep dive. So we’re there many times for a year or two, and then we’re equipping them to be able to sustain the strategies and we help them to hardwire. So what makes us different is we have a variety of ways that we work with an organization and it’s all strategic based on this understanding that you cannot learn everything you need to learn about culture and behavior in a four-hour workshop. So we like to establish long-term relationships with clients, but as we’re doing that, it’s just like as a nurse, day one, when a patient’s admitted, I’m already thinking discharge planning, discharge planning. So we start this relationship, but the whole time we’re trying to wean ourselves out so they don’t become consultant dependent, that we’re equipping them so that we can empower them to continue this momentum after we’ve left.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Really just multimodal different channels, as little or as much as you’re looking for, but certainly a lot of options. What if you’re a floor nurse that needs help? What do you do? What’s the path? Do you tell your leadership team about this? If they’re hearing it like, what should they do? Because I want to make sure we cover them.
Renee Thompson:
Absolutely. There are a couple of things. First of all, we encourage them to join our community. We have an online community. We have about right now about 10,000 people in our community. It’s growing.
Saul Marquez:
Where do people find that, Renee?
Renee Thompson:
So they can just go to our website, and right on the homepage it’ll say, you know, join our community. And it’ll ask you, are you a healthcare professional at the bedside or are you in a leadership role? Because we have two lists. And for our healthcare professionals, the nurse at the bedside, if they join the healthcare professional list, everything that we send is really geared towards someone who’s working with people who may be disruptive.
Saul Marquez:
Got it.
Renee Thompson:
And we send an e-blast out every Tuesday morning, and it’s not just about bad behavior, it’s really how to cultivate the good behavior, too. So we’d like to do a nice balance of, okay, address these bad things, but how do you encourage these good things? So there’s that. The first book that I ever wrote is called Do No Harm Applies to Nurses Too! Strategies to Protect and Bulletproof Yourself at Work. And this book was written based on the work that I did in my doctoral program where I taught senior nursing students how to protect and bulletproof themselves before they start their first job so they can be equipped and prepared for the whole nurses eat their young. We also have some other initiatives, and some of the courses that we have in our academy are designed for that bedside nurse, so there are a couple of ways that we work with them.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome. You know, it’s really great to hear that there’s options for everyone. And so folks, we’ll leave links in the show notes today to help you connect with Renee, with her organization, get on her list so you can get all these helpful tips every Tuesday. So really, like on the entrepreneur side, even as a provider, talk to us about your biggest setback. What was it and what did you learn from that?
Renee Thompson:
Oh, my gosh. I have to just pick one?
Saul Marquez:
Any, all right.
Renee Thompson:
Well, from a leadership perspective, let’s say, you know, when I was in that leadership role and I mentioned a little bit of it, but even with my company now, there are ten of us, I am leading ten people on this team here, and we’re all virtual so we don’t come to work together, we’re all over the country. I would say, some of the setbacks that I had being a leader was not being honest with people. And what would happen is I’d be in a situation where I was frustrated with someone’s performance, I was frustrated with how someone acted, and I wouldn’t say anything to them, I would tell my husband all about it. And for some people, because people don’t give feedback for several reasons, one of them is I don’t want to hurt their feelings because I want to be seen as the positive and I want everybody to like me and I want to be nice to people as we’ve already said. And what ended up happening was because I wasn’t being honest, we kept people with our company for a lot longer than we should have, and it caused a lot of rework and a big expense to us. So I’ve learned that, and we set this up right from the beginning, and this is what I would recommend for any of you listening, if you’re in any type of leadership role, when you hire someone, have a conversation with them. Like, look, my goal is to help you to be successful here, and to be successful, in order for us to help you to be successful, we’re going to give you feedback. We’re going to tell you the good, we’re going to tell you the bad, and if we have to, we’re going to tell you the ugly because we want you to do well here. And it also goes both ways for them to give us feedback. I think that whole giving feedback, just being honest with people was transformational for me. And so I’m still working on it to the point where if I complain about something, and I’ll complain of course to my husband, and he’ll say, okay, are you done? Now that, who do you need to be talking to about this? I’m like, oh, I know, but you know. That’s okay, but then I have that conversation. So I would say that has really has set us back and I think it sets us all back. We probably can all think of a time when we should have had that conversation with someone weeks before, months, even years before. I think that that’s been a big growth opportunity for me as a leader, as someone who owns their own business. The other thing that I would say has been a setback is thinking I have to do everything myself, not delegating because, oh, nobody can do it as good as me, you know, everything myself.
Saul Marquez:
Founder syndrome, founder syndrome.
Renee Thompson:
Yes, and now I actually have something, like in my journal, that I look at every day, and it basically says, I have it written, when I’m about to work on something, I don’t ask myself how can I do this? I ask myself who can help me do this?
Saul Marquez:
I love that.
Renee Thompson:
Because there are so many people that are smarter than me, better than me. Why wouldn’t I tap into their expertise?
Saul Marquez:
Amen. Here, that’s on my wall. Can someone else be helping me with this? Delegate it now.
Renee Thompson:
Yes, I wish I would have thought that years ago.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And that reminder, having an accountability partner like you have your husband.
Renee Thompson:
Yes, I do.
Saul Marquez:
… on your team. Folks, have that accountability partner to help you be honest with the people around you, and I think it’s a world of a difference. So appreciate that feedback, Renee. Hey, let’s take a minute to talk about your podcast. Really want to give you an opportunity to plug that because I think a lot of our listeners would enjoy it.
Renee Thompson:
Yes, well, thank you. And the podcast is, I would say, as great as it is, because of all of your health, you and your team, you have a great team.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you.
Renee Thompson:
I’ve been talking about bullying and incivility, you know, for over a decade now. And we used to have a series on YouTube called Coffee & Conversations About Bullying, and it’s still active, but that was really geared towards employee-to-employee, so someone at the bedside. So when you asked, you know, I’m a nurse, what resources do you have for me? Oh, my goodness, go to my YouTube channel. I have over 120 episodes. It’s okay, how to handle silent treatment, how to handle this; everything that you can imagine, we’ve addressed it. Well, it was time for me to shift to a podcast format, and I just don’t have the capacity to do both. So recently we shifted, we stopped adding to Coffee & Conversations, and we started a brand new podcast called Coffee Break: Breaking the Cycle of Bullying in Healthcare – One Cup at a Time. And it’s really just geared towards people in a leadership role so that they can implement our practical strategies to help them set behavioral expectations, confront disruptive behaviors, and hold people accountable. And we have various guests who are in leadership roles who are sharing their expertise, but it’s going back to the whole practical strategies. I always ask my guests, what are three strategies and one action that somebody can take now, because that’s what we’re all about. So yeah, I’m really excited about it.
Saul Marquez:
Amazing. Well, it’s a great podcast, folks, so we’ll link that up in the show notes as well. Add it to your list of favorites because it’s jam-packed with valuable, like things you could do right now. You could literally get off of one podcast and get to work.
Renee Thompson:
Absolutely, that’s the goal.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, well, Renee, you do an amazing job. I appreciate you jumping on with us today. What closing thought would you leave the listeners with today and what’s the best place for them to get in touch?
Renee Thompson:
Great! Thank you for asking that. This is one of the pushbacks we get from people, the objections when we know they need our help. But one of the pushbacks is, oh, well, these are soft skills, you know, we have other bigger priorities, you know, staffing, and finances, and everything. And people think learning how to address disruptive behaviors, because that does involve conflict resolution, you know, how do you communicate in a more effective way; people think they’re soft skills, but they’re not, they’re essential skills. These are essential skills that everyone needs to acquire if they’re going to be able to do what they need to do in healthcare, and that is better serve their patients by first serving each other. And I just always remind people that the way we treat each other in healthcare is just as important as the good care that we provide. So I guess I gave you two.
Saul Marquez:
No, I love it. Great parting thought there. And then if people want to learn more about you, whether it’s to sign up for your list or nurse executives that may want to consult with you?
Renee Thompson:
They can just go to our website. It’s HealthyWorkforceInstitute.com. I know it’s a mouthful, HealthyWorkforceInstitute.com.
Saul Marquez:
Amazing. Renee, thanks for being with us today, and folks, take advantage of the amazing work: over a decade of thought that has gone into this topic of workplace violence. Renee is your gal. Renee, thanks for being with us.
Renee Thompson:
Thanks for having me, Saul.
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