#423 Leadership in the Medial and STEM field - an interview with Francie Jain by Niels Brabandt

In the Medical and STEAM fields, leadership training is often only provided with a limited approach. High expectations and limited budgets often led to a high employee turnover. How can organisations in these fiels choose a better approach?

Francie Jain discusses the issue in this interview with Niels Brabandt.

—-

More on this topic in this week's podcast: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify

For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.

Is excellent leadership important to you?

Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com

Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn

Website: www.NB-Networks.biz

Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.

Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.

Podcast Transcript

Niels Brabandt

Especially in the medical field, leadership is particularly important. However, often soft skill training isn't delivered. The question is why are there so many areas where leadership training is direly needed? However, not much is done and we have an expert on leadership here today. Hello and welcome. Francie, Jane.

Francie Jane

Hello, Neil. Thank you, thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Niels Brabandt

Thank you very much for taking the time. So first, very impressive cv. I saw that you didn't only work in real world practise. I saw MBA from Chicago Booth and another Grey from Princeton. So you know what you're talking about. So what is the reason? Let's say people know that leadership is important.

Probably every single doctor in a hospital will tell you leadership is important. At the same time, when we see how many measures are implemented, how many trainings are provided, you see a rather limited number of leadership training or soft skill training in general provided to these kind of leaders. And the same applies to people in the STEM field. So science, technology, engineering, mathematics, what is the reason for that, in your opinion?

Francie Jane

Yeah, great question. I think because in the past leadership and HR has been seen as kind of. There's no. Almost like a non science. Right. It's a, it's non mathematical, it's non scientific. But it turns out there's plenty of data around.

The benefits of good communication, the benefits of good leadership, the benefits of professional development. There's science and the data around measurement around that. But in the past, I don't think it really was. I think if you think about the history of hr, it was like personnel, right. It was just people who kind of shuffled paperwork and got people onboarded.

Niels Brabandt

Yeah.

Francie Jane

And now there's much more of a sense of understanding that if people are your number one line item, you know, how do you get the greatest return on their potential? You know, how can they help move your company forward? And if you can get a few hundred percent ROI on human capital, that will probably be the biggest driver of your organisation, you know, whether it's a business or a hospital. Because they're measuring different things. Certainly, you know, hospitals are measuring metrics like error rate or patient experience, burnout rate, things like that, you know, voluntary turnover rate. But, you know, businesses are more probably measuring dollars and cents, but also retention, you know, and so I just think, I think that there's were this period where there haven't been a lot of scientifically or mathematically minded people in this space space of HR or HR services. And so that's sort of coming to the fore right now.

The Other thing I would just add is that within that there's this whole area of like management training that goes on and even within that is personality assessment. And until you kind of understand how you think and how you see the world, I just don't think you can be a leader or be a good communicator. And I didn't have a personal assessment until I was about 30 actually at Chicago. And it like blew my mind because it told me things about myself that I guess I knew, but I didn't really understand myself in the context of others. And that was really, really valuable. And that's what is missing from all the STEM areas.

Niels Brabandt

Excellent. So let's say I'm, I'm running a hospital, I'm the CEO and probably you heard the phrase, I'm not going to tell you when someone says, look, we're really interested in leadership training, however, we just don't have the budget. Everyone tells us we have to save money and save money here and cut costs. There's. And now you're coming along and telling me to spend money, I don't have that money. How to counter that argument that most likely many managers and hospital also came along when they suggested that they need soft skill training?

Francie Jane

Yeah, well, two things. I mean, one is what is the hospital's voluntary employee turnover rate? If it's above average or average to hospitals, they need to invest in developing their employees. So right now 20% is the average among hospitals, but that's still quite high. Right. And is there any organisation that just likes to be average? What happens to your organisation if you have below average turnover?

So, a, but the other thing, B, is that there's also. This is why everyone doesn't understand development as a science. Right. Because how many times has someone said, you know, we need to invest in this research and development, we need to invest in this technology, it's the same thing. And if you actually put those investments head to head with human capital, human capital will win every time because the return on investment is so high that. And it's also not even just high empirically, it's high compared to the peers who don't invest in human capital. And so what happens is if you are looking to have an advantage or you're looking to retain people more, I mean, there's so many ways to think about it, but human capital can be one of these like, you know, secret sauce kind of situations.

Niels Brabandt

Very good. So when now people say, okay, look, I'm, I might be a high ranked executive in a hospital and then I Say, maybe I'm convinced of spending money on that. Of course, every single one of them is scared about one thing. What happens if someone says, I spent the money and there is no trackable roi? So how do I track the return on invest, especially on learning and development in a software skill field where I do not just can measure a number and then say, okay, look, this is what we invested in seminars, trainings, coachings, and that is the ROI in dollars. So how can I have a trackable proper tracking of ROI in L and D learning and development?

Francie Jane

Yeah, yeah. God, I love your questions.

This up my alley. So the thing that I really like to do that I recommend is almost to test it out in a small a group that's representative of other groups. So for instance, in a hospital, you know, you might say, let's test out some group coaching in the orthopaedics group. We're going to, you know, do a survey before, do a survey after. We do a survey with also other groups that didn't receive the coaching. And the survey might touch on things like psychological safety, you know, engagement with the organisation, willingness to stay. You know, there are all sorts of things you can ask people and then see if there's a change after the coaching.

And the other thing is you can also look at methods. That's one of the cool things about hospitals, is they're so far advanced of many organisations in following and tracking metrics. And so metrics do change. Like, one of the things that's really interesting is that there is a strong relationship between employee experience in hospitals and patient experience at hospitals. And there's also a relationship between burnout in nurses and poor experience with patients. And that's connected to error rate, all sorts of things. And so when you start to fix these problems, it starts to trickle down to these other metrics.

But I do recommend, like, instead of going out like big and saying, oh, great, we're going to do it throughout the whole organisation and, like, we're going to spend millions of dollars. I think what you can do is do it with a smaller group and just see, like, what starts to happen, get a little bit smarter so that maybe you tailor it more for your needs or your goals. I mean, one of the things that I believe in is like, I don't believe in just like throwing group coaching at these organisations. It's more like, okay, what's the problem? What are we working on? Because if you're not really clear about the goal or the mission, how do you know what to measure? And so I think that that's really important.

And there's tonnes of ways to measure this stuff. And, like, I work with this really cool professor at Columbia and she's like, at the intersection of HR and accounting. And there's also a tonne of accounting metrics as well. So you can get the finance team involved and you can become really mathy and in a way that gives you a lot of certainty and, like, comfort. But the other thing is, like. The other thing I would say is we have this incredible case study with. So we're like a marketplace.

We don't have any ip. We connect great coaches to employers, but we have this one Coach who's a PhD in psychology and he's a system. And it's basically a system helping people learn psychological safety. And it's learning how to, like, connect with people who have different strengths than you to, like, solve problems. Because in some situations that could be a reason to, like, avoid somebody, right, because they're so hard to deal with. You can't, like, figure it out. But if you start to figure out the different strategies to work with people who are different, you have incredible solutions.

So anyway, he. His content was used at a large health system in Colorado and it was in a smaller town, it wasn't in Denver, and they had 24% employee turnover and the average for hospitals is 20. So they were like, okay, we've got a problem because we're above average turnover, we're in a smaller town, people aren't moving here. And on top of it, they're. There's like plugging the gap, plugging the hole with travelling nurses, which is. Everyone may know this on the call, but basically they're nurses who come for like three or four months and you pay them 1.5 or two times the going rate, the full rate for nurses. Okay, so it's kind of like this terrible spiral because you have high, you know, high turnover, you're plugging.

Niels Brabandt

Then you have higher costs for payment for paying them 1.5 or 2 times as much.

Francie Jane

And then it, like, screws up the morale because every four months you have a person doesn't know what they're doing. And so everyone's trying to teach that person how to, like, do stuff. And so anyway, so his content group coaching was used throughout the organisation. It was opt in.

The CEO got involved. Everyone. It was provided to everyone, anyone who wanted to come. No, it was not mandatory. That I think without, by the way, is really key, the not mandatory part, because humans like to decide for themselves. And what happened was Every year the employee turnover rate went down 1 or 2%. And so then by after year nine, it was at 4% employee turnover, which is crazy, right?

And then they're winning awards, they're winning like best place to work, you know, winning all these hospital awards. And then what was crazy is from the CEO told Dr. Thomas, my coach, that the difference in money between 24% employee turnover and 4% employee turnover was $32 million a year.

Niels Brabandt

Wow. And isn't that the point? Because you probably heard one line quite often when, when someone says, okay, let's, let's offer leadership training for the doctors and they of course get the really great coaches and the great trainers and when we go down to operational level, we have to give them the cheaper trade and the cheaper coaches because, you know, you have to save money on that. We just can't send the great people and the best expensive people to them as well. That is then a straightforward, scientifically proven misperception and a wrong decision by definition.

Francie Jane

Oh my God, like crying 100%. And that's actually my original idea, which was what if you got these like X experts and made it more affordable because of the group. Certainly you can't afford these people to go one on one with like mid level people or maybe people in the technology side or like the tax or whatever, but you can have 20 to 1 and like, therefore you're getting really, really great insights and you know, you're, they're learning the same thing as the more, the most valuable people. And another thing I would say, which is funny too, is that everyone needs to learn the psychological safety. Just because you are very good at one thing and maybe, you know, you're a doctor and you're, you know, cardiologist, whatever, you had like a million years of training, it doesn't mean that you're great at communicating with people. And it's kind of like this, that whole, that joke about a sense of humour. Like everyone thinks they've got a sense of humour and like everyone thinks they're good communicators.

But the thing is we can always be better. And I think to see that as like a growth mindset thing, the idea is let's keep it open to everyone so everyone has the ability to get better. And here's the thing, they may not have been presented with this in the past, this may just be foreign and so great, let's bring this to people who never had it and things start to really change and shift. We had in person training, it wasn't training, it Was like, I never know what to call it. It's like group coaching, but it's training with coaching, with discussion, with reflection. In Boston, with a hospital group. And after these few hours, things really started to shift.

And like, doctors are saying things like, I know I don't mean to snap at people, but like, how can I slow down? Or how can I change my tone? And like. And it's that kind of thing. It's. There's no blame being assigned and no one's wrong and no one's right, but it's like, what's the North Star? Your organisation, especially at a hospital, the North Star is, you know, getting all those metrics as good as possible, you know, reducing the error rate, increasing, you know, the patient experience, all these different things.

And so that's the North Star. And it's like, we're all focused on that as a North Star, as opposed to protecting my ego as the North Star. Hospitals will be great. And so, and that's kind of think the point is, like, just we only shift our minds a little bit to remember, like, what we're doing here. And like, I think that's why these trainings or coachings can be really valuable.

Niels Brabandt

Excellent. Two more questions.

So one of them is, and that's a really serious issue here, even more in the us, because we all know that in hospitals there's a high risk of people burning out. Burnout already in Europe is a massive issue because of all. So first, of course, people call in sick for a long time, then it takes quite a while to get them back on track. And also, of course, especially as leadership misconduct can be connected to burnout, we know that in the US there's not only a reputational but also a straightforward legal challenge that can be connected with it, that can cost you millions of dollars. But of course, let's focus on the humans. How can soft skill education make the situation better to reduce the burnout rate? Because we know that most hospitals focus on going on the lowest staff level possible, going on the lowest cost possible, and at the same point hoping that no one burns out, which is, of course, a very thin line to walk.

So how can soft skill education somehow make the situation better? That people don't burn out?

Francie Jane

Yeah, yeah. So it's basically, it's actually really interesting because employee turnover and burnout are just two sides of the same coin. In America, the employment contracts aren't as long as in Europe, so instead of people burning out in the us, they're more likely to quit. For instance, I'm Just doing a project right now in libraries. Libraries are more like the European model where people don't really quit, but they burn out. And it's really the same thing. And it's that there's a lack, I mean likely it's just a lack of psychological safety.

And the reason I keep saying this is there's this incredible study that everyone should know about. It was 2015 by Google and they were trying to, for years trying to figure out what unites our best teams and like, who doesn't want to be like Google. Right. They're very, very smart company, innovative. And finally they figured out the one thing that unites all their teams. It's not like where you live or where you went to school, blah, blah, it's, it's the degree of psychological safety in the group. And so what's so cool about that is it means that we can all do it.

Yeah, it is. You know, it's not a question of like where you were born or were you breastfed, all these things. It's really about like, do people feel like they can be honest, tell, say what they think. But, and then the benefits to the group are a lack of group think, you know, disparate viewpoints. There's just, things are moving forward. And, and the other thing that I also like to talk about is there's this hysterical study. It was like a, an example group thing in the US when they tried to release Coca Cola, tried to release New Coke.

I don't know if you remember that. I remember that.

Niels Brabandt

So I remember and I remember that they, they re read. I know that when, when it came to Europe, they, they backpedalled pretty quickly. Yeah, we like Coca Cola as it is, so just keep it that way, please.

Francie Jane

Yeah, even the Americans do. Everyone was like, what? New Coke, we don't want Coke. But basically it was a group think problem. And they had some research showing that in a blind taste test, people pick Pepsi over Coke. Yeah, but so they thought, oh great, we'll just shift our recipe to be more like Pepsi. But the thing was people who buy Coke want it to taste like Coke.

And everyone was the same kind of type on that group. And there was no one saying, you know, like, maybe we do some focus groups or maybe we, you know, like here's devil's advocate. There's somehow that like was not resonating with the group. And so I always take that as a real act. That's what happens when you don't have psychological safety and you don't have a diversity of thought is that you make big, big errors. And that error was very costly. I had to look up.

I never remember what the. What they spent, but it was a lot of money because think about all the labels and the shipping and the marketing and all this stuff. It was a mess anyway. So my point is that psychological safety sort of ends up being the solution for burnout and turnover. Because the point is that you don't want to leave. You're happy to go to work because you're able to come up with better ideas, you're able to problem solve with your colleagues. Things are working.

You know, burnout is when you're trying to do your job and you feel like there's a disconnect between the rules and, like, what's happening or like what you're maybe your North Star and what's happening. And I think that is maybe not as directly linked to psychological safety, but this, this thing, things not working and the rules not lining up with how things should be, that's also a problem. Right. Because if a human feels like things are not right in the hospital, they're not being done right, like, that is terrifying. Like, what does that mean? And certainly in America we can talk about. There might be an insurance component to this, but I think the point is that burnout is what happens to individuals who are in a toxic or dysfunctional organisation.

And then people leave and quit from a toxic dysfunctional organisation. And the problem with leaving is it's. It's the same thing as burnout, because at the end, if the whole industry has a problem, it doesn't matter where you go, you're going to have the same problem.

Niels Brabandt

Jump from one employer to the other to face the same problem.

Francie Jane

Exactly. And that's when you start to hear about people who will take a job for 50 cents more an hour because they're like, you know what? It sucks everywhere. I might as well just get paid more. And, like, 50 cents matters. Yeah, yeah. They're just like, this sucks. And so.

And then you also, there's some statistic like, you know, I was looking up for libraries and it's probably the same for everyone. But people who've left the industry, like 80% will say it was because either they were burned out or they had burned out symptoms. And. And so they're really connected and is the end. And I think the point is, like, you just need to find more ways to have, like, effective problem solving going on and that will solve the burnout issue.

Niels Brabandt

Excellent. So to wrap this all up, but now someone is listening to this and say, I think there's a really good point here and I work for a hospital. However I have to approach a person higher in the hierarchy and I have to convince them to move on with that matter because they are the only ones that pulling the right levers, pushing the right buttons, getting the money ready and everything. How do I approach someone who at the moment is on the right mindset doing this, but just moving on with the usual hospital day to day business? How can someone approach a higher ranking person in the hierarchy? Convincing them of actually supporting and delivering soft skill training to our staff is an excellent idea. How can they do that?

Francie Jane

Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. Well, one thing is I've been able to find some really nice like NIH studies that relate burnout to hospital metrics. So for one thing you can supply them with those studies and I really like to look at them because it's a nice correlation. But I think the other thing is like just experientially even just creating a survey of one group or of the larger population, but just trying to understand what people would like to learn starts to get the best the ball rolling. And it could be part of a larger engagement survey. If they do that like you might be able to add on a section where you talk about like, you know, if you could vote for learning something more that would help you in your job, what would you vote for? And I think one of the things that I see a lot is like decision making being made without the, the input from employees, when it's the thing that's going to impact the employee and like it's no skin off your back to ask them what they want because no one's omniscient.

You know, you can't just sit in a conference room, be like I think we should do this thing for everyone. But like why don't you ask them? And, and I think that like you could say listen, we have a budget for professional, we're thinking about doing this thing for professional development. Like what would you like to learn about? And it doesn't have to be an open ended, it could be both, you know, here's some titles or here what are some problems you encounter on your day to day basis that you think could someone could come in and help you with? You know, just things like that. And, and I think the discovery process of hearing from your actual people about what would be valuable is probably the best way to do it.

Niels Brabandt

Excellent. So when now someone says I think I'd like to be in touch more with Francie Jane. How can they reach out to you? How can they find more of you? Is there anything available publicly, how they can get in touch and what they can find of you?

Francie Jane

Yeah, yeah. So the. The best. If you want to sort of schedule like a call, I do like, zooms with people and that's on the website. So it's just Terrawatt Co and then get in touch and that comes to me and. And we can have as many calls as you want. I like chatting.

Niels Brabandt

Yeah.

Francie Jane

And then I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very pretty active on LinkedIn and Tarawatt's on LinkedIn too, so that could be a good way, if you like, to see what I'm talking about. And, you know, that's.

I guess this is the best way. And I love. I love doing podcasts, so I'm on a lot of podcasts.

Niels Brabandt

Perfect. I think these are the perfect final words. We see soft skill training, leadership training, professional qualification matters, no matter where you work, no matter in which industry you. And you can see that everything becomes better when you qualify your people also on the soft skills side. So at the end of this podcast and the end of this video cast, there's only one thing left for me to say. Francy, Jane, thank you very much for your time.

Francie Jane

Thank you. Real pleasure.