Phyllis Quinlan is a seasoned professional coach who brings her extensive experience in healthcare to the fore in addressing some of the most pressing challenges faced by caregivers today. Our conversation dives into the intricate dynamics of caregiver burnout, the conflation of healthcare's business aspects with caregiving, and the crucial role of emotional intelligence in maintaining a healthy workplace.
Phyllis's journey started when a nurse reached out to her, suffering from what Phyllis later recognized as "empathy fatigue, caregiver fatigue, or what we now label as burnout." This encounter marked a turning point, pushing her to specialize in helping caregivers overcome burnout. Phyllis explains, "I really started to throw myself fully into learning as much about burnout, about caregiver fatigue, empathy fatigue, as much as I possibly could."
The conversation explores how the pressures of aligning the day-to-day business operations of healthcare with the inherently altruistic mission of caregiving create a ripe environment for professional burnout. Phyllis notes, "Professional caregivers, again, doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, start to confuse the business of healthcare with the practice of their profession. And they will not align."
A significant part of our discussion revolves around addressing disruptive workplace behaviors, such as bullying and chronic incivility, which can exacerbate the loss of mission in caregiving professionals. Phyllis stresses the importance of a concerted effort to tackle such issues, warning, "You never tackle someone who's dealing in or behaving in chronically uncivil manners, or are actually engaging in bullying, alone."
Moreover, we explore the solutions Phyllis advocates for overcoming these challenges. She highlights the necessity of self-care and emotional resilience for caregivers, asserting, "The fact that they have chosen with bravery to live their life heart open allows them to feel all the good and all the not so good, but in that, they have to have self-compassion for themselves."
Key takeaways from this episode include the understanding that professional caregiving is not just a job but a calling, the critical role of emotional intelligence and resilience in combating burnout, and the urgent need for healthcare leaders to foster a supportive and healthy work environment. Phyllis eloquently concludes that the goal is "to help [caregivers] regain a perspective where there are, where they are reconnecting with mission and purpose and not getting all lost in the weeds of the business of healthcare."
This conversation offers invaluable insights into the complexities of caregiving, the pitfalls of healthcare administration, and the pathways to maintaining compassion amidst professional challenges.
Text Us: What's your business challenge?
[ Music ] 21st Century Entrepreneurship with Martin P. Skerick. [ Music ] Professional caregivers, nurses, doctors, social workers, respiratory therapists, first responders and family caregivers are among the most generous people on the planet. [ Music ] Their journey is not conventional. Everybody has an opportunity to be a good person every now and then. Everybody rises to the occasion when they see somebody episodically in need and they get to their better selves. [ Music ] That is not professional caregivers and family caregivers. Professional and family caregivers choose a life of caregiving, 24/7. [ Music ] That makes them among the most generous people on the planet. So why would anyone with that kind of compassionate nature open-heartedness and desire to serve burnout? [ Music ] [ Music ] Well, hello everyone. I'm Dr. Phyllis Quinlan. I'm coming to you from New York City and I take care of caregivers. So I have an interesting background. I am a registered nurse and I have been for 40 plus years. My background is in clinical, administrative and education. I'm also a certified professional coach by the International Coaching Federation. And in 1994, I became a nurse entrepreneur and started my company, MFW Consultants, and I was able to celebrate my company's 30th anniversary in January of this year. It is a full-service consulting company. I started out with cross-training and doing education. And then I moved on to coaching and I became an author, a keynote speaker. But I think really the journey that I want to share with you here is my journey as a professional coach. So it started very conventionally. You know, career coach, life coach, can you develop a resume? Can you develop a, you know, a letter, a cover letter? And then one fine day, I got a phone call from a nurse. My target audience is professional and family caregivers. And I got a letter from a nurse or a phone call from a nurse who said she needed my help because she could only do nursing. That's the only thing she ever knew how to do. But she no longer could take care of patients. So my immediate thought was that she had hurt herself, maybe her back, some other ergonomic injury. Or maybe she was recovering from a chronic disease or an acute disease like cancer. So when I started talking to her, I said, listen, I don't want to get all up in your personal health information, but just give me an idea of the stamina, you know, that you're at. I want to make sure I start talking to you about career options that are consistent with your physical well-being right now. And she started laughing at me and said, oh, I'm as healthy as a horse. I just don't want to take care of patients. And I don't want to see another nurse or another doctor. So I immediately thought I had a crank call. But I started asking questions as all good coaches do. And I asked, I got real curious around why she had called me and what she was really asking. And then I realized I had my first client who was struggling with what we would call empathy fatigue, caregiver fatigue, or what we now label as burnout. And from that part, I really started to, you know, throw myself fully into learning as much about burnout, about caregiver fatigue, empathy fatigue, as much as I possibly could, because I realized this was where my coaching career was going to go. And that's about 15 years ago, and certainly it has. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] There are many reasons why people lose their connection to the immune purpose, which is really my working definition of what burnout is. I think among the most common reason is that professional caregivers, again, doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, start to confuse the business of health care with the practice of their profession. They're looking to align the day-to-day business operating a hospital, a practice, and they are looking to align that with the mission and purpose of being a caregiver, and they will not align. One is a business, the other is a calling and a way of life. This is where the struggle starts. You couple that with, you know, having health care organizations predominantly run by business people who do not have that same sense of mission and purpose. They have a business sense, but not a caregiving sense. Their souls are not connected to their mission and purpose and their profession. They're calling their desire to make another person's life that much better. And you start to work with decreasing levels of staff. You start to work with leaders who perhaps are more transactional than they should be humanistic. You start to work in work environments where leaders turn an eye. Don't necessarily focus on what's going on in a healthy work environment to establish, create, and sustain a healthy work environment, especially around disruptive behaviors of bullying and incivility. And the next thing you know, you have someone who is lost. They have lost their connection to mission and purpose, and they have burned out. We should start living with the hope. I wish I could believe we've come so far. But today is so long. I wish I could believe. I wish I could believe. But we can't go back. So I have two ways of coaching with professional caregivers and those administrators and business people that run care giving. When I'm working with professional caregivers, really my purpose is to help them build a sense of resilience and well-being and also help them regain a perspective where they are reconnecting with mission and purpose and not getting all lost in the weeds of the business of health care. So I work with people to develop and strengthen their sense of emotional intelligence and then to improve their sense of well-being. So it's not just a journey on self-awareness, although that is a major part of it, but then buying into the fact that they actually need to take time to do some self-care, to spend some time on themselves, which for professional caregivers is heresy. They see themselves solely as the caregiver, and unfortunately in many people's minds eye, if they feel that they need to receive care, they're equating that with being somehow less than able to do their job, broken, perhaps damaged in some way, disconnected, and they couldn't be more wrong. The fact that they have chosen with bravery to live their life heart open allows them to feel all the good and all the not so good, but in that they have to have self-compassion for themselves. They have to be able to allow themselves to first be human and then to be extraordinarily generous human beings, which we call professional caregivers. So I help them sift through the blind spots that are holding them back from investing in themselves, that are holding them back from challenging habitual behaviors that no longer serve them, and for embracing new and better ways for having a clear mindset, having a better perspective, certainly staying connected to mission and purpose, and also being able to invest time, make time, and invest in themselves so that they are able to then keep their compassionate nature open. Once they re-establish that compassionate nature, the ability to feel safe in keeping their heart open, they will no longer choose isolation, because quite honestly, that's what Bernad is. It's choosing isolation because it's too difficult to stay in the role because it hurts too much. So in order to gain these new skills, strengths, and perspectives, this is one way back to buying back into what their sole purpose is. When I am working with healthcare leaders, as I often do, my focus is on working to help them establish and sustain healthy work environments. Now, there are many pillars to a healthy work environment, and there are a lot of thought leaders out there with their opinions. You know, the pillars could include but not be limited to communication, collaboration, meaningful recognition, leadership, you know, decision-making, inclusive decision-making, and I applaud all of these efforts, and I think they're wonderful, and I certainly work towards helping leadership develop those aspects of their workplace. But what I am seeing is that people turn to blind eye or feel reluctant to face and address the disruptive behaviors of bullying and incivility head-on. Now, my word of caution to anybody listening right now is that you never tackle someone who is dealing in or behaving in chronically uncivil manners or are actually engaging in bullying. You need to have the buy-in of executive leadership in your human resource department in order to do this effectively. If you decide to take on a bully, especially alone, I can almost guarantee you because they have a way of turning the truth, double talking, using plausible deniability, acting like a victim that you will actually destroy your own career and you will solve nothing. They will stay in the organization and you will be exited. So my word here to everyone is this is a team effort. It's an organizational commitment. It is a collaboration between management, executive leadership and human resources. It can be done. It is arduous, but it's worth it. And your staff is counting on you because regardless if your systems are seamless and you have all the supplies in the world and your staffing is great. If you have just one or two people acting in a disruptive manner, whether they're chronically uncivil or a bully, then I promise you you will not be able to hold on to the talent and people will go elsewhere. ♪ The silver lining of the COVID epidemic is that it became glaringly apparent to just about everyone that they needed to take better care of themselves. And that included professional caregivers and family caregivers. So people are actually making time unapologetically for being able to either do some mindfulness or physical exercise or something that really gives them the much needed break and energy reboots that they need. So that being said, the leadership imperative for the 21st century in healthcare is to create and sustain the healthiest work environment possible. And I want to speak specifically to the disruptive behavior issue because it's not given enough attention in the literature. And we kind of talk over around it and through it. So specifically, the two behaviors I'm talking about is chronic incivility. And that is that person who you know, if they called in sick and even if you had to work short, you'd probably have a better day because not working with them is such a relief. They are totally annoying. They are irritating. They don't do their job. They don't show up on time. It's always a drama, drama, drama. They suck all the energy out of the room. And you ultimately usually wind up doing some or part of their work to get so the team can catch up. Someone who is abusive, though, is really going to demonstrate some narcissistic tendencies. Make no mistake, someone who's engaging in an abusive behavior is doing this intentionally. And they're doing this with the goal of hurting someone and it is an act of power. It is deliberate and it is a showcase of power. So let's talk a little bit about what narcissists do. Well, first of all, they usually are extremely smart and very capable in what they're doing. And that's how they get a hook into the leader in the organization because they turn around and the leader will say, "Well, who am I going to get to orient? And who am I going to get to relieve me when I'm on vacation? How do I know that the unit or the department will run smoothly when I'm gone?" And they ingratiate themselves based on their knowledge and skills for you to count on them. And then you look the other way or give them a pass when you find out that their behavior is undermining team unity. You almost say, "Yeah, I understand they could have strong personalities and they may be a little difficult to work with, but you're so good at what they do." I am here to tell you that the time for excusing bad behavior is behind us. Everyone's post-COVID experience has transformed them. And what I hear from my clients is that many are experiencing the fact that they are stronger than they ever thought they could be, which means that they are not going to put up with abusive behavior, intimidating behavior, or even irritating behavior. That if they find themselves stuck with working with colleagues that are either abusive or just plain old, suck the energy out of the room, that they're going to make a decision to take their talent and their time and go elsewhere and there will be another organization that will welcome them. It's extremely important that you understand again that you have to have a coordinated effort between yourself, executive leadership and human resources when you are working with chronically uncivil or abusive behavior. You also have to understand that bullies or narcissists will have two dysfunctional communication methods. One is plausible deniability and the other is gas lighting. So this is one of the reasons why you don't want to talk with these people on your own, that you have to have people corroborating the story when you're interviewing them or you're calling them out on their bad behavior. Because plausible deniability is essentially, well, that's not what I said, they misunderstood, blame, blame, blame. It's never me, it's always someone else. And then when that is not working, they go victim and say, well, you're always picking on me and actually you're the one who's abusing me and this is where you have to be very, very careful. Gas lighting, all right, is when they try to convince you that you're just crazy. That's not what I said. Those are not the facts. That's not what happened. And they actually take the truth and they create their version of the truth to suit their agenda. These are very dangerous things because people can really have a hard time understanding the who, what, where, when and how of an event, which again is why you have to be working as a team with executive leadership and human resources when you are addressing abusive behavior. Now, what are the remedies? Well, the remedy for chronic incivility is growing someone's emotional intelligence. If you have the time, the resources and the money to invest in someone who you think at the end of that investment will be a quality employee giving you a return on that time and an investment, that's terrific. But the answer for a real true bully is that you need to document, document, document until you have enough documentation that you can exit them from the organization. I don't want you to think that you can change a narcissist or a bully. You cannot. The number one reason why people change is because they identify a need to change. Something's not working. There's a gap. I have to change this, close this gap, and then I will succeed. By definition, a narcissist and someone who has an abuseist mentality doesn't think it's them. It's always going to be you. So if they don't perceive a need to change, they may promise you that they're going to change. They could say, "Well, just watch. Give me a month or two. I'm going to be fine." And you will find that their behavior is cyclical because they don't believe it themselves. They really believe that the world should accommodate them, should change the rules for them. And when someone is constantly thinking, it's out there, that the problem is out there, not inside me. There is no true sustainable motivation for them to change, which means that you have to document every time that there is an abusive incident. You document the education and training and just in time coaching that you offered them. You document the discipline and then you wait and you use the progressive disciplinary methods that are there and guided by human resources until finally you have enough documentation where unfortunately the person needs to exit the building. Here's the cautionary note. If you are a professional caregiver, you honestly believe you can cure a rainy day with enough effort. So we always think that this is a good person and they're smart and they're capable and if I just work with them a little bit longer, they're going to see the light and they're going to change their evil ways. And I'm here to tell you that's never going to happen. So stop diluting yourself and stop focusing all your energy on this abusive person and look at the rest of your staff who was laboring underneath this abusive person who was waiting for you to start to breathe room air and reality and rescue them and your unit. Making a commitment, finding the courage and making the commitment to effectively assess and manage the disruptive behaviors of chronic incivility and bullying is not easy. You want to make sure you're working with someone who understands the mentality of each mindset. You want to make sure that you are partnering with executive leadership and human resources and maybe someone who can help those two other entities understand what's going on with this disruptive behavior. If that is the case, I need for you to reach out to me. My name is Phyllis Quinlan. You can reach me at mfwconsultants, Michael Frank William, mfwconsultants.com. And you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I would love to speak to you, partner with you and help you create a work environment that supports talent, civility, and helps you grow your organization to its limit. [MUSIC] 21st Century Entrepreneurship with Martin P. Skurick. [MUSIC] Imagine a space where triumphs, trials, and tales of entrepreneurship come alive. Welcome to the 21st Century Entrepreneurship Podcast, a gold awarded journey hosted by Martin P. Skurick, connecting with listeners in 95 countries and ranking in the top 0.5% of all podcasts. Join our exclusive community, elevate your perspective, and embark on the path to success. (gentle music)
