It is a Journey...

The BIG decision you need to make is whether or not you want to change your culture and end incivility once and for all. Many times, the culture is bad, incivility is the norm, and yet, as leaders, we focus on other "more important" topics. The reality is that until incivility ends and culture changes, there is nothing more important! Toxic cultures negatively impact every aspect of everything you do everyday! Today is the day to start looking at what you can do to eliminate incivility. Change cannot occur through drudgery, threats, and write-ups. It also cannot occur from sandwiching every negative situation between positive statements, the "love sandwich" method.

I worked for a hospital once where the engagement consultant told us, "once you coach them, love them back up.” Coaching done correctly should not be a negative that requires "loving them back up." And the reality, your high performers, regardless of how much “loving them back up” you do, they are stressed for what they failed to do, and they try so hard to do better. Not so much for the low performers, the uncivil crowd, they dismiss the coaching and only hear all the “loving back up.” Frankly, the love sandwich is a ridiculous method!

Changing culture will only occur with a leadership team being caring, kind, and authentic while still holding the team accountable for their behaviors. Step #1 is making the decision to lead the change. It will be challenging, there will be setbacks, but the end result will be peace of mind for you and for your team. This is a tricky step. It's like the Monday morning diet that ends in the cafeteria by noon. It takes more than just saying, "today is the day I will no longer tolerate incivility from my team". Ending incivility once and for all takes commitment, effort, and a plan.

Step #2 is building the plan. It takes looking at your organization's value statement and/or behavioral standards policy and really committing to enforcing it. It takes figuring out who is your leadership team and getting them to buy-in to this process. It takes determining how you will communicate it to the team, how you will track the behaviors, how you will coach the uncivil behaviors, and how you will track and trend to determine if incivility is decreasing and culture is improving. Communicating to the team can be done through emails, huddles, staff meetings, whatever works best for your environment. Having copies of the value statement and/or behavioral code to share can help to support this decision. Maybe remind your team that in the official "meeting after the meeting" when they are deciding to comply or not, that the discussion should be about how to own/change their behaviors versus deciding whether to comply as accountability is not optional.

Step #3 is the most difficult - it is the point where you as a leader start addressing daily incivility. This is not a one person endeavor. It includes all leaders including charge nurses (who deal with a huge amount of incivility on the reg)! While implementing my doctoral project, I worked with an OR leadership team (director, managers, charge nurses). We hit a few bumps and had to regroup. We knew we were actually making progress when after the third email from the director about zero-tolerance for disruptive behavior was sent, she walked in one morning and found about 20 copies of her email were found taped all over the break-room walls.

My favorite part of the project, aside from the statistically significant improvements (#win), were the leaders’ comments about the project: "It was necessary"; "Not only had we been letting them abuse other staff members, we allowed them to abuse us"; "I think our team trusts us more and knows we will respond to disruptive behavior."

There is no big secret to ending incivility, but there are multiple steps. Consistency is essential if the goal is to truly eliminate incivility once and for all. If you have been the leader for a while and you are now deciding it is time to end the incivility for your team, you will need to clearly let the team know you have drawn your line in the sand, that disruptive behavior will no longer be tolerated, and then become intentional and active in your daily practice by addressing each and every disruptive behavior.

The biggest challenge is in taking your ownership as a leader back from the disruptors, the ones who have created the havoc that you must now correct. I worked for an organization once whose value statement said that behavioral expectations were more than just words on the paper. Their value statement defined how each employee was expected to act in every interaction. It talked about each employee's individual character and the team's collective character and what the expectations were for both. It was a very good value statement! However, this facility hadn't achieved success in complying with these values, and in fact, they struggled. Their patient engagement was below the 30th percentile and their employee engagement wasn’t much better.

As much as these leaders wanted to be a zero-tolerant facility, they couldn't get there. Remember, the uncivil have power, they have worked hard to establish it, and they use it as necessary. They are intimidating (even to senior leadership). With everyone focused on every dashboard, sometimes the fear of having low employee engagement will cause leaders to back away and tread slowly believing that their toxic employees are the voice of "everyone". Unfortunately, sometimes, we listen to the wrong voices, the uncivil voices, and we overlook the voices of the victims on our team - our passive high performers who are enduring incivility on the reg! And then we wonder why our scores don't move and turnover continues! Make the decision – Today is the day to end incivility! #EndIt.