What your healthcare leaders won’t share with you — but you don’t need to worry about it

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Leadership is hard. On the outside, supervisors and managers appear to sit at a desk or in an office and stare at a computer monitor (or two). Why aren’t they on the floor treating more patients? Can’t they see you’re drowning?

On the inside, it looks like this:

Yes, they 100% can see you’re drowning, and they feel it for you. They too have been in your shoes and know how it feels. But here’s what gets lost if they jump into patient care and set aside that seemingly unimportant managerial stuff.

Maybe payroll doesn’t get done on time — but that can’t happen. You have to make a living. Maybe you requested PTO but it didn’t get approved yet, and you’d like to know why, but your manager is in the ED treating a patient, so you can’t ask.

Maybe someone had an emergency at home and called their supervisor to adjust their schedule. Someone else had a code blue and needed a debrief and support. Yet another had someone fall and doesn’t know how to report it, because it’s never happened to them before. That person is distraught; a fall! With a therapist, no less.

They have executive level hospital initiatives to report out so you can get the pay raise you deserve. Those executives ask hard questions to get your manager to justify why they’re asking for more money or more staffing.

Other days involve reading through resumes and calling new candidates to get you more help. Then comes onboarding that new person. You may be the person who trains them, but there are 50 steps that must take place before that new employee can step foot through the door. But this is New Mexico: applicants aren’t falling from the sky. Sometimes job postings go for weeks or months without a single applicant. That position is open for a reason — it isn’t from a lack of effort on your manager’s part. Then, executive leadership decides to cancel the posting in order to save money. That decision was entirely out of your leader’s control, but they have to deliver the news.

Then there’s the newbie leader. He or she was good with patients, good with colleagues, and good with other teams. They get promoted and colleagues drift away. Who were once friends now look at the new supervisor as “middle management,” and therefore, something else. No longer part of the team. No longer aware of what goes on, despite that person knowing very well what goes on. That’s why they got promoted.

And so the talk shifts to loneliness. Leadership is lonely. The circle of people you can confide in shrinks, and those in it with you may or may not be willing to help you along. Tears are shed in an office with a closed door that must be immediately wiped away because there is a knock at the door.

So why do it?

We are in healthcare to take care of people. Leaders are there to help support their teams take care of those patients, with the resources they need and the time and pay it deserves. The systems often fall short, but we can only work within our locus of control.

You do the best you can; your leaders do too. Knock on the door, send the text, call on Vocera. Whatever you need, a good leader will support you. I promise.