Dr Andrew Vanlint

Coming Soon

Adj Assoc Prof Anthony Llewellyn

B Med Sci, MBBS, FRANZCP, MHA, GAICD

Anthony is the Managing Director and the face of AdvanceMed and the Career Doctor YouTube Channel. A Consultant Psychiatrist with extensive medical education and medical human resources experience, Anthony has served over 12 years in various Managerial and Directorial roles, including 4 years as the Medical Director of the Health Education & Training Institute and recently completed a guide into Best Practice for Selection of Trainees into employment roles for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. He is currently working on a similar project for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists.

Anthony is an expert in Medical HR. He has reviewed numerous CVs, chaired and conducted over a thousand job interviews and provided advice to a number of employers and Colleges about selection processes. Each year Anthony helps over 1,000 doctors with various medical career challenges, including clocking up over 700 coaching hours per year.
Anthony is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle’s School of Medicine & Public Health.

Anthony was born on Mouheneenner land in Hobart (Tasmania) and pays respect to the traditional owners of lands he lives and works on, and elders past and present. 

He also has a keen interest in technology and marketing and was previously Chief Technical Officer and a founder of the highly popular onthewards.org project – a website and application designed to assist medical practitioners in their earliest days of postgraduate practice.

Awkward Conversations

Easter Bunny

By Stefan Schweihofer

I recently read a post someone sent me on LinkedIn about Awkward Conversations.

The most interesting thing about this particular post was that it wasn’t about how to avoid or deal with awkward conversations (which is mostly what you will find if you google “Awkward Conversations). This particular post was about how we often miss the opportunities in awkward conversations.

Give 3 opportunities

As part of my regular process of feedback and keeping myself accountable to those who report to me I have attempted to instigate a monthly process of rounding.  I took this concept from the Studer Group who are one of the leading international healthcare organisation reform and coaching groups.

Simply put you put in place a structured approach to your regular conversations with your line reports.  Studer recommend 6 questions that can help to get to the heart of performance.  This is all based on the premise of performance discussions being more about the manager receiving feedback on their performance than the employee.  Yes.  I know that may sound a bit novel to some folks but believe me this is what most performance meetings are meant to be about.  Managers have far more power to remove barriers to performance for employees than vice versa.

Anyway the whole set up of the rounding process recognizes that this may actually be novel process for the person you are rounding on and that asking them for feedback about the work unit’s performance may have not happened very much in the past.  In my experience the first couple of roundings are polite affairs (aka not awkward) but don’t lead to any meaningful gems of information for you to work upon.

Its not until about the 3rd time you go through the process and your roundee is now familiar with the questions and gets the idea that you are committed that you start to get useful pieces of feedback from the process.  This is all obviously predicated on establishing an environment of psychological safety*.

*Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected. It is also the most studied enabling condition in group dynamics and team learning research.

The standard Studer question set include questions like what’s been working well this week, what’s not been working so well, who should be acknowledged for good performance and do you have the tools to do your job?

I’ve since gone further than those questions and really tried to make the conversation awkward by asking for feedback on my own personal performance, i.e. tell me one thing I do well, tell me one thing I could improve on.  Believe me these are even harder questions for a direct report to answer than for the Manager to ask but if put across in a genuine desire for feedback can lead to invaluable insights.

These are even harder questions for a direct report to answer than for the Manager to ask but if put across in a genuine desire for feedback can lead to invaluable insights.

We are now teaching more conflict resolution in medicine and that’s definitely appropriate.  But that’s only one type of “difficult conversation” that we need to be having with each other.

It occurs to me that there is an opportunity for many trainees to engage and be engaged in awkward conversations with their supervisors within the confines of the relatively psychological safe space of supervision, particularly individual supervision.

This probably begins with the supervisor role modelling  by dogmatically asking for both positive and negative feedback until he or she gets some “areas for improvement”.  Thereafter we can hopefully encourage our trainees to be a bit more open about discussing their failings (perceived or real) and perhaps also be open to constructive criticism from us as supervisors.

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