Next week I take my first-ever trip to Las Vegas! I’m speaking at the Association for Healthcare Administrative Professionals (AHCAP) conference and am really looking forward to it. AHCAP is the professional organization for executive and administrative staff who support healthcare leaders, and I became acquainted with them through my time at the Washington State Hospital Association. WSHA staff who went to the meeting always loved it.
It’s unfortunate, but not all administrative staff can go to the same meeting. All health care and association work would simply stop if they were all out of the office at the same time. Professional administrative staff are invaluable, and have been some of my favorite people in every office I’ve worked in.
They think like nurses, don’t they? They stop the bleeding mess in front of them and prepare for the incoming ambulance at the same time. I also appreciate how and why they value order and process: it reduces the amount of time you waste looking for things. That preparation also allows them to be adaptable when things get weird. And finally, they are constantly aware of what is going on around them, which makes them both personally and professionally invaluable. West Wing was never the same after Mrs. Landingham died.
Because I hold this particular group in such high regard, I was really touched when they invited me to speak at their annual educational conference. The theme of the meeting is “Lighting the Way to Leadership” and I’ll be presenting about communications—a pretty dang broad topic, but one with which we all wrestle while whistling. Read that out loud three times fast!
Some days, every meeting could start and stop with the great line from Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” Putting together my presentation to AHCAP has been a good thought exercise as I’ve tried to drill down to what really matters about communication, and why it seems to fail so much of the time. By definition, communication is a two-way interaction. It’s not a straight line: it’s a loop.
We fail to communicate because too often, we communicate selfishly: we have the information, and we decide the other person should have it—so we shove it down their throats. But if you change the framework of the interaction to elevate the recipient’s position and make their needs primary, you increase the chance that your message will be received. At the end of the day, the recipient decides to accept your gift of knowledge, not you.
I certainly hope that my presentation somehow makes their jobs easier—they certainly have done that for me. See you in Vegas!