Conversations for Leaders & Teams

E73. Be the Best Part of their Day: Unleashing the Power of Leadership Connection, Engagement, and Unity with Dr. David Schreiner

• Dr. Kelly M.G. Whelan

Share episode

Send us a text

Have you ever witnessed the transformative power of a leader who truly connects with their people? Dr. David Schreiner,  joins us to unravel the art of leadership communication and presence. His journey reveals the critical shift from underperformance to excellence through the power of attentive engagement. In our conversation, David shares his stories from the healthcare sector, illustrating how small acts of gratitude can ripple through an organization, lifting both leaders and their teams to new heights.

Embark on an exploration of the 'engagement imperatives' as Dr. Schreiner breaks down the three pillars crucial for leaders to enact meaningful change: personal connection, intent engagement, and mission-focused unity. This episode isn't just a lesson in leadership; it's a call to embrace the humanity within the workplace. We discuss actionable steps that anyone can take to foster a culture of appreciation and care, with David's real-world examples guiding the way. Witness the incredible impact of leaders who make being the best part of someone's day not just a goal, but a reality.

Connect with David  @ www.drdavidschreiner.com  and purchase his book Be the Best Part of Their Day on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Part-Their-Supercharging-Communication/dp/1642257605/ref=sr_1_1?crid=LG534D8AAEV2&keywords=be+the+best+part+of+their+day%2C+schreiner&qid=1698690014&sprefix=Be+the+best+part%2Caps%2C203&sr=8-1

About David:
Dr. David Schreiner who is an inspiring and values-driven leader who is a passionate advocate for engaging in a meaningful way with the people that matter the most. His best-selling book helps us to learn and implement communication skills that lead others to describe the time spent with us as the best part of their day! 

Looking for leader and team development for your organization? Contact us today!
info@belemleaders.org

Until next time, keep doing great things!

Speaker 1:

All right. Well, hey there, and welcome to Conversations where today we have Dr David Schreiner, who is an inspiring and values-driven leader, who is a passionate advocate for engaging in a meaningful way with the people that matter the most. His best-selling book helps us to learn and implement communication skills that lead others to describe the time spent with us as the best part of their day. For all you, strengths, enthusiasts, dr Schreiner leads with arranger, activator, relator, competition and maximizer. David, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Speaker 2:

I'm great. Dr Kelly, Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to spend some time with you.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, I'm glad you're here too. I'm glad you're here too. I'm glad you're here too, and congratulations on the book. Thank you, it's really been a fun run, and you know, previously you had said, let's say, that you love sharing how we can engage in a more meaningful way with the people that matter to us most. So where did this stem from?

Speaker 2:

Kelly, this goes all the way back to 2019. And I promise not to bore you with a five-year story, but I was CEO of our hospital. I had been so for about eight years, nine years and our hospital was doing well. We were hitting all of our key metrics and our board believed that I was doing a good job. And I felt like I was underperforming. And when I really dug into that, I found that I was not listening and respecting the people that were in front of me. I wasn't in the moment and I wasn't giving people the attention that they deserved and I wasn't appropriately following through on things. So for me, that started a process that ended up in me doing a doctorate and really diving into executive communication and finding out how I can do a better job of telling people that I appreciate them. I love the work that they do and I wanna be there to be a positive part of their life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's something about that leadership presence and really you know, helping others and I love that your book is about you know that communication piece but really being there as a leader and being present is so important. Many times we think about oh, we're in a leadership role and so we're doing what leaders do, but what leaders do so many times are those soft skills that people don't think about.

Speaker 2:

So well said, and I also found that as we move up the organizational chart, we also get less feedback and it's easier to get farther away from the people that matter the most, that are doing the true work of our organization, whatever that might be, and I think we really have to guard against that and stay connected with the people that are doing the true work of our organization, whatever that might be, and I think we really have to guard against that and stay connected with the people that are doing the work on the front lines.

Speaker 1:

That's right, you know you said something really interesting there about that moving up the ladder and that you do. You know the feedback really isn't there. What do you and this just kind of popped into my head when you think about your own leadership are you asking for feedback now, like, have you had a shift with how you're thinking about things?

Speaker 2:

I was blessed to have the presence of a couple of really good executive coaches, kelly, and that made a world of difference for me in seeing things that were perhaps my blind spots and going through some testing, such as you started this podcast with today about trying to find out how I'm wired, how I think, learning more about that, and then also just seeing some of these executive coaches watching me in the wild, in the environment where I practice, and giving me suggestions on what I can do to be more effective. So it's really hard for me to see from the inside out. However, when I get that feedback from people that are important to me and people that I trust, it's easier to incorporate that into our style.

Speaker 1:

That's right. Yeah, coaching is is important and and you know I love doing, I love executive coaching, team coaching and with with teams it's. It's even a different dynamic how you're actually coaching in the moment or watching at their business usual meetings in the moment and coaching during that and helping them understand that you know and giving them feedback. So that's amazing. So congratulations for you. Doing the work on yourself On behalf of those you serve is really what it's about.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it absolutely is, and in the healthcare space, and I think in all leadership, it really is about the idea of what can we do to make a positive difference. One of the goals that I set for myself is I want people to go home that evening and when they're having dinner with their partner they talk about. That was the best part of my day the time that I spent with him. He listened to me, he was present in the moment. He talked to me, not just telling me what I wanted to hear, but he asked great questions, and that's an aspirational goal that I have. I don't always meet that, but that's what I wake up in the morning, hoping to do throughout the day.

Speaker 1:

Good stuff. So your book it came through the research that you mentioned, right Through the doctoral research that you did. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that, Like how it ended up in a book, a seller book?

Speaker 2:

Well, it did start as a doctoral dissertation and other than my mom, I'm not sure anyone has ever read it and I wouldn't suggest anyone ever does. But what I kept running up to Kelly in my dissertation is my dissertation chair, who was a wonderful professor. He kept telling me that's a story, that's an opinion, that's an experience that you've had. You can't put that in an academic paper. And so I developed these stories from these brilliant men and women from around the country. I had the chance to interview people from five different rural hospitals, from all parts of the country, and I interviewed their chief executive officer, the chairman of their board of directors, the president of their medical staff or their chief medical officer, a vice president that reported to the CEO and an hourly employee. And I began to see these themes of these high-performing leaders, some things that they were all doing, and that's where the book came from.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I've got to ask this because I know that you work in the rural space and your research was based on rural. What did you see in your research and I would have read your dissertation what did you see in your research when you think about, or when you, when you've studied rural versus non-rural?

Speaker 2:

I'd love to hear what, what, what you found with that I found out that not only was this not a rural versus urban thing, but it wasn't a healthcare versus other industry thing.

Speaker 2:

Kind of things that I found about love and respect and faith and the way that we deal with others in our own community had nothing to do with the type of work that we did. It really had to do with who the person is, that we are and who we want to be and I use that word aspirationally earlier. We want to be our best. What's that look like? And so I quickly found out it was really exciting for me to discover that these traits that these leaders had were things that I wanted to better understand and be able to quantify that if more of these things are present in our communication, then we're able to engage in a more meaningful way, and that was so much fun to go through that process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thank you for sharing that, and you do talk about pillars in your book. I'd love to hear maybe a little bit about these three engagement pillars that you speak of.

Speaker 2:

I did so as I went through that painful process and you've done the same thing. I think of coding these 26 interviews that I did. I would have had 25, but one leader couldn't decide between two people, so I interviewed both of them. I've had these three pillars, and the first one was engage and connect at a personal level. The second was engaging with intent through various mediums. And the third is being mission focused through united leadership, and I found that each of these leaders kept coming back to these engagement imperatives, and there are five of them under each one of those pillars.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, engagement is so important, and that's another thing. Typically, you know you're going about your day and organizations, if they, you know, have an engagement survey, it's like they may have an engagement survey, but what are they doing with the data that it's showing? Right, yeah?

Speaker 2:

I was a master at doing what we call rounding, which other people call things like manage, by walking around and get through our entire organization, and it was just a, it was a flyby. It was like, hi, how are you doing? How's everything going? And that's not rounding. I learned from these leaders and from others that it's really the process of stopping and slowing down and asking what you can do to make their day better. Talking about a concept that I learned called appreciative inquiry, about trying to find from people what are they doing, what's existing when they're at their best, and that just leads to such rich conversations and it fills up my bucket when I get a chance to do that.

Speaker 1:

We all need our bucket filled.

Speaker 2:

We do.

Speaker 1:

So tell us a story about one of those engagement imperatives, Imperatives. Am I saying that right?

Speaker 2:

Exactly. That's right. So one of them is around finding ways to express gratitude, and I had the opportunity to work with a executive, a health care leader in the state of Vermont, and this gentleman came from a large Catholic family and in his family when good things happen to family members, they celebrate it over food. They bring everybody together and have this big meal, and so what he decided is for his organization every three months they were going to have their executive team and members of their board of directors serve people that worked in his hospital Second shift, third shift, weekends, the 24-7, 365 approach and through those meals, while their executive team was there again, they had a chance to say thank you for the difficult work that you're doing for our patients and for each other. We love you for everything you're putting into this for the people that we care for, and the results that he got from that were overwhelmingly positive and this is a very successful hospital.

Speaker 2:

So they had a lot of things to celebrate. But he shared with me that if we got to that three-month point and we didn't have a new recognition or award, I would make something up. It was Arbor Day, it was Halloween, it doesn't matter, we're just going to come up with something because it's so important. We want to do this at least quarterly throughout the year, and that was really meaningful for me. That's something that we brought back to our organization here, and we try to extend that same concept.

Speaker 1:

What's interesting is that it doesn't even have to take money, Like you talked about earlier. Even just stopping and slowing down and having the engagement with those what I like to call quick connects it's so important. So, whether it's you're providing a meal or you're stopping and having, you know, that meaningful conversation and really inquiring as to the person, it doesn't have to cost a thing.

Speaker 2:

That is so insightful for you to pick up on that because if you think about that story, they could have said there's a free meal in the cafeteria. That's giving the same thing, right. But that's not what they did. They had the executive team serving the meal and that's that opportunity for that quick connection, even if they're just going through the line. You know people love to see me put a hairnet on. They'd laugh about that for hours and we need to do those kinds of things. We need to put ourselves in positions where we're with them.

Speaker 1:

Okay, if you're listening to the podcast, the audio version of this, there is not much hair on the head. Oh gosh, that's funny. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, that's. That's interesting, and I and it's. I think it takes a mindset shift for leaders to be able to recognize that there are things that they can do that actually do fall within their role, if you will, and it may not be in their job description Maybe it should be in their job description, but yeah, I think that's interesting.

Speaker 2:

I think you're right and I believe there are 15 things that we can do and those are part of the book. I mentioned the three columns and then the five things underneath, and what I like to do is ask people to look at that and do a self-analysis and say am I doing 12 of those? Am I doing eight? Am I doing four? And maybe see if there's something that I'm not doing today and say does that interest me? Is that something that I would like to learn more about? Can I hear about a story about how that's done? But then you have to do it, Kelly. It's like any muscle right. You have to use it to get better at it. And so pick that one thing and stick with it for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and then, if you enjoy that, then move on to the next thing. And what my research showed is that the more of the 15 things that leaders are able to do, the more meaningfully they can connect.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the intentionality piece. Yeah, the intentionality piece. And I think people will gravitate and do more of what they like right, because their brain is telling them oh, I like this.

Speaker 2:

The response is good. I think it's. That second piece of the response is good and that's really helpful for me. When I try to pick up one of these and I look at this chart and I say that's my focus for this week, when I see the way people respond to that, that encouraged me, encourages me to keep doing that, to keep doing more of that, and it becomes natural. And that's what we want, right? We want it to become a natural thing.

Speaker 1:

So so those are some practical, practical steps for people to take, Are there? Is there anything else that you would suggest?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we talked about gratitude. One of the other things that I found that was really important if you have time for a really quick story is using multiple channels to communicate the message, and so this is one of my favorite stories, through the research that I did is much like today. You know, when you do a Teams call and I had to do all of my interviews virtually because it was in the middle of the pandemic and we couldn't travel and go into hospitals the middle of the pandemic and we couldn't travel and go into hospitals, and so when we did this, when the sound came on, it sounded like it was a race car or a tornado or something was happening here. And then the video came on and this lady was holding a child and vacuuming. This was in the state of Michigan. I'm thinking what in the world is going on here? And the vacuum turns off and she goes on to tell me that she's an intensive care unit nurse. She works full time in that job, she has a second job in a nursing home and long term care facility, she has six children and one of them is special needs. And what she tells me Kelly and I remember this, like we had the interview yesterday this lady told me that I'm not going to watch a five-minute video from our CEO.

Speaker 2:

I just don't have time to do that. But if you give me a transcription and I can see that there's something at the three-minute and 20-second mark that I want to watch, then I'll do that. And that afternoon the videos that we do here in our organization we started transcribing them because it made so much sense to me. We have to meet people where they are and you might appreciate a video. Someone else might prefer face-to-face meetings or a text message or an email, and sometimes, as leaders, even though it feels like it's overwhelming, we have to find ways to do and not or.

Speaker 1:

That's right, absolutely. And you know you hit the nail on the head with. We have to meet our people where they're at, because that way, them meeting us right and having communication with us is going to be the best part of their day.

Speaker 2:

I hope so. And the other thing and thank you for that and the other thing from that is in order to know what that is, we have to ask them what that is. We have to ask them. We did a survey in our organization and we found, you know, there's so much data that's going out there. You're trying so hard to communicate with us, but we don't have the time to go 15 different places to find it. So what we did is we came up with what we call a three-minute message. So we have three items that go out once a week on Wednesdays, and these are what our executive team thinks are the three most important things going on in an organization, and you can do a quick read, you can see the headline and you can decide if you want to read more about it or not. But we try to consolidate because the people that we ask told us we just don't have time to go hunt and gather the information.

Speaker 1:

You're trying to. That's just like social media, you know, as people are scrolling through. If it's quick, sure. If it's longer than a minute, forget it, you're never going to get there. Well, what is important for you to bring forward about, either the work that you're doing as a leader, your book.

Speaker 2:

I think the most important thing, kelly, for me is the love and respect that we're able to show people, and it took me a lot of work to be able to be better at that and I still have so far to go to continue to improve. But being able to tell people we love them for what they do is really important and it's it has resulted in some of the most meaningful relationships that I've had, the most meaningful interactions that I've had with people, and it can freak people out a little bit when they hear it for the first time, because we all have different families of origin and we all have different histories that we bring to where we are today. But I think if it's done with authenticity and with the respect that it deserves, then those kinds of conversations, in a way that are comfortable to you as an individual leader, are so important, and I think that your listeners can find so many ways to interact in a more meaningful way to the people that matter to them the most.

Speaker 1:

So you know we may have people listening to this and if they've listened to other podcasts, they've heard this. However, when you talk about love and leadership, it may be foreign right to some. How would you help another leader understand and we know the importance of it in our personal relationships but when you bring it into the workplace, what does that look like? Or how could you help a leader understand loving your people and loving them well?

Speaker 2:

I think the better that I'm able to do that is driven by how well I know the person that I'm working with and I have to allow them for me to not enter into a space where they don't want me. That's the last thing that I want to do. But I also know that there are some people that I work with that they accept that and it is it's sincere and it's wonderful for them to do more of that and and just try to know our people better and to begin to get an understanding of where that line is, so to speak, and maybe every once in a while just kind of gently touch one toe over it and see what happens, because you'll know I mean, you can feel it if that's uncomfortable and that's never our intent is to make anyone uncomfortable but at the same time we have to tell them that we appreciate them and that we're grateful and we appreciate them as individuals.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, that's good stuff. All right, dr David Schreiner, people can get your book on your website correct, they can.

Speaker 2:

It's also available on Amazon and at all major resellers. So all the website does is take them out to the places where they can buy it. So Amazon's really the easiest way to go.

Speaker 1:

But there's other things on that website that they can look at too and they can connect with you that way, and we'll have that all in the show notes so people can click the links and whatnot. I'd love to give you just the last word. What say?

Speaker 2:

you Well. First of all, thank you so much for having me as a guest. It's an absolute honor to get to meet you and to be a part of this, so thank you. The last word for me is just tell people you care about them, find the thing that feels best for you and telling people that they matter. I think we all need to hear that.

Speaker 1:

All right. Well, Dr Schreiner, thank you so much for sharing your expertise today. It was a wonderful message and I know that leaders are going to be piquing their interest in getting your book from what you shared today. So I appreciate you appreciate your wisdom around this topic and, until next time, keep doing great things and we'll see you soon.