Carve out a minute to let me bend your ear for this next dispatch from The Advice Column (is it just me or is this bland moniker growing on you?!).
I was recently referred a healthcare executive for mentorship. He’s no novice to entrepreneurship, and he’s now embarking on a new opportunity with a company still at that early primordial swamp stage of life. The team (more like a rag tag collection of eager smart people!) is wading through the muck of figuring out exactly what problem they are solving and what the solution should be. In one of these early brainstorming sessions, a non-clinical person piped up with all the hubris they could muster and made a grand statement about the appropriate approach to delivering their proposed clinical care solution. Ok, I’m admittedly exaggerating for effect, but you get the point! This doc’s question, paraphrased:
How do I handle a situation like this when someone with little (ok, zero) clinical expertise waxes philosophical about how to deliver clinical care?
My clinician pals have no doubt experienced this before, the health-tech version of mansplaining (docsplaining, maybe?!). In fact, if the official Merriam-Webster’s dictionary definition of mansplaining is “to explain something to a woman in a condescending way that assumes she has no knowledge about the topic,” then maybe docsplaining could be defined as “to explain something to a doc or clinician in a condescending way that assumes they have no knowledge about the topic.” But, hold up, my non-clinician friends are probably thinking the converse also happens to them! I imagine they could just as easily define the term as “to be explained something by a clinician in a condescending way that assumes you have no knowledge about the topic.” Sitting here eating humble pie, yes, I’ll admit the clinicians do this too. Guilty as charged.
But I beg you, please, let’s put our mutual annoyance aside and figure out how the heck to talk to one another. Because communicating across disciplines is literally the secret sauce for success in health tech companies. Clinicians can’t build alone. The rest of you can’t (I mean, shouldn’t…) build clinical care solutions without us. Perhaps that’s obvious, but somehow the obvious frequently bears repeating. So it’s critical that we find a way to minimize the conflict and frustration that so often arises in these situations where healthcare execs with clinical expertise and their non-clinician peers sit on opposite sides of the communication chasm. Magic can happen when we marry teams with complementary expertise. So let’s talk about how to handle these predicaments. It ain’t easy, but it is so worth it.
The first step is to identify which flavor of “splainer” you are dealing with. I’d argue there are two major subtypes: the narcissists and the folks who are actually well-intentioned.
The narcissist is exhausting. Full of bluster and know-it-all-ness, these folks are genuinely hard to work with or work for. I still recoil when recalling times I was upstaged by a non-expert on a clinical topic that I am exquisitely well-trained to discuss. Cringe. Sigh. Pop Zofran for overwhelming nausea. Run for the hills!
But narcissists are the minority in my opinion. The optimist in me holds out hope (and a perhaps naive belief) that most people at their core are good and well-meaning. Some of these benign folks are just blundering through, eager-to-learn novices who just don’t know any better. Then there are the smarty pants types trying their very best to look wise and seasoned and smart and say important things as they navigate their own insecurities as business leaders (both clinicians and non-clinicians alike). In their eagerness, these folks sometimes step outside the bounds of their own expertise. Benign yes, but it can still be grating.
Bridging the communication gap with these colleagues still takes some nuance. You don’t want to come off looking like a know-it-all asshole yourself. You want to demonstrate a willingness to be flexible. You want to make sure the other appreciates and respects your expertise. The non-clinician wants to be valued for the strategic or finance or product or whatever-it-may-be acumen they bring to the table. The clinician wants their gazillion years of clinical training to be appreciated (4 years med school + 3 years of residency + 5 years of fellowship + being an attending physician is a lot of experience to be drawing from). And some of us clinicians also happen to bring a ton of strategic or sales or product or data expertise to the table too nowadays.
My own experience living at this intersection of business and clinical disciplines leads me to offer the following:
Assume positive intent
As leaders (and by default, teachers), begin by assuming positive intentions. Assumptions don’t serve us well in most of life, but this is the exception. Far too often we don’t give people the benefit of the doubt, and instead we get all riled up thinking the offender is trying to overstep and disrespect us. Flip this script. Assume the best and let others prove you right vs. expecting the worst and making them prove you wrong.
Find common language
Experts from different disciplines will have different communication styles, and we also quite literally speak different languages with unique vocabulary. We’d all be benefited by avoiding jargon and acronyms. Also go out of your way to learn the key terminology and language used by team members from other disciplines. Finding middle ground is on you.
Communicate, early and often
Communication is critical. Not an email. Not a text. Both of which are devoid of emotion and ripe for misunderstanding. Get on the phone, hop on a zoom, or jump in a meeting room to share your thoughts. Advance the conversation forward rather than stewing in the cesspit of your own chaotic brain. Advocate for your own views, but explain yourself and definitely don’t preach. At the same time, appreciate the other’s perspective, and create an environment of mutual respect, openness, and curiosity for learning from one another. It’s a balance of advocacy and inquiry.
Clarify your north star
Getting alignment around a clear north star is a key starting point for mutual understanding and collaboration. So begin by ensuring that there is clarity on goals and purpose, and that there is full awareness and alignment on what problem you are trying to solve. This goes a long way towards avoiding misunderstanding around intent of words and actions.
Look in the mirror first
Let’s be honest. Navigating sticky relationships and conversations is exponentially harder when you are not in a grounded, patient, headspace yourself. I’ve been there. The times I’ve had issues communicating well with others was almost always when I was dealing with my own insecurities about feeling valued and respected. A little introspection goes a long way…
A few months ago, Pete Shalek and I spoke about overcoming our own communication and collaboration challenges between our product and clinical teams in an A16Z podcast. Here we were, two well-meaning people with our well-intentioned teams all eager to innovate and build great tech-enabled clinical care solutions in service of our patients. But it definitely wasn’t always smooth sailing, and it took us putting some of the above lessons to use to get there.
So let’s stop “splainin” and start communicating, openly, collaboratively, with good intentions. Done right, done together, perhaps from that early primordial swamp, real magic will emerge.
“The art of communication is the language of leadership”
- James Humes
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