Pierre Update

Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers for our dog, Pierre. Thanks to you, and some excellent work from the doctors and team at the Maine Veterinary Medical Center in Scarborough, Pierre is home and improving each day.

This week I worked with Dr Pothoff and he talked me down from the ledge.

Both he and the techs reminded me that neurological problems take longer to get back to normal than other systems. Plus, I recognize I can be pretty impatient. Add my own dog to the equation, and apparently you get a nutbag veterinarian.

But it was a good teaching moment anyway. Life tends to do that, give us just what we need at just the right time. I am grateful that he is back home and feeling better. He is blind in the right eye and walks funny, but that describes 1/2 of us anyway. He is eating cheese like its going out of style and learning to walk with his new funny legs.

He has staples in his head, and I’m thinking we are going to leave them instead of taking them out. He looks like he has a kind of metallic mohawk.  Mary says that is a bad idea, but I think she might change her mind when she sees the tattoo I have planned for him.

Thank you also to my amazing Kindred Spirits team. The doctors gave up their days off, and everyone worked together to make it seamless. So I have decided to not come back. I’m going to take off for the next year to give myself a sabbatical.

OK, I am kidding. The Bank won’t let me do that anyway.

But I was again appreciative of the momentum that the clinic has and my role in it. I say that I hire excellence and compassion and then empower those that I hire to do the right thing. That is how it plays in my head, but in reality I want things done a certain way and don’t always communicate that to the group well until they have made a mistake. Sorry guys.

Now, get off Facebook and get back to work!

Seriously, I can see with this week away that you kind of have to pick your battles as a manager or leader. I started Kindred Spirits with a wing and a prayer. I don’t know what that means, but it was definitely with an idea of what a clinic should be. As I said in my Musings on a Decade email, the clinic now has a heartbeat of its own that is not just mine. It is everyone here that puts their heart and soul into their work.

This week away definitely gave me some well needed perspective. I’m coming back to shake up a few things in the management structure. Don’t get me wrong, at the end of the day the buck still stops with me. But I am purposely distributing some management responsibilities to the team. Fact is I trust them and I’m definitely on this earth to be a vet, not a business manager.  I am adjusting to my role as leader and person with the vision, not necessarily the guy that makes every decision in the practice. Excellence is all I want at the end of the day for the place I spend at least 1/2 my waking hours. Defining, clarifying and inspiring that in others is how I intend to spend this part of my career.

But mostly I want to spend more of my time seeing patients.

My illustrious team…be patient as I grow as your fearless leader. I have come back inspired to micromanage less. You guys can grade me publicly on Facebook over the next few months. Of course if you give me anything but an A+, I will have to fire you because you have really, really bad judgement.

This week I will be back in the saddle. Tuesday we are going to have a staff meeting and will be unavailable for 2 hours. I am not sure if I am the only one, but I love the opportunity to get together as a team and work out the bumps and strategize about how we can do a better job. I almost always get better ideas than I had going into it. The challenge at this time in the history of Kindred Spirits is implementing those great ideas.

I came back from my experience at Maine Veterinary Referral Center inspired and wanting two things that they have.

#1 an MRI. That thing is cool. I mean freakin’ cool.

#2 a smoother visitation plan. Every day I went to see him I just announced who I was and they brought Pierre out and let me visit as long as I wanted. We do allow visitation at Kindred Spirits, but I can see that we have room for improvement. I see that on the agenda for Tuesday.

I’m going to have to drop the MRI idea though. I looked them up, and a little one is $300,000.

That ain’t gonna happen, but I bet we can have a great visitation plan. That shouldn’t cost quite so much.

so hey team….good news and bad news….

I’m baaaaaaccckkk

Clients, have a great week

Team members, thank you. Seriously. And in case you wonder who I mean when I say that, its you….Dr Pooler, Dr Barry, Vicki, Christina, Erin, Jenny, Alayne, Jo-el, Adrienne. Lisa, Velvet and Sherri.