Mental Wellness, Leadership & Culture Development for Veterinary Medicine Teams
Evidence-based Coaching Powered by Clinical Psychology, Cornell, and Harvard Leadership Best-practices.
The Challenge: Helping Animals vs Running a Business
Passion and performance is crushed by stress, overwhelm & burnout
While you and your team are passionate about helping animals, you find yourself swamped and barely able to keep your head above water. Lacking skills on how to cope with stress can have long-term detrimental effects on your team and performance.
Grief and compassion fatigue are real problems
As a veterinary professional, you regularly have to make tough decisions. While you want to help every animal, some are beyond your help and others have owners who aren’t willing or able to do what’s necessary. This emotional toll can build over time and cause serious problems.
Conflict, difficult team dynamics and client interactions
Managing a team and a business requires skills that aren’t usually taught in school. Conflicts easily arise when under pressure both with staff and clients. Behaviors such as gossip, aggression, ineffective communication, and avoidance can harm the team dynamics. Do you have the skills to deal with all these difficult situations with confidence?
Poor work-life balance due to poor time use and boundaries
Another example of skills often not taught in school: strategic planning, time management, delegation, boundaries, and effective communication and leadership. Without these life starts to feel like an endless treadmill with no relief in sight. Exhaustion, apathy, anxiety, and lack of joy often follow.
Addressing “fires” to the detriment of long-term growth.
Veterinary hospitals face continuous emergencies that require immediate attention. How does your team remain responsive to immediate needs while also attentive to medium and long-term initiatives that serve the bigger vision and mission of the organization? How do your core leaders balance working IN the business with working ON the business?
The Solution: Master These Wellness & Leadership Skills
Build skills to increase resilience, wellness, and overall performance
Master and apply evidence-based psychology and coaching skills that will help you and your team better cope with stress, anxiety, and burnout. Everyone will learn how to recognize “red flags” and how to respond before the situation gets worse.
Process and heal grief and difficult emotions
Strategic planning, coaching, and evidence-based psychology can aid in anticipating, processing, and healing from the emotional hardship that is common in veterinary medicine.
Recognize and resolve conflicts quickly and effectively
Conflict resolution and effective communication are powerful skills to master. Learn how to have respectful and constructive conflicts that will move the team and organization forward. And learn how to create and implement policies to protect your team and improve client relationships.
Create a pro-work-life balance culture
Learn and cultivate effective time use, planning, and boundaries to nurture a wellness culture where your team supports one another in making decisions that support thriving at both work and home.
Balance immediate needs with long-term growth
Establish new routines with your team to balance the focus between short-term, urgent situations and long-term strategic activities.
4 Elements of Better Performance
Individual Performance
We will teach you team the best practices to better manage stress, anxiety, grief, compassion fatigue, time management, boundaries, and more.
Wellness Culture
We will assess current patterns and behaviors that need to change to get your organization back on track. This include psychological safety, burnout, and other measures that inform where improvements can be made.
Team Dynamics
We will teach tools to better handle conflict, communicate more effectively, deal with power struggles and procrastination to improve internal team performance as well as client interactions.
Leadership Skills
We will work with your leadership team to maintain a wellness culture s while supporting your organization’s vision, values, strategic objectives, and KPIs.
With a Proven & Effective Approach
Phase 1
Discovery, Evaluation & Planning
GET CLARITY
Daily fires and stressors prevent leaders from setting and executing a long-term wellness strategy with their teams.
During this discovery, evaluation and planning phase, we work with your key leaders to develop and align on such a strategy.
We also diagnose and evaluate the biggest hurdles standing in your way and what it takes to effectively overcome them.
Phase 2
Implementation & Execution
TAKE ACTION
Following the discovery, evaluation, and planning phase, it is time to take action.
Depending on your hospital’s needs we customize a mixture of team workshops, small group leadership coaching, and individual coaching to align your team around your top objectives and support your leaders in driving the necessary changes.
Phase 3
Long-Term Team Support
MAINTAIN & GROW
With your leadership and team aligned, there are now two options for long-term sustainable success.
1) Train one of your leaders to take ownership of leading and maintaining a wellness culture, or
2) Have a Bespoke coach become your Fractional Director of Wellness & Culture Development to ensure alignment and success with new hires as your practice grows.
Skills You & Your Team Will Master
Personal Wellness and Performance Skills
- How to prevent and manage burnout/exhaustion
- Dealing with anxiety and stress
- Increasing confidence and motivation
- Processing grief and other difficult emotions
- Upholding boundaries and self-care
- Management of time and energy
- Understanding and communicating needs effectively
Interpersonal and Team Dynamics Skills
- How to communicate effectively and respectfully
- How to prevent, de-escalate, and decompress from conflict
- Creating and maintaining psychological safety
- Identifying and understanding your own vs others’ personality types and communication styles
- Improve management of difficult clients and recurring stressful situations
- Improve teamwork and role fit
High-Performance Leadership Training
- Diagnosing team problems/patterns
- Assess and improve motivation
- Vision/mission/values alignment
- Understand and utilize a variety of leadership roles
- Group decision making
- Root cause analysis of underperformance
- Strategic planning and execution
Frequently Asked Questions
"How much does this vet-med leadership & culture development program cost?”
The program cost varies depending on the size of your team and the involvement of our team.
In some cases, we work with hospitals on an hourly basis and in other cases, it makes more sense to set up a retainer to allow for more flexibility.
We take all the time needed to learn about your team and your goals to co-create a plan that supports your financial goals as well
"How long does it take before we get to see results?"
It typically takes about 4 weeks to interview the leadership and team members and which provides much clarity on the most common challenges and strategic goals.
Individual and team coaching success very much depend on each individual’s motivation and willingness to do “the work.”
Hence, the first noticeable improvements may happen within a matter of weeks or a few months, depending on your team’s involvement in the process.
“We're already super swamped. How much time do we need to dedicate for this program?”
This program is designed for busy, high-achieving leaders and teams, just like yours. Generally, we will meet via Zoom for 60-minutes per person, two to four times a month. Team workshops are built to support your current operations so we offer much flexibility in when and how these are conducted.
Between sessions, you will have a range of options for how much work you want to do. You can choose according to your bandwidth and spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours between sessions.
“Will this program take place online or in person?”
That’s up to you!
We often provide our services and support virtually using Zoom, WhatsApp, text, email, and Slack as well as support from G-Suite.
We absolutely love to work in-person whenever possible as we feel the personal connections are most powerful when we are in close proximity. We are located in Santa Barbara, CA and happily discuss travel to meet clients outside of this location.
“My employee is struggling. I want him/her to feel supported and happy in his/her role. Can you help?”
YES! We love working with leadership to help with employee performance and satisfaction. Often employees feel overwhelmed and burned out.
Providing skills to manage stress, anxiety, and connect with the meaning within their role often leads to much higher levels of work satisfaction and performance.
How We Get Started
STEP 1: Let’s see if we are a good fit
We only work with teams where we feel 100% confident that we can have a substantial positive impact. As much as you will evaluate us during our initial consultations, we will evaluate you and your team to ensure that we all have what it takes to deliver tangible successes for your team. At this stage we will co-create a proposal that fits everyone’s needs.
STEP 2: Scope of work
Once we decide to work together, it’s time to flesh out the details of our plan. We will start by working with your key leaders to fully map out the individual and team challenges they would like to focus on. This will inform team workshops as well as high-performance leadership skills training.
STEP 3: Action & Adjustment
Now, we move into action. We will provide the team and individual training necessary to move the dial on your biggest challenges. We will identify internal leaders to champion and forward objectives throughout the team and provide guidance and support to adjust to roadblocks and unexpected issues.
STEP 4: Support
In addition to individual session and group workshops, our team will be available to provide support in-between sessions as well. This includes a certain level of emergency support, so that we can be there for you and your team when it is needed most.
Meet The Founder
Crystal Stokes
Crystal Stokes, designed this program as part of her mission to contribute to the health and happiness of animals and the people who serve them. As a passionate animal lover and human-psychology-performance professional she honored the intersection of her interests through the creation of Bespoke: Vet Med; a mental wellness, leadership, and culture development program leveraging evidence-based skills to help authentic leadership styles shine while effectively supporting others to perform at their very best.
Crystal’s innovative approach is derived from her training from Master’s in Counseling Psychology, Harvard Organizational Leadership, Cornell in High-Performance Leadership, CoActive Performance Coach Training, Enneagram certifications, 15+ years experience as an ACE Certified Medical Exercise and Fitness Nutrition Specialist, and experiences as a veterinary technician and director of operations for several companies.
Contact us today to learn more.
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