My self, the CMO, project manager and compliance nurse are sitting across the table from our auditor, sweat is pouring down my back and you could just feel the weight of this audit in the air around us, like a layer of dense fog. She finally looked up and said, “you passed, I need to finalize the total, but it appears to be 95.8%….What!!!! did I hear that right, WE passed!!! I am in shock, and the 4 of us look at each other with completely big eyes and wanted to scream but are afraid to! 95.8% we did it!!!

WE take a moment and then give a little shout out of “YES!”. Our president and the other members of our staff where notified via text, and jabber. It had been said our president leaped out of her chair in the office, flung her door open and was screaming at the top of her lungs “we passed!”

Success is not just an individual thing at times, success is also a group accomplishment, and to have every person in our department get the opportunity to share in this success makes all the hard work worth it.

An overwhelming feeling pours over me like a damned up waterfall that the logs have finally been cleared and the water starts flowing down. I am so proud of this team, I am so proud of this accomplishment, I am so proud of this success.

So how did we accomplish this? We divided and conquered. I rounded up a few employees in medical management and other departments with different skill sets and qualifications. We then divided up each section of the 266-page audit. Each person was assigned a certain area to complete. We divided it out even further by taking so many pages of each section that needed to be completed by the next weekly meeting. Then we would meet every week and see where everyone was at with their assignment, reviewing the work that had been done for accuracy and then make assignments for next week. The weekly meetings also gave us a chance to collaborate on struggles we may be having in a section so that we could tackle it together. We tracked every section divided up on a one note. Then a month before the actual audit we did 2 mock audits to insure we where ready.

Divide, concur, collaborate, organize and back into how to solve for X!

It worked! The feeling of success is different for everyone. It feels like a waterfall for me, the over whelming gush of water pouring at a rapid pace over a cliff. I love that feeling. What does success feel like to you?

This week I have been exploring the components that led me to believe why I had the most recent epic failure (I had a lot of time to think since I have a nasty cold and no voice. Picture lap top on bed, tissue box and cough drops, “hack, hack”) and wanting to share what it feels like to me when I’m in a high trust work environment.

Friday night, 9 pm 2016, I place a call to my Chief Medical Officer to confirm if he had seen a report that was to be completed by someone else today and due to the national team, he stated no. I told him I would get right on it and complete it and turn it in. he trusted me, He knew when I said I would do something, I did It, since we where in a high trust relationship. The other person that did not get it done was in a low trust relationship with him and incidents like this made it go even lower.  I completed the report, turned it in and waited for Monday to come around.

At the end of the day on Monday she pulled me aside and asked me why I had done it, I simply stated to her “because you didn’t, and I was in the office when you committed to the CMO it would be done that night, so by you not doing it you put the whole department at risk, and now I have lost trust in you for not doing what you said you would.” Excuses after that went in one ear and out the other.

So how do we build trust? “Hi my name is Cindy, trust me.” What? No that is not how it works, you must earn it, both professionally and personally. Building trust for me takes a few key components.

1. Doing what you say you are going to do, and if you can’t complete it by the time that is expected, communicate that with the other party, but be careful with this, try to insure you set realistic expectations to complete tasks and not ask for a lot of extra time consistently to build trust quickly.
2. Positiveness – in a low trust relationship you must start by positive communication, low trust needs this before it can move to high trust where critical feedback is valued, if you aren’t positive in the beginning it will come across as criticism, and the meter goes down on the trust chart.
3. You better have facts and logic to back up what you are speaking about. Start with a pyramid, your idea or topic is the top, what are your trying to get across, logic is in the middle, positive feedback and collaboration at the end.
4. Take accountability for everything you do that was not up to par, and for leaders, promote this behavior. There was a time one of my managers made a decision for his department in front of customers and me. It was not completely the correct decision, but, I knew in this moment I needed to back him and show support for him publicly, then, I would take him aside and coach him for the next time. By doing this I built trust with my manager, he knew I would have his back, and that if he did not know the answer always ask, that allows us the opportunity to share information, which…. you guessed it, built trust.
5. The “Why” factor. This one is my favorite. Remember being a kid and you parents would say “Cindy, go and pull the weeds on the side of the yard” and as a little girl I would ask “but why, we don’t use that area” and the parents reply would always be “because I said so” RIGHT! We all have a similar story on this. As a leader, I always give the why. “team, we need to insure we have all of our cases complete in your que by the end of each work day, and the why is because if they are not we are billed an extra $350 a day for inappropriate stays” I don’t even wait for them to ask me why any more, I give it to them so that they can have trust in me that there is valid reason I am asking them to do it. This strategy works REALLY well in my personal life also.
6. And the last one is Empathy. People do not care how much you know if they feel you do not care about them. Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes gives you a better perspective of the situation. If you ignore people until you need something and then are “super nice” (said in my 13 year old valley girl voice) to them….you will never build trust.

So…..I spent the first 3+ years of this current epic failure doing all of the above, until, the load got so heavy things started to slip…….March 2017……