People Care by Thom Dick

Author:Thom Dick [Dick, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-05-08T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Caring for Colleagues: The Real Value of a Caregiver

“It takes two men to make one brother.”

—Israel Zangwill

In Chapter 1 I proposed that patients don’t have to be perfect, and neither do we. Well, I don’t think our colleagues should have to be perfect either. On our best days we’re all just helpers, doing the best we can with rudimentary tools, incomplete information and a few hundred hours of training, to make other people’s worst days just a little easier for them.

One of the unfortunate habits to which emergency caregivers succumb is a tendency to compare themselves with one another. That can be a good thing if your intent is to emulate someone’s achievements, traits and skills. But too often it becomes an exercise in self-validation in which we look for the shortcomings of others in order to say, “See, I’m better than they are.”

That’s an arrogant pursuit. Arrogance is a form of imbalance that occurs in us when we focus too much on ourselves and not enough on others. It produces no outcomes that benefit anyone, including us. It has the effect of destroying wonderful friendships and producing divisive gossip within good organizations. And it has undoubtedly ended the careers of many fine caregivers (and probably damaged our profession as a whole).

Remember our earlier discussion about evil—it always works by denigrating the importance of beauty and minimizing the value of people. If you were dedicated to evil, what better way would there be for you to achieve your goals than to destroy the best, most talented, most powerful caregivers?

Remember, too, that no matter how good a caregiver you are, you will always have some bad days—and you can always get better. Allow your colleagues to have bad days too, without appointing yourself to judge their competence. And avoid gossip like a plague. It destroys valuable people, the loss of whom surely hurts us all. I can’t help thinking of it as a safety hazard and holding myself accountable for its presence in the work environment of people I love and serve.

You don’t have to be a boss to counter the effects of gossip in your workplace. Use Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent noncooperation. Simply don’t say a word. That’s it; that’s the strategy. Next time you walk into your agency’s day room in the middle of a conversation about someone who’s not there, that’s gossip. Simply don’t participate.

The people in that room will all be trained observers. They probably won’t comment on your behavior, but trust me, they’ll quickly notice you’re not contributing to their conversation. They’ll notice the same thing next time too, and the time after that. Soon they’ll engage less and less in such commentary, and others will notice the same thing about them. It’s a good example of how one person can change an entire organization.

How can you tell if you’re involved in a conversation whose nature is gossip? That’s just as simple. If you find yourself wondering whether you’re gossiping, you are.

A very good way

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