Episode #40 – Rob Best

Stacy Pursell:

Do you work in the animal health industry or veterinary profession? Have you ever wondered how people began their careers and how they got to where they are today?

Hi, everyone. I’m Stacy Pursell, the founder and CEO of The VET Recruiter, the leading executive search and recruiting firm for the animal health industry and veterinary profession. I was the first recruiter to specialize in the animal health industry and veterinary profession in the United States and built the first search firm to serve this unique niche.

For the past 25 plus years, I have built relationships with the industry’s top leaders and trailblazers. The People of Animal Health podcast highlights the incredible individuals I have connected with throughout my career. You will be able to learn more about their lives, careers, and contributions. With our wide range of expert guest, you’ll be sure to learn something new and every episode. Thanks for tuning in and enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the People of Animal Health podcast. On today’s show, we are talking with Rob Best. Rob is a known keynote speaker and a regular guest on TV and podcast from talking about his work with people like Ndaba Mandela and Kobe Bryant to profiling criminal suspects and celebrities for possible deception.

Rob is a certified expert in neuro leadership, the science-based field centered around emotional intelligence. His work focuses on increasing the emotional and psychological safety within professional environments to help attract, retain and develop talent. And he certainly knows a little something about talent having been a basketball player and a world explorer who’s trekked six of the seven continents and even the CEO of a global nonprofit supporting teenage entrepreneurs in over 30 countries.

Rob holds two bachelor’s degrees, business and organizational communication. And his learning and education have never stopped. He’s earned his CVPM. He’s a licensed expert in body language, statement analysis and deception detection. If you think that sounds like some FBI or CIA stuff, you’re right. And Rob uses these skills for supporting leaders and influencing positive change in business and in life. Welcome onto the People of Animal Health podcast. And how are you, Rob?

Rob Best:

So good. I’m the person who sits and receives compliments and I take my two hands and I push them away like, “Oh, stop it, stop it, stop it.” And you read the bio and we all write our own bios. And hearing it out loud, I get to rarely hear it and I want to do the same thing. I want to push away because my gosh, there’s a lot there and I suspect we’re going to have some fun talking about some of it.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, we are going to have fun talking about it and I’m so excited to have you on the show. I know we last had the opportunity to see each other in person at the AVMA show and had been planning this for a little while, so I was very excited to have this chance to talk with you. So, I’d love to start off at the beginning. What was your life like growing up and where did you grow up?

Rob Best:

Oh, gosh. I was born in Upstate New York, and I was in grade school when my family moved west to Southern California. I was an awkward kid, a bit of a loner, socially awkward. And one day my dad put a basketball in my hands. Turned out I was a pretty good athlete, played most all sports, played them pretty well, but enjoyed basketball the most and that eventually got me into college and my goal was to keep playing after college. So, I did.

Didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. The basketball gave me an outlet, gave me something I could enjoy. It became a very safe space for me. Anytime I had a basketball or I was on a court, most sports gave me a hint of that, but basketball was really my safe haven, but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do as a business professional. I knew I didn’t want to work in sports. Playing sports was great, but I had this gut instinct that there was something of entrepreneurial interest.

So, when I finished with athletics, I stumbled into an incredible mentorship opportunity with a consultant named Tom Drucker. And Tom was mentored by the one and only Viktor Frankl. And so, by one degree of separation from Viktor to Tom, Tom became my mentor, and I felt and fell into a passion for leadership and behavior.

So, all the postgraduate stuff and work in leadership came after. The initial was very unintentional. I like to say I failed my way into it. Today, it is all very intentional and the roots remain with those first few years of mentorship with Tom Drucker and learning what behavioral science is and how it can affect people and professional environments. So, there’s a quick summary. I hope I did okay.

Stacy Pursell:

Yeah, you did. And you’re an expert, Rob, in neuroleadership and emotional intelligence. Can you share some insights on how understanding cognitive science can help us unlock human potential in the workplace?

Rob Best:

Of course. This is an easy conversation because it’s not theory-based. There’s three decades of evidence behind how emotional intelligence drives results in business. When we look at our EQ, the first thing we can connect to is things like emotional or psychological safety. There’s a lot of people to talk about that, especially in our industry. Most of your listeners I’m sure are familiar with Josh Vaisman, one of my favorites in the space of psychological safety. We need more Joshes in vet med.

Learning, practicing and developing emotionally intelligent behaviors as habits will drive emotional safety in a professional environment. And for measured results, it’s directly connected to things like high performance, employee retention, job satisfaction, things that equal efficiency and production.

So, whether you’re a private practice, maybe you’re an owner with a few hospitals or you’re a consolidator, this is a level playing field for all and it’s an absolute must. And when you learn to value this for the results it can produce, you begin recognizing how leaning into EQ behaviors can, in a positive and intentional way, affect your company culture.

And this is one of these things that I think a lot of people unintentionally get wrong. They believe if they focus on the performance with our quarterly results and our reports, the performance is going to drive a good culture. Sales will fix everything, revenue will fix everything, and the culture will be happy. No, it literally never works that way.

100% of the time, culture will always drive performance, hence the upfront necessity for business leaders and hospital owners and practice managers to begin to understand a little more about emotionally intelligent behaviors and how their ability to be more self-aware and their ability to be more self-regulated with their decision-making and their leadership can ultimately long-term drive sustainable results that are measured and will continue to be measurable.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, that’s good stuff. Well, you emphasize the importance of emotionally intelligent leadership. What are some key emotionally intelligent behaviors that leaders should adapt to improve communication and team dynamics?

Rob Best:

That’s such a good question and there’s these five components behind emotional intelligence. And I won’t go super academic, I just want to give context here. The five are self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation and social awareness. And I like personally to focus on the first two.

Self-awareness being the first one, and this one’s arguably the easiest of the five to grow because you can work on this. It’s like when we train for an athletic event, we train to run a race, training our brains is very similar in that we’re going to practice emotionally intelligent behaviors to grow our emotional intelligence. I’m going to go out for a 30-minute run to train my legs to get ready for the race. I’m going to learn some EQ behaviors to grow my EQ. So, self-awareness is the first and arguably the easiest.

One of the ways we can grow that muscle, simply ask for feedback. That’s it. Request feedback. Request feedback from people who report to you, request feedback from people you report up to, request feedback from your friends, from your family, from your significant other. Make it a cultural norm for your space to request feedback with consistency from other people. So much so that at some point, they may simply start offering feedback because it’s become so consistent. So, what’s one of our behaviors that we can immediately use to grow our EQ? Just start asking for some feedback.

The second of the two is arguably the hardest, which is self-regulation. So, now that I’m more aware, we hear a lot of people talk about self-awareness and I don’t hear a lot of people talk about what comes next. Yes, the value for self-awareness alone is very high. However, now that you’re more aware of particular behaviors perhaps, the next step is regulating those behaviors so that they become more intentional.

If these are behaviors that are creating a negative influence, what’s the shift in mindset and behavior that can make it a positive? If the feedback is these are behaviors that are really helpful and supportive, well, let’s record them and become more intentional with using them more often so that we drive a more positive environment, more positive culture for more positive results. So, those are my low-hanging fruit opportunities. Ask for feedback and then leverage the feedback to become more intentional with your decision-making as it relates to your behaviors.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, and it sounds easy enough, ask for feedback. And I read Jack Canfield’s book The Success Principles, and one of the things he talked about in that book is how feedback is a gift. I love feedback and I think it is a gift because we all have blind spots, and if we don’t get that feedback, then we go along thinking everything’s good when other people might not think that things are good with whatever the experience is.

And so, as a recruiter, I’ve had candidates before. I have an example that came to mind. I was working on an executive search and I had this executive that I sent out on three different interviews with three different companies. The first interview, he was interviewing with the president and the president said, “He talks too much, he’s not listening.” I gave him that feedback and I coached him for the second interview. He did the same thing in the second interview. I got that feedback twice. And then I reluctantly sent him out on the third interview with the different company. I gave him that feedback again.

He did the same thing three times and I said to him, I said, “What happened?” And he said, “Well, it probably just wasn’t the right fit.” Instead of reflecting within himself that, well, maybe he sabotaged the interview three times, and I thought, “We got this feedback three times from three different companies. It’s not them, it has to be you.” But he was not open to the feedback. He just said, “This is not the right fit.”

So, I’ve seen this before working with candidates. They want to know, “Well, why didn’t I get the job?” And you give them that feedback or you give them feedback and then, and recruiters and companies become reluctant to give people feedback because people, they get offended. So, how do people become open to feedback and why are people not open to feedback?

Rob Best:

Such a good question. There’s two things I’ll address here. Number one is to help ease people’s minds with regard to the negative feelings or emotions that might surround the topic of feedback. We have these five neurologic social needs that every single human brain has. And if any one of these five happens to be triggered in the realm of a potential threat, the defenses are going to build in the person. And defensiveness in humans is literally biologic. We have learned behaviors that follow our defensiveness, but defensiveness is biologic and that’s going to occur. It is expected.

So, in a feedback conversation, one of our neuro social needs is a sense of autonomy. Maybe I’m receiving feedback that is threatening my sense of autonomy. I maybe perhaps made a couple of mistakes and because of those mistakes, the level of oversight required for my next project is going to increase, and the company’s perspective is that they’re giving me more support. My perspective is no, you’re looking over my shoulder. My autonomy is reduced, which is going to trigger my defenses.

So, this defensiveness with feedback conversations is expected. I can give several examples, but I think that’s enough to buy into the understanding that it is expected. So, that’s one.

Two, and this might shake a few of the listeners here. Feedback can be a gift. Agreed. Part of our mindset for receiving feedback as a gift is understanding that all feedback is true. This is a hard fact for a lot of people to understand. And there is an exception on leaving off the table here. The exception is if someone has malice intent, they’re attempting to cause you harm, let’s leave that off the table for a moment because generally speaking, especially in professional environments, feedback conversations do not have the intent to cause harm.

That being said, yes, it is true. All feedback is factual. For what reason? Why am I so confident in saying this? Well, for most all people, most all of the time, how we intend to occur to other people is oftentimes in conflict with how other people receive us.

So, when they give us feedback, it’s from their lens, it’s from their perspective, it’s from how they experienced our presence or our behavior. That doesn’t make it untrue. It may be untrue to how we intended to occur, but it’s not untrue to how we were received by the other person or the other party. All feedback is true. Hence the gift that comes with feedback is learning more about how we can adjust our behaviors so that we are more congruent with displaying and being received in ways that are aligned.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, that makes a lot of sense. So interesting. And I want to continue with this. So, developing and retaining talented teams is a significant focus of your work, what strategies do you recommend for building a positive organizational culture that emphasizes growth and innovation?

Rob Best:

We can call this the Simon Sinek crosses with Brené Brown moment. From the Simon Sinek, it’s this unwavering focus on people come first. 100% of all our investors are people. 100% of all of our clients are people. Our patients are pets, but our clients are people. 100% of all of our employees are people. If you don’t know people, you don’t know business. It’s quite literally that simple.

So, the Simon Sinek side is make sure people remain first. Don’t replace people with a number. And sometimes we may unintentionally use language that replaces people with numbers. We’re going to say, “This is about client service.” Well, depending on how we’re introducing that conversation, we may be unintentionally looking too hard at a data point as opposed to looking closer at the people point. What exists in the environment relating to our people that might be influencing this data point? That’s the start point.

The Brené Brown side for influencing the positive outcomes is being a leader who’s full of vulnerability and empathy. And the purpose here is for fueling connections. I mentioned earlier that there’s these five neurologic social needs and autonomy was one of the needs that I mentioned.

Another one of those five is relatedness. Our brains require a sense of relatedness. And when we’re in positions of titled leadership, those who are not in equivalent positions will have a gap in their ability to feel like they can relate to us and like we can relate to them. Therefore, it requires some intentional behaviors, hence emotionally intelligent behaviors to help close that gap, to help them feel more related to us and vice versa.

And when we choose vulnerability and when we use empathy in ways that is expressed with intention, we can increase the sense of relatedness between us and the people that we support. Hence, you can drive more positive results and outcome through efficiencies and productivity all connected to people’s performance.

The vulnerability displays high levels of assuredness and confidence in ways that are very authentic. The empathy that is expressed helps people believe that you understand how they feel. It’s rooted in fueling connections. You increase that sense of relatedness, you’ll increase the sense of connection. Your team will be more confident and comfortable disclosing to you information that can be used so you can help them.

This is a side note. It’s a really cool study from a long time ago. It was unexpected. It was from human hospitals. There was a study that was being conducted where one hospital was full of all these fear-based leadership behaviors. Another hospital had really, really talented leaders that built an emotionally safe environment.

And they were looking to all sorts of data points when studying these two hospitals. And something that they found that they didn’t expect was the hospital with fear-based leaders and fear-based leadership in a fearful environment, emotionally fearful environment. They had far fewer cases of medical errors. This raised my eyebrows like, “Oh, my gosh, is there a positive behind fear-based leadership?”

So, they started to dig a little deeper into the study and learned the following. The two hospitals in reality had a fairly similar number of medical errors that were actually occurring. What was different was the hospital with emotional safety, they were reporting the errors so that corrective actions could take place. The hospital with the fear-based leadership, they weren’t reporting the errors. And you can imagine what follows that.

Stacy Pursell:

That makes a lot of sense. And it sounds like earlier when you were talking, somebody the other day said to me, people overprocesses, and it sounds like that’s what you’re saying, people overprocesses. And for me, that’s a simple way to remember it. Like you said, there’s people on all sides. People are your customers, people are your employees. When you’re in business, you’re dealing with people.

So, as an international keynote speaker, what are some of the most impactful messages or themes you address in your talks and how do they resonate with different audiences around the world?

Rob Best:

Oh, gosh. It depends. Okay, I’ll think about this in two ways. One, for the audience, it depends on the audience. Who is this audience? What’s going to be impactful for them? What’s the purpose for my presence for even being here? And if I consider the audience, some of my most impactful, meaningful, memorable moments are connected to youth and youth leaders, it’s when I get to talk with teenagers who are going to literally drive the next generation of innovation on our planet. It’s when I get to go to universities and spend time with college students who are ready to come in and help progress veterinary medicine to whatever the next stage happens to be.

For me, I get all the warm and fuzzy feels. My hair on my arm stands up, I get the goosebumps and I get to walk away feeling like there’s been a connection in the room that’s going to drive some decision-making that can be beneficial for the individual and for whatever the individual happens to do with their personal or professional lives.

So, when I think about the audience, that’s what surfaces first for me. When I think some of the more meaningful messages that I would perhaps want to make more available. These are messages that more people need to hear. The first one that comes to mind is a keynote I’ve been giving for the past few years related to the academic piece is attitude and unconscious bias.

In business, the number one indicator today, your audience can Google this, I think there’ll be a Forbes article that details. This will be the first will pop up in a Google search, but the number one indicator for the success or failure of a business today is the attitude of the leaders on site.

Stacy Pursell:

Wow.

Rob Best:

Now, this isn’t like the stock market, like every day if you watch it up and down, up and down, up and down. Everybody has a good day. Everybody has a not so good day. However, like the stock market, if you watch the trend over time, if the leadership attitude trends to the positive over time, it’s a safe bet that this company is going to do well over time. If there are attitude trends to the negative, then you can make that bet.

The second piece on the academic side is unconscious bias. What science has the most evidence about yet business today does the least with is unconscious bias. It is the largest gap of opportunity for us to take action on. Hence, I want to make this available because we have tools and resources, we’re just not using them. And it applies to so many things that we’re experiencing in our hospitals today.

The story around this particular keynote is fun though. It’s a title called We Can and We Will. It tells a story of the Buffalo Soldiers and how they supported the US during the Spanish-American war and fought alongside Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. And ultimately, we followed this one particular person who was the longest-living Buffalo Soldier and his time living in Richmond, Virginia, which is the epicenter of slave trade in the United States.

And so, we talk about our opportunities as a community, local, national, and global for understanding the meaningful components of attitude and unconscious bias and how we can learn from these historic stories and leverage conscious decision-making that can boost positive attitudes and reduce unconscious biases in support of a simple request for us to all be kinder than we feel. That’s my favorite.

Anyone happens to be listening, if you’re looking for an emotional positive and fun keynote experience, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I struggle with self-promotion, but this one particular message is one I will never hesitate to make available for people. Thank you so much for asking that question.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, I love what you just said. Be kinder than we feel. I have a degree in broadcast journalism, so I think in soundbites, so that’s going to be one of those soundbites that’s going to play in my mind for a while. Be kinder than we feel. I love that. And you were talking about leadership. It sounds like the success or failure of a company comes down to the attitudes of the leadership on site. So, in your experience coaching senior leaders, what common challenges do they face and how do you help them overcome some of these obstacles to become more effective in their roles?

Rob Best:

It’s tough. It’s hard to find a common denominator because the environments vary with senior leaders. There might be a senior leader who’s responsible for two hospitals and less than 150 people. Then you have senior leaders who are responsible for hundreds of hospitals and thousands of people. And the variation that they may experience is pretty significant.

So, when looking for common denominators, one of the things that surfaces in today’s veterinary world is timelines have shifted significantly. What used to feel like a week now feels like a day in terms of decision making. What was a month is now a week. What was a full quarter is now a month. When I used to have a full year, I now have a quarter to produce results and show results.

That I think is very consistent. There’s this rapid necessity for results. And it takes us away from the potential to truly establish something sustainable within a professional environment. If I look at that as a baseline and where I can help with some consistency and where I do help with some consistency with the senior leaders is helping them to understand what the longer term potential is for their current time decision making.

So, what are the long-term results? Is this a moment where because I have to produce results or I believe I need to produce results that are more immediate and for whatever the reasons are, whether it’s just me and my team or my investors or my board or whomever it happens to be, if I have this belief that these more immediate results are necessary, it’s the understanding that I still have conscious decision making available.

And if I can identify short, mid, and long-term results based on how these decisions are going to affect people first, now I can begin to adjust some of that decision-making from a perspective that is truly evidence-based with demonstrating longer-term success.

How do I summarize that in a way that is more tangible? Human nature. We have a tendency to be more competitive than collaborative. And this decision-making for short-term gain is what you see in a competitive environment. It’s short-term wins. It’s literally win-loss. So, the focus becomes how do we build and develop a more collaborative skillset for mutual benefit longer-term? Because long-term, a collaborative approach over a competitive approach will always gain more. Always. This is not a basketball game. It isn’t four quarters and it’s over, win versus lose. No, this is the business of life.

And within the professional environments, what might feel like the end of the fourth quarter because there was a term and results were necessary, well, guess what? There’s another four quarters next year, another four quarters of the year after that. This is an infinite process. And if you don’t have or maintain that mindset, you can fall into more of a competitive style of decision-making that is very unintentional yet very real. And it’s going to shorten your ability to access and obtain longer and higher gains in the future.

So, the focus becomes collaboration skills and they’re rooted in some additional details that’ll be a different conversation at a different time. The important piece is mutual benefit. You might beat me today, but I’ll be back at the table next month. Now what? If it wasn’t a win-lose in and it was truly mutual benefit and next month I’m back at the table, our ability to continue to collaborate and find mutual benefit will grow both of our results, whether they’re financial or otherwise.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, it’s so interesting that you say that because there was an executive that told me this, and he was actually a guest on our podcast before, but he was telling me this story about how when he was a young man, he was at the table negotiating with another man. And the negotiations became very heated, and the older man said to this younger man, “Let’s go outside and let’s walk around the building. Let’s just take a walk.”

So, during that walk, the older man told the younger man, he said, “When you’re negotiating, if it’s not a win-win for both parties, it’s not going to last.” So, if it’s not going to work for both parties, it’s not going to be a long-term situation. He said, “I never forgot that in the rest of my career. When I go to the negotiating table, it has to be a win-win for everyone. It has to be a collaborative situation versus a competitive situation.” So, that reminded me of that when you just said that. So, it sounds like there needs to be more training among companies on collaboration skills.

Rob Best:

Absolutely, there is. And if we isolate the negotiation piece alone, just think about the conversations you have throughout the day. 80% of the conversations you have are negotiations. Where are we going to have dinner tonight? If you have kids, they start their day negotiating. “Five more minutes, mom.” Our lives are full of negotiation conversations.

In business, there’s two pieces here that I can offer as low-hanging fruit. We can all easily apply these. Number one, going into negotiation if there’s a problem or a position to be taken, the first step is you’ve got to identify and define it with absolute clarity. Because if you don’t have agreement on a problem, you will never find agreement on a solution. If you don’t have agreement on what the position is, you’ll never find agreement on the progress.

So, step one, make sure you have a clear definition of whatever the problem, the issue or the position is. It has to start there. And confirm mutual understanding of it and agreement that this is our center point.

The second, your focus is not the position. To overcome the position, you don’t focus on it. The focus is where are our mutual interests and how do we meet as many of these mutual interests as possible? And so, you quite literally lay out the basics of mutual interests. If we’re talking about any kind of negotiation that’s occurring in our hospitals, think of the basics. We both want good patient care. We both want positive employee experiences. We both want departments that are proactive in helping each other, so we don’t have this back versus the front conversation.

Again, all these low-hanging fruit mutual interests. The focus becomes I’m going to be very rigid in what I want, whatever that happens to be. I want for this person to no longer come to work late. Okay. But I’m going to be very flexible with how I get what I want. And the flexibility is found in how do we maximize our ability to meet all of these common interests because these common interests are going to overcome this one problem or this one position, and we always have more common interests than we do problems or positions.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, you’re right about that. I do a talk at some of the veterinary trade shows on, I teach negotiation skills, and I mentioned what you just said. Some people think that I only negotiate when it comes to negotiating a job offer or I’m negotiating on buying a car or buying a house. But you’re absolutely right.

We negotiate every day. We negotiate with our coworkers on, “Can you work this day for me?” If you’re in a clinic, “Can you pick up this shift for me?” Or like you said with kids, “Can I stay up 10 more minutes to play this video game?” Or you’re negotiate with your spouse on chores or who’s going to pick up the kids. So, we negotiate all day long and sometimes they’re not even realizing this is a negotiation.

Well, change is inevitable in any organization. I’d like to talk about change, and what are some of the best practices that you teach and managing change and enhancing organizational agility to stay competitive today?

Rob Best:

Yeah. I love the conversations that surround change, primarily because it’s constant. We’re aware that change is constant. And there’s going to be several variations of methods behind how we choose to lean into change. One of my favorites is something called a change management diagnostic tool. And it includes these elements of behaviors and elements of strategy. And it’s this really cool matrix.

And your audience can Google it. It’s literally just called the change management diagnostic tool. They’ll find it. It’s very well-known and widely used. And when you look at this matrix, it identifies if your team is experiencing this, generally speaking, this is the piece that’s probably missing. Now I’m stating this off the top of my head, so I may have this detail wrong, but you’ll understand the example I give.

If one of the is false starts, it seems like we plan so well for all of this change, but we just can’t seem to get off the ground. We have this consistency of false starts. Well, false starts may relate directly back to a sense of purpose. So, within the sense of purpose, it’s our ability to communicate the vision. So, maybe we need to give more attention to our ability or our skill in sharing or conveying what the vision is for this change because the vision is going to stimulate the start.

So, there’s five behaviors, there’s five strategies, and they all correlate. So, it’s this awesome change management diagnostic tool. I root most of my change discussions with leaders and with organizations around this when we’re looking at a very particular change that’s occurring.

Separate from that, we look at what is the significance of the change and how do leadership behaviors affect what your priorities are with this change? This is a process from the NeuroLeadership Institute. It’s these three buckets, priorities, behaviors, and systems. So, we sit down and have a conversation because there’s some change management that’s going to be required. It’s going to be a big deal. We’re going to equip people with this change management diagnostic tool, but we need a bigger, more robust plan. Okay. Well, we’re going to take a look at these three buckets.

Number one, what are our top priorities? Never more than three. If it’s more than three, it’s no longer a priority. It’s too diluted. So, there’s one, two, or up to a maximum of three priorities. The second bucket is really my responsibility. The first one is the company, and I help them navigate and negotiate what those top three are.

The next bucket I’m going to identify what are the leadership and organizational behaviors that are necessary, the human behaviors that are necessary in order to obtain results directly related to these priorities. And I can build the plan around how to adopt the behavioral habits necessary.

The third bucket is collaborative with me and the team, which is systems. There are existing systems in your hospital. Quite literally operating systems. It could be workflow. It could be your soap sheet. There are systems that already exist. We’re going to identify how these current systems either help or hinder the behaviors that are necessary in order to achieve results relating to your top priorities. It’s just a simple reverse engineering of how we look at it, but the systems that really help, we focus on enhancing them, maximizing them where possible, the systems that hinder.

When it is possible? We change those. Sometimes it’s not possible. When it’s not possible, rather than focusing on perceiving this as a negative, we perceive it as how do we adjust so we can reduce how it hinders and increase how it might help. So, that’s a simplified process, priorities, behaviors, and systems, and we build around those three buckets for more robust change.

Someone wants to do a really big project that shifts an entire hospital’s culture or a whole company’s culture. We’re going to look at priorities, behaviors, and systems and build a plan around that. Otherwise, our day-to-day changes that we know we experienced, this diagnostic tool that you all can Google search is a phenomenal resource and I’ll never hesitate to share it forward.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, there’s so much in that I feel like we could just go on for a whole day and just talk about that, changing culture. In my mind, I was wondering how long does that process take to go in and change a whole culture of a hospital. How long does it take?

Rob Best:

It’s going to vary as you can imagine. It always depends. Every year older I get, the two answers to questions I feel I give more is either, “it depends” and “I don’t know”. This is one of those “it depends”. On average, you’re going to look at it at least somewhere in the ballpark of nine to 12 months to help ensure a shifting of the culture. For that culture to really fully shift and sustain long term, it’s going to be more like 18 to 24 months of consistent effort.

So, maybe you have somebody who comes and helps from the outside. It can be consultants like you or I who help identify what the process is going to look like, and we help guide that process through the first year. The second year, if we’ve done really good at what we do and if the circumstances are appropriate, we can provide a process where the team can self-navigate most of that second year and become more sustainable without the necessity for consistent outside help.

Every situation is different. Some situations are far more complicated and they need a lot more help and it takes more time. Some situations are easier and there’s minor shifts required, and they’ve got really talented leaders on site that can drive a lot of this, and that reduces the time. So, just think on average, nine to 12 months is your basic. Eighteen to 24 months for larger projects and things that really need to have some stickiness for long-term shifts.

Stacy Pursell:

Okay, interesting. Well, Rob, you’ve been the CEO of SAGE Global since 1999, a nonprofit supporting teenage entrepreneurs. Can you tell more about the impact of this organization and how it’s evolved over the years?

Rob Best:

Oh, gosh. So, I was in an accounting course in college, and I have so much respect for people who are professionals in accounting. I had to learn just enough to understand some of it, but it is not my wheelhouse. So, there was some extra credit offered towards our final grade if we got involved with this program in college relating to business and community service. For me, that just meant I could do less accounting work.

So, one of my responsibilities was to create a project. And I was at that time a college basketball player. So, March Madness was definitely top of my mind. And for those who don’t know, March Madness is a college basketball tournament where you have brackets of universities from all over the country. It’s North Carolina against Duke. It’s UCLA against University of Arizona, et cetera.

I had chosen to create a small local competition for teenage entrepreneurs that would mimic March Madness, but for kids in high school. And the one little twist to create something new or different was I went to these local high schools. I looked for classes that already had been teaching business and entrepreneurship, and there were some programs around town that did that for these schools. And these kids were operating these little small micro businesses. They were real businesses. I asked about their willingness to somehow attach their businesses to social needs, and they seemed interested.

So, fast forward 20 plus years, teenagers build real for-profit businesses all over the world. We’re active in over 30 countries. We have chapters in over 40 countries. And these teenagers are building businesses that somehow meet or address social needs. And every year, we host a global tournament that starts with regional competitions, then national competitions with the top two teams from every country being invited to compete in our World Cup. We call it the SAGE World Cup. And we host in a different country every year.

Today’s August 1, and at the end of this month, the end of August, we’ll be hosting our next SAGE World Cup in Tokyo, Japan.

Stacy Pursell:

Wow.

Rob Best:

So, we’ll have all the national champions will be in Tokyo, Japan by the end of this month competing for the World Cup, and it’s the Olympics right now. It’s the Summer Olympics in Paris. This event is very much like the Olympics. These are teen entrepreneurs who are now competing and vying for the number one teen entrepreneurship business in the world, quite literally.

However, it’s a four-day cultural event. And by the time they’re on the competition stage, they’re polished and they’re ready to go. I mean, they’re going to rival any boardroom that you’re going to see with business professionals. However, it’s secondary. That competitive piece is now secondary. The part that’s on the forefront is the fellowship and interaction with all the other teen entrepreneurs from all the other countries. We curate three days of cultural experiences for them to build these global relationships with each other, and it’s so awesome to see.

So, today, there’s quite literally tens of thousands of teenage-owned and operated businesses that are connected to our organization. Here in the US, many people are familiar with a TV show called Shark Tank. To our knowledge, the first teenager ever to receive funding on Shark Tank was Jason Li, who was one of our US competitors, and he had an electronic recycling business called iReTron. So, it’s been a fun and exhilarating journey. And it’s awesome to see some of these businesses many years later blossom into incredible drivers of local economies.

Stacy Pursell:

That’s incredible. I told you when I saw you at AVMA that I’ve been to Japan and I went to Japan as a teenager. And it’s so clean, the people are so friendly and story for another day, but I had a chance to go as a teenager for a cultural experience with people all over the world. It was so incredible. Well, Rob, you have a diverse range of interest from surfing to globetrotting to mountaineering. How do these personal experiences influence your professional work and outlook on life?

Rob Best:

Yeah, it does influence. I think it balances and it influences. Again, I was that awkward kid, loner, uncomfortable around people. You would never guess that when you would see me at AVMA and my interactions and my socializing and my networking, and it’s a very intentional, very learned skillset, and I need to balance that. I’m still that awkward, uncomfortable kid.

Many of us in vet med can relate to how we gravitate to our pets for example. Walking around behind me right now, I’ve got my Bichon and my Weimaraner, and today is Friday, it’s the end of a long work week. In my mind, I just want to go to a trail and isolate with my pups and reset. That’s the balancing side. I need something that’s going to just get me away.

The other piece beyond the balancing where there’s influence is I have a fairly extreme mind and extreme in that I attach to something and I dive all the way in. There’s no way I should have played basketball at the level I did, but I dove all in. I went extreme with my commitment. I do the same today with athletics in a different way. Endurance is usually what I lean into most, which so long as your body doesn’t quite literally physically break, endurance is all mental.

So, I push myself past limits physically and mentally with these extracurriculars. I had foot surgery in April of 2021 to repair a broken bone. And it’s a two-year recovery for the surgery I received. I knew I was going to lose my mind if I sat for two years with a slow recovery. So, I talked with my surgeon. I brought in some other doctors. I brought in some other support systems. I signed up for an Ironman. And seven months after surgery, I crossed the Ironman finish line.

Stacy Pursell:

Wow. Congratulations.

Rob Best:

And quite literally should not have been physically possible, but we made it happen. So, when I say I’ve got a bit of an extreme mind for me and what I expect of myself, that’s an example. How does that influence? So, the balancing is it gives me a balance of where I need my isolation and be with me. But the influence is it has in a significant way grown my ability to develop coping skills for overcoming adversities, mental and physical.

In athletics, we sometimes like to say, “Yeah, this player has a chip on his shoulder, or she has a chip on her shoulder, and they just play with a little more aggressiveness and in a positive way.” For me, that’s the equivalent of in business today, that’s my equivalent of there’s a higher level of resilience. There’s a higher level of an ability to self-regulate.

When the storm hits, can I navigate the waves? And the answer is yes. Why? Because I’ve navigated enough of the storms at this point to know it’s going to pass and I’ll be ready for when the waters are calm. And how that translates to influence is in whatever language makes the most sense for the hospital or the team I’m working with, that ability to understand and learn how to navigate the storm so that you can operate at your absolute best to truly maximize your human potential when those waters are calm, is what I bring to the work that I do.

Stacy Pursell:

Do you have a hard stop or do you have a little more time, because this is so intriguing?

Rob Best:

I have more time.

Stacy Pursell:

Okay. Well good, because I have some more questions I want to ask you. So, you’re certified in neuroleadership, body language, statement analysis and deception detection. How do you apply these skills in a business context to improve leadership and team performance?

Rob Best:

There’s a lot of variety behind the detail here. The simplified surface is reading and influencing human behavior. So, how do I gain a better understanding of how to read the environment and the people in the environment so that I can adjust my behaviors in support of their emotional safety?

For those of us who have titled leadership positions, the moment you walk into a room, the environment has changed, the climate has shifted. Your presence alone affects people around you. Because of my nonprofit we talked about, I get to travel quite a bit outside the US. And a very, very long time ago, I started photographing. So, now I’ll photograph wildlife on assignment, not professionally for revenue, but really just because I want a new lens. So, I’ll go on assignment and the money I might earn will help me purchase new photograph equipment.

That being said, it is not uncommon that I’m asked, especially when I’m in Africa, to photograph wildlife and their natural habitat or in ways that look natural. The problem is that’s an impossible request. The moment I enter their environment, they are aware of me.

There was a mama lion. I love showing this when I give talks, and I talk about this particular detail. There’s a mama lion who just had some cubs and this one reserve. It’s an open reserve, forget, it was either Botswana or South Africa. And they wanted to get some new images that they used for marketing to help combat poaching.

And they said, “We want natural images.” Well, again, impossible request. The moment I was within a half mile, there was an awareness that a human is present. And I have this one image from about 50 yards away where mom had literally pushed the cubs down, so they were out of sight, and she was just eyeing me right through the lens like she was ready to just come attack and it was mama protecting her cubs.

But it was a great example for, no, my simple presence in the environment has affected her behaviors. And we see the exact same thing with human behavior. So, when we think about reading and influencing human behavior from a position of leadership, how can I be more aware of my presence and how I affect other people?

So, when I see someone who happens to retreat, they take a couple steps backwards, what does that mean? When I see someone shrug their shoulders, what does that mean? When I see someone change their blink rate, what does that mean? All of these things, by the way, can mean absolutely nothing. It’s context. It’s situational. And yet depending on the context and situation, it can mean something very significant.

For example, I mentioned a shoulder shrug. A shoulder shrug is the number two most common nonverbal cue for possible deception, but it’s within context. Some of us just shoulder shrug as a baseline. It’s just something we do when we talk. I’m one of those examples. I shoulder shrug all the time when I talk. It’s part of my behavioral baseline. But for most humans, it’s not part of a behavioral baseline. And it can be, it doesn’t mean it is, but it can be a sign for possible uncertainty and possible deception.

“What if I see that, Rob? What if I see that? I know. This person never shoulder shrugs. I just saw him do it twice. What does that mean?” Well, it means that you should probably probe with a few open questions. Search for some greater understanding. Don’t search for deception. If you look for deception, you’ll find it. Deception’s everywhere. One in every seven adult conversations includes a lie. If you’re in college, it’s one in every three conversations that includes a lie. Facts. If you look for lies, if you look for deception, you’ll find it. Don’t look for that. Look for understanding. Look for evidence to seek understanding and that’s what you’ll find.

So, reading and influencing human behavior conversations. Sometimes we get very, very detailed with these little nonverbal cues. Sometimes we stay very surface level with gaining a basic understanding that your presence is going to change the environment. And how can we be a little more intentional with how we walk into the hospital each morning? Are we walking in the front door or the back door? Who are we greeting? How are we greeting them?

Are we walking through the front door and greeting clients or you walking through the front door and keeping our blinders on and not greeting the clients? And how is that affecting CSRs and techs who might be in the lobby and see you that? Is that reducing unintentionally? Is it influencing them to reduce the level at which they interact with clients? It might. It’s a conversation we should definitely explore. So, yeah, this fun stuff.

Stacy Pursell:

All of this is so interesting. You mentioned blinking. I blink a lot because I have dry eyes. I can’t help. I don’t like it, but I have dry eyes, so I blink. But I remember one time there was a veterinarian that I sent in on an interview, and she came out. Well, what had happened is she had interviewed with this practice before I met her, and then I had talked to her about this practice because they were my client. And she said, “Well, they made me an offer and I actually turned it down.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “I didn’t think they liked me.”

And anyway, long story is I ended up convincing her to go back and interview. I ended up placing her with this practice, but it was the body language of the people working in the clinic that made her feel like they didn’t like her, but they didn’t feel that way at all. They wanted her to work there, but she had this … You hear people say, “That person sucks the energy out of the room, or that person brings energy to the room.” So, when you were talking about people walking in the room and that body language, that reminded me of that story. She said, “I felt like they didn’t like me.” And it was the body language.

So, it’s so interesting how all of this impacts people. So, well, I want to ask you about something else. You’ve worked with prominent figures like Ndaba Mandela and Kobe Bryant. Can you share any memorable experiences or lessons that you’ve learned from these collaborations that have shaped your approach to leadership and development?

Rob Best:

Sure. Yeah. My nonprofit organization, working with the teen entrepreneurs is where I first met Ndaba Mandela. He’s one of Nelson Mandela’s grandsons. And he’s a person who, he’s got his grandfather’s gravitas. He’s got this incredible voice. And he’s leveraged it for supporting people all over the world. He’s a regular speaker at the United Nations. He’s spoken here at the US Congress, at the Library of Congress most recently. He is a renowned global speaker. He has an organization called Africa Rising that supports youth throughout the entire continent of Africa.

Just an amazing individual who I got to meet through our nonprofit work. By chance, we just happen to be similar in age and in interest for helping people and especially kids. And we developed a fast friendship. So, whenever, wherever and however we can support each other’s efforts in that space, we always do. And anytime we happen to find ourselves in a similar city, we make it a top priority to spend some quality time together.

The lessons that I learned from him are infinite. I would say perhaps one of the biggest lessons is awareness of my levels of influence. He carries a name that the world knows. I don’t. And I oftentimes will minimize my own belief of my levels of influence. And I have to be very cautious with that because it can affect people unintentionally in negative ways.

A simple example, I was talking with a small group. I don’t even remember what our primary topics were. It was something relating to communication, I’m sure. But a question was posed about the future of veterinary medicine for interactions with clients in lobbies. And I said that I would see future hospitals that don’t have reception desks. There might be some dividing areas in a lobby to separate cats and dogs and et cetera, but there wouldn’t be a reception desk and there wouldn’t be any reception work.

And my mindset was there is no reason a client needs to see receptionists doing reception work, or CSRs is doing CSR work. There’s no need for clients to see that. I understand structurally and architecturally. So, in the future, you can build without that and create a lobby space that is dedicated to interactions that are necessary. You have a greeter with a tablet perhaps, who simply spends a few moments of time with the client and the pet before they are ushered into an exam room.

Now, I’m thinking of this as this is a pretty cool idea. That would be innovative. It’d be super different. It could be super client focused. CSR work would still occur just in someplace different out of sight. And one of the people who were in that room happened to be a long time CSR, who loved the work that she does in animal medicine and wanted to think of a future career continuing to do this.

When we took a break, I learned that she was crying with one of her coworkers because she thought I was giving a realistic next step in vet med that would eliminate the need for CSR employees in hospitals. And so, for her, she thought her career might be coming to an end that she loved and adored. And of course, I felt awful. That was clearly with my setup, that was not the intention yet that level of influence, just a few words about something I thought was fun to think about, had that kind of effect on this one person.

Ndaba carries a presence that is influential with his name alone and my time with him, I’ve conducted talks with him, I’ve conducted interviews where we’re both sitting, and I’ve seen in real time his levels of influence in ways that have made me more aware of mine so I can be more cautious, more regulated, more intentional with how I provide support for people.

So, that’s Ndaba. What an incredible person. He’s got a book called Going to the Mountain that everybody should read. It’s his life story about him and his grandfather, and a very, very incredible coming-of-age story, where they literally go to the mountains, something cultural that you all can read about in his book.

The other, Kobe, I don’t talk about Kobe much in recent months or this past year or two, not for any reason other, it just doesn’t come up as much. There was an unveiling earlier this year of a statue in front of Staples Center, and that brought the conversation up again. There’s actually another unveiling today of another statue.

Sometimes it’s a hard conversation. It’s a hard topic. I did give a keynote last June where there was a few people I highlighted as part of the story, and he was one of them. And I choked up. I lost it for a brief moment and cried a little. Not uncommon for me to do on stage by the way. This was one of those times.

So, basketball is a small world. The summary is I got to work with his basketball academy for 10 or 11 years. Spent a lot of time together, worked a lot of events with him, some through the academy, some not. He had a small circle. I was lucky enough to be a part of it for a period of time.

And the influence that I had mentioned with Ndaba and presence in being aware, Kobe had this absolute consistency. People talk about the mamba mentality. And beyond that, there was this absolute consistency of intention. So, where there’s influence within Ndaba, I would say there’s intention with Kobe. At all times, he was aware of his presence and he was very intentional with his words, his interactions.

The only time you really saw, and it wasn’t like he was guarded, but if you were to interpret it as guarded, the only time that went away or you may suggest that it would go away, just an observation is with his family, with Vanessa and the girls. But even then, if you know him, you know how intentional he is. He’s an example for his girls. He’s an example for what he would want for them later in their lives.

This consistency of intention always left me with feeling a little awestruck, not starstruck, but awestruck with what those moments or encounters might mean for the other people or might mean for me. Gosh, we were hosting a camp and I’m walking side by side with Kobe, and there’s hundreds of kids everywhere and this little couldn’t have been more than eight years old, this little kid runs up to Kobe and this is while he was still playing and he said, “Kobe, Kobe.”

This was during, there was some contract negotiations at the time, just business stuff for the NBA and this little kid, “Kobe, Kobe. They should trade you to this team for this player straight up. That would be great and you can go play for them. And that’s my favorite team.” And he has an eight-year-old kid. Most of them would just laugh like, “Oh, that’s cute,” and give him a high five and keep moving.

Kobe stopped and he said, “Okay, well, I really appreciate it. What’s your name?” I don’t remember the kid’s name. He tells him his name. He was super friendly with the kid, but he said, “Let me tell you why that won’t work.” It was as if he was on ESPN talking to one of the commentators in ESPN and explaining why here are the logistics for why this trade won’t work. It’s an eight-year-old kid. But there is this consistency of being intentional.

He was kind and friendly and very intentional even in this little brief, comical moment. And again, his kindness was still, it was a soft conversation. It wasn’t like he took a hard line with the kid or anything yet he was very direct, very honest, and very intentional.

Stacy Pursell:

He took his question seriously.

Rob Best:

Very, very. So, yeah, influence and intention. That’s the two takeaways with Ndaba and Kobe. Thanks for asking about them. Those are two very, very influential people in my life.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, thank you for sharing those stories, Rob. I’m curious about going back to your career in the veterinary space. What’s been the most surprising thing to you up to this point during your career in the veterinary profession?

Rob Best:

Most surprising. The people, by far, the people. I did not expect for this industry to be so incredibly connected to a common purpose. On the surface, for some you can easily say, “Of course we’re here for common purpose. The pets are a top priority.” Yeah, I get that. Beyond that simplicity, there’s a deeper depth that I didn’t expect.

And I first began to recognize this with the consulting work and with this very particular detail outside of vet med. My work is about 80-20 right now, 80% of my work remains veterinary medicine and it always will be because of the people. 20% of the work will be outside of veterinary medicine because the reality is for the type of work I do, outside of veterinary medicine pays a lot better. That is just an absolute reality. They understand it better and it pays a lot more. But I’ll always keep 80% in vet med.

When I work outside of vet med, especially with large organizational change, there is an inevitable process that includes identifying who should still be here and who shouldn’t be here, who fits this culture and who doesn’t. And sometimes that leads to significant changes in personnel. And those are some of the hardest projects for me because I never want to see changes in personnel that aren’t anything beyond maybe a restructuring. But anytime a change in personnel means someone is no longer working with that company.

In my mind I process, they’re no longer receiving a paycheck and supporting their rent or mortgage or family or pets or et cetera, et cetera. That is awful. And to the best of my ability, I avoid those types of jobs whenever possible. In fact, I would say with great confidence. Right now, anytime that might become a part of a project, it’s unforeseen. It just became something that I was not capable of foreseeing.

In vet med, I cannot, in my mind right now, think of a single instance where there was ever truly a hard line personnel issue that I had to. Behavioral things we address, but not where we need a big change with personnel. The people who are there actually want to be there. And that is a tremendous dividing factor that I don’t experience in industries or professions outside of veterinary medicine.

The consistency at which people want to be here, the depth at which people care and the willingness at which people are, not are but have, engrained to do more is extraordinary. So, again, unexpected, but that was over 15 years ago. Now, it’s not only expected, it’s perhaps the one thing I have the most gratitude and appreciation for is just the character of the people in veterinary medicine.

Stacy Pursell:

What does your crystal ball say about the future of the veterinary profession?

Rob Best:

Oh, it’s cloudy. It’s a cloudy crystal ball with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of hope. I see more private practices. I see a reduction in consolidators. I see veterinary leaders blossoming. I see more veterinary professionals taking an interest in equipping themselves with leadership skills. I see more veterinarians becoming more accepting of accidental leadership. If you’re a doctor, you’re a leader. It comes with a territory. Not all veterinary students are told that, but it’s true.

The presence you have as a doctor inside a hospital polarizes your behaviors beyond the extent of a title leader. It’s an unavoidable situation. And I feel for our veterinarians, because many of them have not been equipped and many of them have not been informed. And yet here they are in a position where their focus is quality medicine, quality experience as an employee, as a doctor, as a coworker, as a colleague, and yet they’ve got all this leadership responsibility because of how their presence and their behavior affects the people around them in that hospital. Hence, accidental leadership for many of them.

Stacy Pursell:

Such a good point. Rob, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Rob Best:

Oh, get out of my own way. Really, just get out of my own way. Own the confidence that you know you have. Be more willing to accept the level of influence, specifically positive influence that you can have with other people and start doing that work sooner so that you have a better opportunity to affect a bigger population of people.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, Rob, you’ve got the mic, what is one thing that you want to share with our listeners of The People of Animal Health podcast before you drop the mic today?

Rob Best:

Good people gravitate to good people. Stacy, when you and I have had conversations, I’ve always felt at ease, I have felt valued, I’ve felt like you’ve been fully present and intrigued and in ways that helps someone like me who naturally feels uncertain and awkward and it requires a lot of intentional behavior to give the impression that this is the norm for me and easy for me.

You make communication for me easy, and I want to make sure your audience is aware of that. You are a skilled communicator. I appreciate you. The veterinary industry needs more of you. Thank you for inviting me to come spend some quality time with you. And anyone who has a question of who to call when they need help, I want to encourage them to make sure that you are at the very top of their list.

Stacy Pursell:

Well, thank you so much, Rob, for saying that, and it’s been a real pleasure to have you here today on The People of Animal Health podcast. I really enjoyed hearing about you, your life, your work, all the fascinating things that you’ve been involved with, and I thank you for being here today.

Rob Best:

Thank you so much.