Leading with Empathy
About this episode
Tori Lauro discusses her journey in veterinary hospital management and the importance of leading with empathy.
Join me this week as I have a great conversation with Tori Lauro , Veterinary Hospital Manager at VCA Animal Hospitals . Tori shares her journey from becoming a customer service supervisor to being promoted to hospital manager in 2018. Having faced challenges early on, she reflects on feeling like she needed to have all the answers and make changes quickly, without first understanding her team which led to some initial resistance, as her staff saw her as an "interloper" trying to change things. Hear how Tori learned from this experience and how, when she later transitioned to managing a different hospital, she focused first on building relationships and trust with her team before implementing changes. Tori discovered that leading with empathy, rather than from a place of just authority, was far more effective, and that maintaining psychological safety, focusing on improvements over blame, and having open communication are key. She discusses how she handles pushback from colleagues who want a more rigid, disciplinary approach and how she tracks "chronic mistakes" in a spreadsheet to identify trends but addresses issues in collaboration with staff to understand root causes. Our…
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