{"id":14300,"date":"2012-05-22T05:33:34","date_gmt":"2012-05-22T12:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/?p=14300"},"modified":"2013-01-04T15:57:46","modified_gmt":"2013-01-04T22:57:46","slug":"newman-the-positive-paramedic-project-6-look-listen-feel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/2012\/05\/newman-the-positive-paramedic-project-6-look-listen-feel\/","title":{"rendered":"Newman | The Positive Paramedic Project #6 Look, listen & feel"},"content":{"rendered":"

A nugget of EMS organizational wisdom every day. #6 Look, listen & feel.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Look, listen & feel. Those three words were ingrained into my consciousness a long time ago – long before I was ever charged with leading a team of emergency medical services [EMS] providers. And yet, sometimes the most obvious eludes us as we focus on the process and neglect our people.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Back in the day, Ed Pietroniro was one of our Clinical Team Leaders (CTL) at CSL EMS. He was a superb clinician with strong leadership qualities and the ability to read a problem from many different angles before even attempting resolution. Ed\u2019s a big guy\u2014square shoulders on a solid frame\u2014a human eclipse of a medic. He liked to wear his hair in an early-American-USMC buzz cut. He was intimidating to look at until you saw him caring for a client. Gentle, polite, and decidely delicate for someone who probably didn\u2019t need Fire Department assistance on a Forcible Entry call. Ed was a firefighter\/ security officer with Pratt & Whitney Canada. We liked to call him Special Ed.<\/p>\n

Special Ed liked to wander into my office\u2014the door was always open. He didn\u2019t knock or say anything to announce his presence. I\u2019d be working on the computer and turn around to see Ed settling into the guest chair in my office. It was a tight fit so he tended to assume a lounging position in the chair. Legs sprawled out in front of him the heels of his boots digging dents in the tragically worn carpet. Ed liked to grab whatever was handy on the end of my desk and twirled it in his hands. It\u2019s usually a distracted conversation for someone so focused. He\u2019d say, \u201cHal, are you busy?\u201d I\u2019d say, \u201cWhat\u2019s up, Ed?\u201d and Special Ed would tell me a story.<\/p>\n

After going missing-in-action for almost a month on CSL EMS, Ed fell into the guest chair. He had only been named to the Clinical Team Leader position a few days before he had virtually disappeared and I had asked him to resign the post. As Head Coach, I didn\u2019t want to see our crack at a new paradigm shattered before we really got underway. We needed CTLs who formed the heart and soul of their respective teams. I believed Ed hadn\u2019t taken the role seriously\u2014any and all attempts to coax him into The EMS House had been made in vain.<\/p>\n

I should have known something was wrong by the way Ed was sitting in the guest chair. Ramrod straight with his eyes focused on a spot on the Old Glory curtain hanging behind my head. Boots held tightly together\u2014knees bent at ninety degrees. \u201cHal, are you busy?\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s up, Ed?\u201d Ed told me a gripping story. His team responded to a call for \u201ca man down\u201d on the sprawling Pratt & Whitney Canada campus. When they arrived they found a fifty-something-year-old male in cardiorespiratory arrest. Using the AED that he had fought so hard for the company to purchase, Ed resuscitated the gentleman. He was elated. Ed has always displayed enormous pride in his thirteen years of emergency services work at Pratt & Whitney. He was always regaling us with stories about new ambulances, and the \u201cFoam Boss\u201d crash\/rescue truck they had at their Saint-Hubert Airport Test Facility.<\/p>\n

I congratulated Ed on saving a life. It did not seem to register. Special Ed was just staring at me\u2014or more accurately, through me. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong, Ed?\u201d<\/p>\n

And then the impossible occurred. Special Ed crumpled forward, his eyes filled with tears. The chiseled face dissolved as Ed cried into his big hands. \u201cPratt & Whitney Canada outsourced the emergency services department. All forty of us have been fired. They\u2019re replacing us with private security guards.\u201d \u201cWhen did you find out?\u201d \u201cThey told us three and a half weeks ago.\u201d The time Ed was missing-in-action. \u201cWhy didn\u2019t you let me know.\u201d \u201cI just couldn\u2019t tell anyone. I was devastated. Thirteen years and no warning and that\u2019s it\u2014it\u2019s all over.\u201d A scant six weeks before Christmas 1999 and Special Ed Pietroniro had lost the job he loved.<\/p>\n

When I first came to CSL EMS I was fresh out of grad school. I thought I was going to run the EMS World. Tried my damndest to import everything I learned in an American classroom to the halls of The EMS House. First thing I really learned about grad school was that most of what I learned was better left back there. I was a class \u201cA\u201d moron. I managed to alienate most of the members of CSL EMS within just a few months and the rest of them by the end of that first awful year. That\u2019s a really bad thing when you\u2019re running a volunteer shop because that leaves just you to cover all the empty shifts. There were a lot of empty shifts my first year as Director. I didn\u2019t see a lot of home in those first three hundred days.<\/p>\n

I evolved slowly as a Head Coach\u2014it took me a while before I realized our volunteers were seeking the same elusive organizational ideal as me. We all wanted a place where we were appreciated and respected\u2014where folks knew you by your first name\u2014and we judged each other on the care we delivered and nothing else.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re all thinking, \u201cWhat the heck does this have to do with Special Ed?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadly, it was a reminder to me that I still had a long way to go before I could say I was a really effective Head Coach. I had always told the leaders in our organization to be farmers instead of mechanics. ‘We ought to be carefully nurturing our members with all the requisite basics instead of just fixing problems as they occur.’ And here I was, the Head Farmer, and I had missed an important clue. One of my herd had gone off his feed and I had done nothing more than wait for him to come back to the barn. I hadn\u2019t called him at home. I didn\u2019t drop by his apartment. I didn\u2019t \u00a0pursue Special Ed with any real interest. You can\u2019t ask people to become the heart and soul of an organization when the Head Coach doesn\u2019t display the very passion he\u2019s demanding of others.<\/p>\n

I learned from this experience. I pledged to Look, Listen, and Feel for the emotive clues left by our members. Look, listen, and feel. Look out for your people. Watch for signs that they\u2019re having problems. See if they\u2019re having a good time. Look. Listen to your medics. Hear what they have to say. Listen. Feel for your support team. Share your compassion with your colleagues. Care for your whole team. Feel. Back to basics, people.<\/p>\n

Look, listen, and feel. Words to live by.<\/p>\n

Ed Pietroniro had a long successful run as one of our Clinical Team Leaders. I challenged him to be everything his former employer wasn\u2019t: loyal to his team members, dedicated to their success, interested in their education, approving of their performance, appreciative of their service, and respectful of their individuality. Special Ed eventually left The EMS House to become a career Paramedic in Ontario.<\/p>\n

Be well. Practice big medicine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A nugget of EMS organizational wisdom every day. #6 Look, listen & feel. Look, listen & feel. Those three words were ingrained into my consciousness a long time ago – long before I was ever charged with leading a team of emergency medical services [EMS] providers. And yet, sometimes the most obvious eludes us as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[8802,11552,8806,8805,742,29,21461,8803,8804,21619],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14300"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14300"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14303,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14300\/revisions\/14303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bigmedicine.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}