A job offer with an increase in responsibility and impact can be very appealing, especially if it comes with a huge pay jump. This episode takes you through some of the most difficult career moments I’ve endured, including some of my biggest regrets.
S1E7: A Dark Time
Tyler Small: So for the second time in my life, I actually took a role where I was supposed to start out doing one thing and then transition to another thing. And it didn't really work out.
[00:00:15]I'm Tyler Small, and this is hacking emotional intelligence. Yes. So the reason I left Western governors university, which was a really tough decision because I loved those people. It was a fantastic place to work. And I had just received a promotion. Also. The work that I was doing was highly fulfilling.
[00:00:38] The vision of the university is to be the most student-centric university which is just totally awesome. The president Scott Pulsipher often talked about changing the lives of individuals and families and just super cool. Leaving all of that behind an organization that I knew that I had gained a lot of trust, built a lot of really cool relationships and moving to another organization.
[00:01:01]And as you might've guessed, they offered me a substantial pay, increase, a very cool title and the opportunity to have a larger impact.
[00:01:12]As I said at the beginning, , I was expected to do one role. It was basically an implementation partner and then transitioning into a role that was director of virtual education. Super excited to do the director of virtual education role. And the implementation partner was basically something to help me learn the organization, learn their their processes, their philosophies, that sort of thing.
[00:01:37] So I thought, Hey, I can do this is this. Great. And the thing that I was implementing was a technology that was used for ideation and light project management. And I thought, great, , this should be pretty easy to learn, which it was. All of the basic features were very simple for someone who's a digital native to pick up on teach themselves.
[00:01:59] And they're coming out with new features all the time, which were important to learn. And with very little exposure, I was able to pick up on the software. It was not a problem at all. The problem came when the company realized, Oh, we've hired someone who has some experience in healthcare, but hasn't really been a hospital executive yet.
[00:02:20] And they realized that everyone they had hired for the role so far had been a hospital executive. And that was an expectation of a lot of people in the team. And so it became obvious very quickly that as I went out in the field to do my training with a more experienced consultant that we went out and we would visit with these healthcare executives of these huge hospitals. Healthcare systems with 50 or a hundred hospitals in them, and maybe talking to the chief medical officer, the chief nursing officer.
[00:02:50]And it became very apparent that while people like the consultant that was training me this person who was very senior,
[00:02:56]she was very close to retirement age. She had a whole lifetime in hospitals
[00:03:01]And
[00:03:01] Tyler Small: I had not actually through the experience that I hadn't spent really much time in hospitals at all. I had visited some people in hospital and I hated hospitals. I hated that the pharmaceutical companies and it's the insurance companies that drive what hospitals do and how they do it. The whole environment and the economics of it, and know that we focus on pills instead of nutritious food and exercise. And. Sleep like those things just really drive me crazy. And I didn't realize that before getting there.
[00:03:38] But I had a lot of experiences talking with these high level hospital, executive type people where they were like, Hey, safety in the hospital is really important and we should work on this. They're always teaching people about patient safety and such. which is great. And they would often cite this study by John Hopkins. And it was that preventable medical errors was the third leading cause of death in the United States. Based on all this data that they had.
[00:04:04] I was floored by all this not to say that healthcare is bad or not to say that doctors aren't doing good work. It's very inspiring that the work that they're doing, I have lots of friends in healthcare. the whole premise is that it stands on I just don't agree with it. I didn't voice that at all at the time. But I think it was an underlying thing that was tugging on my soul. Just a very. Subconscious side note that was going on.
[00:04:27] Anyway. We have our in between meetings where the we're driving to a new client or whatever.
[00:04:33] And I say, I could never do the type of consulting that you guys do. That you've been a a nurse practitioner you've been. A physician you've been an executive within a healthcare system. And I've never done that. I couldn't give the type of consulting that you guys are giving.
[00:04:47] I know how to do culture transformation. I know how to develop leaders. But as far as the kind of advice that you guys are giving between the lines of.
[00:04:56] Hey, you should really consider this type of drug or,
[00:04:59] Hey, you guys should really consider um, you know, going to your insurance provider and renegotiating this particular part of the contract, or,
[00:05:06] Hey, you guys should really consider um, using the framework that was provided in this academic study nine years ago for this particular process in the controls within your organization, like those things, I had no ability to call upon and to bring to the situation.
[00:05:22] So they said we're not asking you to and, we'd love for you just to continue to help people learn how to use the software and change the culture. But I realized after that conversation, that moment in time when I was talking with one of the founding partners, and it was one of the senior consultants was a moment in time that probably that they realized, wow, Tyler can't do this job.
[00:05:43] And, Shortly after that, I began to transition into, my role as director of virtual education. Which was good from my perspective and at the same time, like they hadn't really budgeted for that role that early yet. So this was an enormous problem. A startup, very small, they were working on all these big contracts that were just about to close and begin implementation.
[00:06:07] However, some of them were going long. In the sales cycle. And so they were got into a little bit of a cash crunch and then they had this problem where training their new consultants, even though all the people they were hiring were these really experienced former healthcare executives and they each had their expertise to come to to bring to the table.
[00:06:27] However, they had not been trained on. The the company was safe and reliable. They hadn't been trained on safe and reliable. What is the safe and reliable dogma? How did they all train towards the same ends with the same philosophy in a United way so that as they went into a larger healthcare system, they couldn't just go to each group and say, Hey we're going to train you now.
[00:06:54] Like just the scale that was required was needed. It really required virtual education. In order to break that barrier and scale to the next level, unfortunately simultaneous to this the person that actually hired me was going through these problems where his lifestyle had caused them enormous medical challenges. And and then it was like, just was going to the doctor. Wasn't obviously doing it. He had to make some lifestyle changes and. Ironically enough, this was a huge problem for the company that was training hospitals and suffered from the same general problems that healthcare suffers from in general.
[00:07:30]But nothing against this guy is amazing, man, fantastic guy. And and he needed to make some major changes. So they hired an executive coach for him, and it was determined that he had too much on his plate. He was. Working like way over a hundred hours a week. And so they said, okay Tyler can report to this different person.
[00:07:49]So I was then reporting to a different person. And the individual that hired me, the individuals I was originally reporting to had a very clear vision for my role as virtual education director, the next person who I reported to. Had zero vision. He had no idea what virtual education was. He didn't know what he learning was he didn't really understand how a even something as simple as a two or three minute video would fit into education as a consulting company, how they would help healthcare system using a video or , a very engaging interactive webinar like that e-learning modules, like those sorts of things were very foreign to him.
[00:08:32] He had pretty much zero vision of how virtual education was going to be the backbone tool to allow them to scale their company. Even to educate their consultants coming in. There was also this assumption that I could do everything. I was hired as a director. My assumption was that I would hire a team and I talked about this in depth with the person who hired me that. That I was interested in a leadership role and in building a team. And that was the plan. When when I switched to the new to my new boss, that was, of course not carried over.
[00:09:08] And it was like why aren't five times more productive than you are. So that was an enormous issue as well as this this underlying belief that wow, like how in the world could. Someone who hasn't been a hospital executive, actually design instruction and learning experiences and development programs for hospital executives.
[00:09:31] And the whole premise , in my industry is, we go and, I've created Arabic courses. I've created courses for accountants. I've created courses for mortgage professionals, for healthcare billing professionals for. CEOs and as I was doing those things, I had never spoken Arabic before.
[00:09:51] I'd never taken an Arabic course. I'd never been to business school. And I designed business school courses like it's just part of the premise of, what a designer does, what someone who does, who designs these types of programs. And so there was this mental block. They had never really worked with a department like that.
[00:10:11]And I'm laying out all these issues of the dark time. And the other issue that was really interesting was that in, and this is completely independent. I think of all these other problems is that the educational environment within a hospital is very much a based on compliance and they have a hospital.
[00:10:31] Has to they're required to meet all these requirements in a thousand different ways. So each specialty must receive continuing education for their specific specialty. Each piece of equipment there's specific training on that. It's very much, you have to do these things.
[00:10:48] There's not really an area that's Hey, and if you want to go learn about this that's not a have-to then feel free. And there that's that wasn't part of the program. It was very much, you have to do these things or else you will be terminated. And in order to accomplish that, they basically had in-person instruction.
[00:11:14] And they had an LMS, a learning management system and the learning management system had this reputation. That was mostly true. I'm sure there was some exception, but the learning management had this reputation throughout the industry of being a complete monster, a complete mostly a waste of time.
[00:11:34] Sometimes it had the courses that people would take would be. Moderately interesting or valuable, but the compliance aspect of it was very forceful and it said, look, you've got to do this or else. And so it really didn't matter if they were engaged in it or not. They just had to click the boxes off and it has this very big stigma around it.
[00:11:59]That was a situation. I found myself in and with a good part of the organization saying, man, Tyler, he can't do anything to help us. Like this guy is super worthless. And then part of the organization saying, Hey, he's actually starting to make these videos. And I know everybody doesn't like, think they're awesome, but I think they're awesome.
[00:12:21] And our founding partners have think they're awesome. And. And I've showed them to my clients at the highest levels. And they're already changing policies as a result of these little videos that Tyler producing. So let's keep doing that. But there was always this huge argument from other parts that were like, no Tyler doesn't have the background to do this.
[00:12:40] Like he can't possibly do this. So all this was going on and my time was very tight. There were a lot of eggshells to walk on and there was also this organizational dynamic where one of the people I was working with had a family connection to someone higher up the chain. And for one reason or another, I I ended up ticking off this person who had the family connection up the chain.
[00:13:08] And I don't know if that had anything to do with that for sure. But I wasn't using the five-star approach and I hadn't formalized that as something that I could use systematically across the board, like I have now. And so it was the learning experience was basically looking back was wow.
[00:13:26]If I just would have used the five-star approach, I would have been able to solve all of the dilemmas that I faced. And I had a lot of solutions to to each problem that I was trying to use, but I wasn't doing it in the right way.
[00:13:40] My approach was wrong. And this was a dark time for me because while there were certain individuals in the company that I really connected with and I really valued each person's. Expertise and input that I was working with. But I was not reciprocally valued in that way.
[00:13:56]It was a very stressful time for me. Until we came to the mutual conclusion that this was not going to work they were very kind to me as I left and and that choice was a very good choice. I think on my part as they went to scale to these even larger healthcare systems, I think that that hurt them a great deal, that they didn't have the expertise for virtual education just when they needed me most.
[00:14:21]It was becoming clear that. Organizationally, it wasn't possible for me to stay there. Especially without the five-star approach. I think it could have all gone differently if I had used that at the time would have solved all my problems. No not all of my problems but most of them in it, it wouldn't have been so stressful.
[00:14:37] It would have been I w I would have systematically improved each relationship. And looking back, I'm like, wow, I made so many mistakes and I can see so many of these errors where I just had the wrong approach. But long story short after leaving there and going through that dark time, I ended up starting the five-star approach this company that now I'm very focused on the goal of catalyzing, a million five-star relationships in the next two years.
[00:15:04] And that is something that, that lights my fire. It's something that I wake up every morning, super excited to do. And , I would say it's a little bit stressful when I think about the load the impact that I feel impressed to have on the world. I feel like it's a calling for me. However, I I realized that this isn't really my work.
[00:15:25] I feel like it's the work of. Of he who owns the universe, the King of the universe. I feel like I'm being compelled by God to do these things. And I know that might sound weird for some of you to say that in a business setting. But I think it's important to make my inspiration clear of where I'm coming from.
[00:15:45] And if I live up to that, then that's on him. Uh, if I fail then that's on me, So I crawled out of that dark time to create the five-star approach to 2020 was a difficult year for many. And that's how 2020 started for me with that darkness. But in starting this company, I wrote my first two books in 2020.
[00:16:05] And I started serving my first clients and I hired my first employee and. Began partnering with many others and it's, it has brought so much light into my life to be able to do this great work to help other people through their problems in the workplace, with relationships and beyond. And continually shocks and surprises me how quickly and easily people are able to solve their relationship dilemmas, clear up the stress in their lives.
[00:16:34] And break free to the success that they want. It is continually amazing to me. And so I love helping people do that. That is the end of this very long episode, a dark time and a, which has of course led to a much brighter day. And that I'm very much loving today and these days, I hope that you've enjoyed this episode.
[00:16:57] I'm Tyler Small, and this is hacking emotional intelligence.