Are you ready to take your practice to the next level?

Randy Hall is the founder of Aspire, which offers online leadership and management courses designed to help create a thriving practice culture. Aspire is a proud partner of AAHA’s Healthy Workplace Culture Initiative. The initiative helps veterinary teams create a work environment that fosters overall wellbeing. You can learn more about Aspire and AAHA’s Healthy Workplace Culture Initiative by visiting aaha.org/culture.

People who manage veterinary hospitals are often doing another full-time job as well. It could be an owner-veterinarian who’s practicing medicine full-time while managing the practice in between appointments, or a practice manager doing double duty as a veterinary technician. Either way, you’re going to have a hospital that’s structured a little bit differently than other organizations in which leadership doesn’t always have to wear two hats.

And leadership by itself is challenging.

It’s especially difficult in veterinary medicine because typically, people in this profession haven’t grown up in a world where they learned about leadership, or employee engagement, or culture change, or any of those things. All their attention has been focused on the technical aspect of veterinary medicine. They just sort of figure out that other stuff as they go along.

And most of them actually do figure some of it out.

But now we have an opportunity to help veterinary professionals get to the next level by giving them some tools to use—and some frameworks in which to use them—that’ll make their lives a little easier.

We call it Aspire.

What inspired it? The realization that the veterinary profession needs a way for the people who actually run the business or manage a team to learn how to lead. It’s certainly not taught in veterinary school. There are outside resources, but they're few and far between, and you have to choose carefully. And if you’re wearing two hats, you know better than anyone that there’s not enough time in the day to get into that. You might as well put on a third hat.

And there are no leadership tools (none that I know of, anyway) that are both comprehensive and geared toward the veterinary profession. So even when people do use those outside resources, they don’t work well, because it’s really tough to adapt them effectively to the kind of chaos and craziness that is the veterinary profession.

We built Aspire to fill that niche.

So here’s a little bit about me: I have an animal science degree and I started out selling veterinary pharmaceuticals for Pfizer Animal Health. I moved into management and eventually over to their training and development department, where I worked my way up to global director of learning and development for all of Pfizer. My last corporate role was senior vice president of learning and leadership development at Bank of America, where I spent time teaching leadership and coaching leaders at the highest levels before leaving to start my own consulting business about 10 years ago.

I brought my leadership background, my instructional design background, and the learning tools with me, and I combined them with the knowledge and experience of the world I saw while working with veterinary hospitals—your world—every day for years.

What do I bring to Aspire, and through Aspire, to your teams?

I bring that same combination of leadership skills and perspective—a combination I use every day in my work with both Fortune 500 companies and veterinary hospitals.

Aspire made its world debut last month at Connexity by AAHA 2018, but the techniques it’s built on didn’t—I've been consulting inside veterinary hospitals on culture change, leadership, recruiting, hiring, and employee engagement for the last decade.

In that time, we’ve developed a lot of proven tools and techniques that we use to help a hospital improve, whether it’s uniting the team, increasing the level of engagement, improving the culture, reducing conflict, sparking communication, or helping leaders learn how to lead more effectively.

And now we’re working with AAHA to bring these tools to you.

Aspire to create the future you want for your practice. Start now. Start here.

Photo credit: © iStock/Zornam

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