Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights with Dr. Melanie Sue Hicks

In this episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm, Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm speaks with Melanie Sue Hicks, PhD, SHRM-SCP, CFRE, an author, speaker, coach, and global philanthropist who specializes in human connection and resilience.

Dr. Hicks shares how her path into organizational culture grew from early service work, research on generations, and experience in a toxic workplace. She reframes burnout as driven by misaligned expectations, lack of recognition, and repeated small breaches of trust that fuel disengagement and quiet quitting, and points to better onboarding, human-centered leadership, and thoughtful AI use to free time for more human connection.

If you have any topics or guests you'd like to see on future episodes, reach out to us on our website.

The views and opinions expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of Quality Insights. Publication number QI-051526-GK

Transcript

Welcome to "Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights," the podcast that delves into the captivating intersection of innovation, science, compassion, and care. 

In each episode, Quality Insights’ Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm will have the privilege of engaging with leading experts across diverse fields, including dieticians, pharmacists, and brave patients navigating their own healthcare journeys. 

Our mission is to bring you the best healthcare insights, drawing from the expertise of professionals across West Virginia, Pennsylvania and the nation.

Subscribe now, and together, we can take healthcare by storm.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Taking Healthcare by Storm. I am Dr. Jean Storm, the medical director here at Quality Insights. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Melanie Sue Hicks, a workforce and employee experience expert, author, speaker, and global social impact advocate. Dr. Hicks currently serves as the vice president of programs for the Denver Metro Chamber Leadership Foundation, where she works with organizations to strengthen leadership, workforce strategy, and employee experience. Over the course of her career, she had- has advised hundreds of organizations from small businesses to educational institutions and nonprofits, helping leaders navigate complex challenges in talent development, organizational strategy, and workforce optimization. She's also the founder of In Pursuit, a boutique consulting firm focused on leadership development and employee culture. something that I'm very interested currently just because of the difficulties in staffing in the healthcare environment, and I think that we can draw many tips and tricks from what Melanie is doing in her work. Beyond her professional work, Dr. Hicks has traveled to more than forty-five countries and contributed thousands of hours to global service projects focused on education and community development. She is also the author of Incongruent: Travel, Trauma, Transformation, a memoir exploring resilience through travel and service. I am so excited to jump into this conversation. Dr. Hicks, Melanie, thank you so very much for joining me today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to chat today. Yeah. So as I said, you've built a fascinating career across workforce development, leadership consulting, philanthropy, and writing. What initially led you down this path of focusing on organizational culture and employee experience? It's really interesting. I think that I was-- I did my first service project at around ten or eleven years old, and I remember thinking about the puzzle pieces of volunteering. And then as I got older and I went to first undergrad and then to grad school, I was really fascinated about this idea of workforce, this idea of a career. What does it look like? We're gonna spend most of our waking hours in a job and- what were the components of that? So I had a curiosity about it early on. I don't think I could articulate it but I definitely was very curious about this kind of topic really early. And then when I, uh, had to determine, you know, the getting a PhD, you have to write a dissertation, I put that curiosity to work, and I-- my dissertation is on generational differences in the workplace, and that's the first place where I, I started taking an academic lens and a really deep dive into what does it look like? What are these dynamics that make people wanna stay, that make people get fired up, that make people wanna quit, And then not that long after that, I had my own personal experience which sort of re-energized me to do this work, which is I had a really bad boss, and it was a really toxic organization, and I was academically aware enough to know that, like, this is what textbooks are written about. Um, and yet I found myself in the same position that many people do, which is the job itself on paper was great, the pay was good, like I didn't have any other options. I, you know, I, I had obviously started looking, but it just... It was such an interesting kind of tumbling from my earliest and most formidable experiences in this idea of, of philanthropy and what leadership looks like from a philanthropic lens, and then looking at this, this thing that we all spend our life doing, which is building a career of some sort. Uh, yeah, really early, early interesting and winding path. Yeah. And I love that. That's usually I think what happens to people, you know. Like, things just kind of happen and unfold, and you get to where you need to be. I wanna s-start in our conversation, to bring this, you know, maybe parallel to healthcare. Burnout i-is not just a major topic in healthcare. It's, a, you know... I've, heard, you know, many people say that word who are not even working in healthcare. It's a major topic in many fields, including healthcare, over the past several years. From your perspective, how widespread is burnout? Maybe we can start with healthcare professionals and maybe, you know, we can go beyond that. And what do you think are the, the biggest contributors to burnout? So I have-- I was happily pleased in researching for the show to find out that the things that I read and study and believe in all the industries show up very distinctly in healthcare as well. And so that crossover, to your point, it runs deep. And so there are really two things. The key-- The thing about burnout is it's really not about what we think it is. It's not just overwork. It's feeling like the, Additional expenditure of effort that you're putting in is not being seen and recognized. And also what you're working for is not-- you're not aligned with. And so, for example, in the healthcare field, right? Especially with frontline healthcare workers, the amount of, quite honestly, abuse and just sort of negativity that they're having to absorb while trying to help people, while trying to do their job is is not properly counterbalanced by enough praise and, and accolades for-- And I don't just mean false accolades, I mean genuine appreciation for the depth of care and the empathetic and sort of emotionally mature way that, frontline healthcare workers, for example, and really all healthcare workers are performing with those that are in, in the most vulnerable state, right? Those who are sick and ill and need care are in a state of vulnerability. And it is-- that transcends healthcare into other places in-- even in the work that I do here at the chamber, right? One of the things that we are very intentional about is making sure that we recognize... We put a, on probably close to four hundred events of all different sizes a year. That's-- Do the math. More than one a day, um, because they're happening in different parts of the building with different, different departments. And that is on its surface, a cause, you know, a, a foundation that could cause burnout. And so we've got to be really intentional about who needs a day off, what are you going through? Is there anything happening outside of work that would make you-- your capacity for handling what I already-- what I know that you can handle. And managers-- You know, I, I have an interesting mentor who, pointed this out to me. So this is not my knowledge, but I have absorbed it because I, I thought it was so helpful a-as a way of framing. He said, "You know, there was a whole generation in the past where once you got to management, your entire job was focused on people. You no longer had kind of the technical projects that you had earlier in your career at a lower level. You were raised to a point where you just dealt with people." And over time, that has changed. So we're promoting people who had projects on their plate. We're putting them above other people, but we're not taking projects off their plate. So now they are sort of technocrats, people who are very good at their technical expertise, whatever that is, in whatever industry. And on top of those technical responsibilities, those project-based re-responsibilities or those tac- uh, tactical or, or you know, actual responsibilities. We've tacked on top of that, "Oh, and by the way, manage people." And we've taken away any sort of training to do so, and we've taken a- away a lot of the supports like onboarding or other, you know, employee development activities outside of their direct manager. And so we, we've sort of ill-equipped an entire generation of leaders to do the really important work of leading, not just managing people, and that is... has cracked the surface or cracked the foundation of leading to burnout, right? If you-- People will bust their butts, so to speak, for 80-hour workweeks when they are fired up, when they're fired up about the work, when they're fired up about their patients, right? They'll... When they still feel called by a mission, by a purpose. And the minute that pendulum shifts to, "I feel unappreciated, I feel, you know, kind of beat up by the workplace the people don't appreciate me, the system I'm working in isn't recognizing how, how much I have on my plate, and they just keep piling on more," right? Those are the ways-- Those are the symptoms of burnout. It's so-- It's just deeper. We'd like to just say, "Oh, just take things," or "They're just working too hard," or "Hire more people," but it's deeper than that. Yeah. And I, and that leads me to the next question, this concept which I really like. I listened to, I think it was one of your t- TED Talk you did on YouTube about the concept of the invisible snake bite. Mm-hmm. So for listeners who may not be familiar with that idea, what does it mean? How do you see it showing up within the workplace culture? Absolutely. So let me give you a little background on, on the title. So I did my dissertation, as I mentioned, on generations in the workplace, but the academic theory I based it on was something called psychological contract. And in a very thirty-thousand-foot view, it's just the expectations we bring in. And when those expectations are mismatched or misaligned it causes a lot of unintended consequences, interpersonal consequences that lead to organizational consequences. And so that, you know, psychological contract, number one, it gets mixed up with psychological safety, which is a very important concept, but completely different, and also it's just a mouthful. And so along the way, I just... I work in, especially in... Because I give so many workshops, I work in the world of, illustrations and this idea of giving a story or a picture to a concept that helps people remember it or helps people digest it. And so I came up with this term invisible snake bites because if you... and I live in Colorado, I do a lot of hiking. If you get bit by a snake you run to the hospital, you get an antivenom, you live for the most part, right? If you... and, in a happy theory you can survive, right? But if you were to s-- close yourself in a room and allow a snake to just keep biting you without giving yourself the care to get it away from you, to stop it, to give yourself the antivenom to heal, you're going to eventually die. And that is a, a very dramatic way to think about it, so, in my mind, it's so overlaid what happens in organizations. We allow these very small breaks of trust. We decide that each one of those individually, oh, they're not that big of a deal. I don't wanna, I don't wanna ruffle feathers. I don't wanna have a whole conversation with my employee because of this very small conflict that happened, or, we can just give them one more assignment. I, I'm sure they can handle it, right? All of these small breaks in trust over time, it's like sitting in a room with a snake and not healing. And it is what deteriorates the trust in an organization and the consequence of that is it, it sort of by sheer nature of so many breaks in trust, your organizational culture will collapse. And the consequence of that are everything from when people hold it in, you've seen, the term quiet quitting, which is just sort of disengaging slowly from a job where you're not really giving the organization your full self. but yet you're kind of taking up space all the way to the flip side of that, which is I held in all this anger that I have around the way I've been treated here, and I'm going to just sabotage. You know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna quit in the largest, most public way, and we call that sabotage, right? And so, you know, and, and that large quitting is really the hope behind it somewhere subconsciously is that it would hurt the organization, right? That's why we call it sabotage. And all of that is, based on this idea that if you can just take each time trust gets broken, take each little snake bite and deal with it and not brush it under the rug and not pretend it doesn't exist, you won't develop the pattern that will eventually cause such big rifts in organizational culture. And I think part of why we do that is our lack of wanting to ruffle feathers. We have become more and more shy or timid about having hard conversations. Maybe ill-equipped is a word I could use because I think people are not, It's a muscle you build. To have a challenging conversation takes, you know, you're gonna mess it up the first time. So the more you have challenging conversations, the more you build the muscle for that, and the less you do it, the more timid you are about having those. So that's part of why-- what's happening here, and also we're just busy. We're overloaded. In the same example I just used about sort of managers no longer can focus on people because they also have projects along with people, it's less time that they have to think about these little things, and it's like, "I don't wanna have a whole conversation with them about that. I will... I'm sure it'll work itself out." Or, you know, it, "It really wasn't that big a deal. Do we really have to, you know, let's not make a, a mountain out of a molehill," kind of mentality when really there's unincon-- unintended consequences there. Yeah. I, I have seen that. And you mentioned quiet quitting, which I'm very interested in, and I think it was, like, a huge buzzword couple years ago. Yeah. I don't know if, if it's exact- if it still is an issue. And how significant is it, uh, of a challenge for organizations in the United States today? Yeah. I, I wish that I had come up with the term because I talked about... This is just to give some framing. I completed my dissertation in two thousand and seven, so we're going on twenty, uh, you know, we're coming up on twenty years. And I talk about this exact same concept in the workplace twenty years ago. So it's not new, but somebody gave it a real cool title, and it made the news. I wish I had thought of it. I would love that. I'd love to take claim to that. But we just called it disengagement. And the truth is, it is in some ways worse than ever because of our now pendulum over to not wanting to have tough conversations, people are afraid to speak up, and they're afraid that they won't be heard, or they just don't even know how to frame it, or they're afraid of a whole lot of things. And so quiet quitting is disengagement. It's, estimated to cost the economy about nine trillion dollars a year globally, uh, disengaged workforce. That is a third of the global GDP, and it can be what they say is there's approximately forty-eight percent of any given organization is at some stage of disengagement, and that's just huge, right? That is, that's so much missed opportunity, and I don't wanna just frame it in dollars and cents because we're talking about humans here. So yes, if I'm talking to a CEO and I need them to understand and to value culture, I will give them all of these stats about how that affects their bottom line and how it matters. But to me, I'm a human-centered leadership person, so to me, I'm like, that means that many people are having the Sunday scaries, are showing up on Monday morning wishing they weren't there, are begging for Friday to show up, you know, assuming they work a nine to five or, or whatever your shift is at, you know, at the hospital or in a healthcare facility. But this idea that they're not Wanting or motivated to give as much of themselves because they're just not as excited about the work and they're disengaged in any fashion means we're, we're not doing our job. We're not leaning in to figure out who these humans are, what do they need, how do we better support them. What happens a lot, I think that contributes to quiet quitting and people don't wanna admit it, is it is very challenging, the larger the organization, the more challenging it is, to make individualized plans for individualized kind of benefits for people, right? There's a lot of, nervousness about equity. If you give this person this benefit and not this person, are they, you know, is there equity claims? And that's all super valid. However, there are ways to listen to employees to understand what they really need and not make assumptions. Um, and it doesn't necessarily happen in like a random employee survey, right? Sometimes you have to get to know your people, know what they really need, know what they can really, you know, what would really benefit them, um, and what they would really appreciate, and then be able to put that in place to re-engage them, to get them back engaged in the work. And sometimes it is too far gone, and your best-- the best thing you can possibly do as a manager is say, " I get that you're disengaged. How do I help you find your next chapter?" And I don't mean that in a we're gonna fire you kinda way. I mean that in like what skills can I help you build while you're here that will keep you excited while you're here, and when you're ready, you can launch, right? Yeah. And those are tricky conversations, and they're hard conversations, and they're conversations that HR people... And I have a senior certification in HR, but When I have these conversations with HR professionals they start to bite their nails in front of me 'cause they're like, "Oh, I don't know if we can do that." And I understand all of those fears and all of those legalities, and also I understand humans. Yeah. So I just wanted to briefly touch on COVID. You know, people don't wanna talk about it anymore, about the pandemic, but you know, many systems, healthcare systems, other systems are still reporting staffing shortages and workforce strain. Do you think the pandemic is still impacting staffing in the United States, and what lessons should organizations take away from that experience? This is a great question. I absolutely think the pandemic is still having ripple effects. Staffing specifically I think is, is a deeper question. I think it's, more complex than just the pandemic. But what I will say is I did a panel interview for a, a book that I'm working on, around, engagement and disengagement in the workplace, and one of the thing... And I, uh, I'm sorry. I did a panel interview with, with a number of, of psychologists and psychiatrists, and I, I was talking to them about the mental health, the long-term mental health and how that's rippling into the workforce. And one of the things that one of them said that I thought was just brilliant was we got comfortable in the uncomfortable. So from a general perspective, and I know this doesn't necessarily apply to healthcare workers, they're in a kind of a completely different, level because they were face-to-face the whole time and enduring incredible levels of stress and anxiety that were not felt by the everyday worker out in the field. But what I can say about the workforce in general, and then I'll come back to healthcare specifically, is people got comfortable not engaging. They got where we had all of these kind of places where you show up face-to-face, you go to run clubs, you go to book clubs, you go to religious institutions you show up face-to-face for doctor's appointments, you know. And we got real comfortable with this idea of like, maybe I don't have to put that much effort in. Maybe I don't have to put myself out there that much. Maybe I can just get real comfortable being isolated. And that has trickle effects into everything workforce. The human-- the f- the face-to-face value of being, and I'm a, a fan of hybrid work. I'm not really a fan of remote work from a research perspective. I think hybrid is one thousand percent the middle ground we need for a lot of positions that don't need to be twenty-four/seven face-to-face. But it has to be done right, and when it's done wrong, it can be actually more detrimental than back to office policies. But I think that the, the trickle effect is this idea that we shifted our mentality away from the piece of connection that really makes us all human. And I think that is where even in fields like healthcare, where so many healthcare workers were face-to-face the entire time through the pandemic, they didn't get any of that, isolation. They were on the front lines. This idea that all of these people that were, that now are resentful that they have to go to the doctor, or they're more negative about, you know, that, that they lost their empathetic human connection gene in some sense. We're seeing that show up in just hostility. And there's a, a lot of discussion also that just the chicken and egg of we're in a very contentious time in America specifically politically and societally, and whether or not it was the isolation we felt that amplified that or the dissent among kind of in the societal and political areas that amplified the isolation. I'm not a political expert to understand that, but, but I will say that there is a definite shift to isolationism that shows up in broader senses and I think Brings a, a level of, quick to anger and negativity that just didn't exist before in this large scale. And I think that definitely affects the way that people are treated in the healthcare system and in, all kinds of... In hospitality, in, airlines, in... You know, a lot of face-to-face interactions have seen increased negativity and, and sort of discourse, negative discourse that just wasn't seen before the pandemic. And those are the ripple effects. Those are the deep psychological ripple effects of the pandemic that I think we can't escape, and we really need to understand better and try to start having some strategies to combat. Yeah. I, I agree with you. We could probably have a whole, whole podcast about this. But I'm very interested in your work in the, you know, multiple generations working side by side because that's today's workforce. And do you think... I mean, obviously, you do think that employers should approach employees from different gen-generations in different ways you know, when it comes to leadership engagement and retention. Like, you know, what does that look like on, in the, in the big scale? So it's interesting. When I did my dissertation, I... Part of why I was interested in generations in the workforce was because the millennials, I mean, I already said the date, so I'm aging myself only just a second time. The millennials were entering the workforce. They were the new kids on the block, and there was a ton of colloquial discussion happening in newspapers and also, you know, on, in boardrooms about, oh my gosh these millennials, they have all these X, Y, and Z stereotypes around them, and they're coming in and they're doing this and they're changing this and they want this, whatever. And we're having the same conversations now about Gen Z. And Gen Z has a different life lens. Their formative years were completely impacted by-- Their entire lens was impacted by the pandemic, and so that is a lens that none of us in any other generation can possibly fully understand what that means to their formidable development. However, the core issues that are happening around these generations are actually exactly the same, and that is like the dirty little secret of generational differences in the workplace. It's all about expectation setting. So when millennials came into the workforce, they had different expectations than, way different expectations than boomers, pretty far-flung expectations than Gen Xers because Gen Xers they were brought up You know, they were a small, scrappy generation who had all kind-- I am a Gen X-er, so I, you know, I feel this deeply, but, like we were sort of left to figure it out on our own, and boomers were not in any way mentors. Now, there are exceptions. These are broad strokes. People had wonderful mentors, I'm sure, in some cases, but as a general rule, we were just sort of left to figure it out. Show up, dress right, come into the office, figure out how to navigate the work that we're giving you, and see you at payday, you know? And millennials came in, and they said, "No, we want more. We, we want you to talk to us. We want balance. We want to be recognized earlier than anyone had ever asked to be recognized, you know, or for, or for lesser acts of, you know, sort of workplace accolades." And that was a shift. But the truth is it was all just about that's what they were set up. That's how they grew up. This is the generation with the participation trophy. And when you understand that it's all just coming from a place of this is the lens through which they see the world, it's really easy to say, "Okay, let me understand that better. Let me understand the lens through which you see the world." And what the research in psychological contract, which is all about expectation, says is just having the conversation about what is it you expect, what is it I expect of you what is it you expect from the organization, what do I expect from you, and then explaining where those th-- Like, looking at the places they don't match, explaining why they either can be adapted or they absolutely can't be adapted will mitigate ninety-nine percent of the negative reaction. It's just about being seen, and I think that's the piece that we're missing out on. It's the same thing that's happening with Gen Z. If you could sit down, and I particularly harp on the fact that we have s- we have under-resourced and undervalued orientation and onboarding in organizations for the last decade. We keep taking money away from it. We keep pushing them towards, "Oh, just make sure they know how to use the systems. Make sure they know how to use the copy machine or the computer or the technical piece of equipment they have to use." And we're not asking the questions. We're not having a two-way conversation of, "Tell me about what you expect from the organization, and let me tell you... let me reset those expectations if those are mis-misaligned." and the time to do that is the first forty-five days. Super important time period. It's almost absolutely a direct line to how long they'll be at the organization is how good they-- employees were onboarded and how seen they felt during the onboarding. Almost one hundred percent. Very s-st-statistically significant correlation there between their longevity and happiness at the organization. And it's so simple, and it's just being ignored, which is we just sit down, and we sa-- and we get to know what they really expect. And then we say, "Okay, that's easy for me to do. Thank you for sharing that with me. I can do that." Or, you know, "Here's why that doesn't work here at this organization. I get that from your previous organization that works, and let me, let me explain to you why." And people will adapt. People will, will recognize that, okay, there's a good reason. I'm not just being shut down for no reason. I'm being shut down, you know, or, or this isn't happening for me because... And it-- And that is true. This research began in the nineteen sixties, and it's still going on actively today. And it-- that string of mitigating negative consequences by talking it out has never been disproven in however many years that is. Um, I don't wanna do math today. I will say what we keep coming back to, which I'm finding, is these, like, you can't be afraid to have the hard conversations. Like- Absolutely ...in all of these things, which, you know- Absolutely. Yeah. I love that. So I need to just touch on artificial intelligence because it's entering every a- every industry. Yes. Do you think AI has the potential to help organizations create healthier employee cultures? Or does it does it risk making the workforce, the workplace feel more impersonal? I love this question, and I love talking about it. I was just having a conversation yesterday about it as well. I think I am a, I'm a big pro-AI person but with this caveat. I am not afraid of it. I am baffled by it. I am s- not an expert in it in any way. And yet, when it comes to organizational culture, the way to make sure that it remains a benefit and not a detriment is to r-remember that it's a tool. It is not going to take people's jobs. People who get really good at using it as a tool are going to take people's jobs who refuse to get to know it. And so from an organizational perspective, if you treat it not as a, you know, a demon in the closet, but rather like as a curiosity it is complex, and it's moving fast, and there are certainly, with anything that moves too fast there are- Lots of ways it can go off the rail and cause unintended consequences. And yet it's a tool. And if we can master the use of the tool in the way that it best helps free up our time, then we can spend more of that time on the human aspects of organizational development. So if I can get AI to do ten tasks that I normally would have done manually, and now I can get them to do it-- it to do it in ten minutes instead of me spending three hours on it, that's two hours and fifty minutes that I can be out working with my staff. I can be having conversations about what the needs are in the organization. I can be out talking to, you know, the leaders that I, that I direct about how to make our programs better, right? For healthcare workers, that's more time that can be spent having actual one-on-one conversations with patients instead of the paperwork that absolutely has to be done and, and, you know, other process and systems that have to be done. But you have to understand the tool, not be scared of it, and then see it as a tool and not as a replacement for humanality, but rather as a tool to make more time for humanality. So there are lots of ways that you could use it to put up a, a barrier. There is nothing I hate more than a chat box with a bot that's not really high-level AI. Now, it's-- The ones who have invested, they're getting to be very, very good, and they have a a memory into, you know-- And then some chat boxes can really help me, like on a website, if they have really good AI. And in two seconds, I can figure out if this bot like really can't help me because they don't-- they're not programmed properly or it's, you know, it's not sophisticated enough AI. That's frustrating to me, right? I want a human at that point. But when a company can use a chat box to define a certain level and then directly put somebody in touch with a human once they get past that level and, and do it in a way that makes the user experience positive and feel like, okay, so I got through a few hoop-hoops, but now I'm headed to a human, that's a good thing. And it saves the humans from answering kind of the dumb questions that we can all ask when we are just bumbling through trying to figure something out, right? So there's just this-- It has to be a mindset and an intentionality by organizations to say, how do we make sure we're use-- we're on the cutting edge of using it in the places that then tur-- we can turn around and retake back that time to be human time. Yeah. I, I agree. Let's make us better humans. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So this last question, I just kinda wanna get your general opinion. I kind of ask th-as this type of question to all my guests. I-if you were placed in a leadership role at the federal level and tasked with strengthening the healthcare workforce or just the workforce in general in the United States, what would be the first major initiative you would implement? Gosh, I thought about this question so long and hard because- ... there's, you know, suddenly 10 things come to mind, of course, as I'm sure most of your, guests would say. And I don't know i-in practicality how this would ever work, but in a utopia world, there would be incentives to train leaders on human-centered leadership. I really believe if we could get back... There's a, there's a really great-- I'll point people to this. I don't have the link, but if-- I think you can Google and figure it out. But there's a really great experiment that was done over in Europe by Heineken, and of course, they made like a mini documentary about it, where they put people in a room, two people in a room who they knew had diametrically opposed views on issues. And it was, uh, the little d- mini documentary has three sets of two people. And The two people in the room have no idea. They don't know each other, and they don't know anything about each other. And they're-- All they're told is, "Do this task together." And so they build basically a bar together. And then they turn around, and they face a wall, and they're shown the interview of each person, and the person is sharing their views. And so it, it's at that moment, after they've spent a couple of hours together, like building and talking and like doing this joint project, that they realize that they are completely diametrically opposed in whatever issue it was. And the voice the voiceover head says... 'Cause there's a beer si- There's a Heineken, obviously. There's a beer sitting on the counter for each of them. And it... And they say, "You can either leave now, or you can sit and drink this beer and talk it out." And not a single one leaves. They just talk. And they talk about their differences, and they talk out... Wow, like, because they got to see someone as human first, and then they saw their views, and then they were more open and more curious about learning from that person about why. What is-- What drove them to be that way? Or maybe my own misconceptions were wrong. Or even if I still stand in my place, this person is human, and they're allowed to have a different perspective than me. And I think that in healthcare and beyond, if we can start to see the human side of people again, so much of the negativity that leads to stress, that leads to burnout, that leads to fights, that leads to bullying online or otherwise All of these things. If we could see humans again, we would be so much better off. And so I don't know how in this federal level tasked with strengthening the entire industry, but if I could just stop the world for a minute and have everyone take a breath and just speak human to human with no, none of those, those, uh, facades and none of those hats that we wear or those strong beliefs, just for a minute, just put those aside and just see humans, I think we'd all be better off. Yeah. We could call it Make America Human Again, maybe. I love that. I love that. Yeah. It's a much better slogan. Yeah. So if people wanna learn more about you, how can they do that? Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me on Instagram at In Pursuit Mel Sue. So, uh, my tagline is, "What are you in pursuit of?" Like, what are you in search of? Uh, so In Pursuit Mel Sue or my website is melaniesuehicks.com. And, I am always up for chatting. I'm always up for talking, so just send me a direct email. I will re- I respond to everyone. I love chatting. I love talking to people. And I'm on LinkedIn too, just under my name, so... Awesome. Dr. Melanie Hicks, thank you so very much for joining me today. I really enjoyed the conversation. Oh, me as well, and thank you so much for having me. This was really, really fun. Thank you so much. Thank you for tuning in to Taking Healthcare by Storm: Industry Insights with Quality Insights Medical Director Dr. Jean Storm. We hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you found value in what you heard, please consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite platform.

If you have any topics or guests you'd like to see on future episodes, you can reach out to us on our website. We would love to hear from you.

So, until next time, stay curious, stay compassionate, and keep taking healthcare by storm.