Critical Communication Events

Gayle Coker
Mike Hoskins
Organizational Communication
Graduate Studies in Business
Southern Nazarene University
June 1, 2014

In the Integris Health System, meetings are held on a very frequent basis. Some days as a director, I go home thinking that I have accomplished absolutely nothing but going from meeting to meeting and doing nothing but getting the meeting checked off of my scheduling assistant on my computer. There are days when I begin to wonder if administration schedules meetings to talk about having meetings. It can be a vicious circle that can give anyone a horrible headache. A monthly meeting that occurs on the last Thursday of every month is the Department managers meeting. This meeting consists of every director in the hospital as well as the President, Chief Nursing Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. During these meetings, the prior month is looked at as well as any problems. A regular topic/problem is low scores on patient surveys regarding courtesy and respect. It was during one of our monthly director meetings that what I felt was the most effective communication events occurred. The speaker was not the Hospital President, or the Chief Financial Officer, but the woman who was in charge of the hospital volunteers and our small gift shop. She had no fancy power point presentation, no handouts with spreadsheets or diagrams. She spoke of the lack of kindness she was observing between each other as we entered the building each morning. Our faces as we rode up the elevator, our facial expressions as we passed our own co-workers in the hallways. She asked a simple question, if we could not show courtesy to the people we worked with, how our patients would feel this from us. She showed the small clip entitled “You can’t send a duck to eagle school” and while it played passed out little rubber