Communicate effectively
Two jobs prior to his current one, Canose was in his first full-time hospital administration position in North Carolina and had come from the North. A patient had died unexpectedly on the operating table, and he was asked to explain to the board why the patient had died.
“The chairman of the board was this little raisin of a man who had been out in the sun way too long, and he was a retired ATF agent, who I later learned had proudly drawn his gun and used it on numerous occasions when he was chasing down moonshiners in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee,” Canose says.
As he explained to the board, he reached the point in the story where it was clear that the patient wasn’t going to live, and out of his mouth came the phrase, “And the patient started going south.”
“The entire boardroom got deadly quiet, and everybody just sort of looked at me, and it was like the cartoon where you have that little word bubble you wish you could reach out and grab and stick back in your mouth,” he says.
The chairman then broke the silence by asking, “Son, what do you mean by that phrase, ‘going south?’” Canose was quick on his feet with an explanation so he wouldn’t have to find a new job so quickly.
“I replied, ‘Closer to heaven,’” he says with a laugh. “That’s called when you’re in the South, get rid of your Yankee vocabulary.”
While it’s a funny story, it’s also an important lesson that he learned in communication during his career: You have to be careful in the words you use to communicate your message and how your audience will interpret them.
Another lesson Canose learned in communication came when he worked in Pittsburgh when he was still a practicing anesthesiologist but was also charged with running the operating room. It was a challenge because he was learning insight into the administration side while also still practicing, and it was during this time that he realized a problem in his communication.
“I spoke in tongues,” he says. “I had this whole new vocabulary that administrators used. When you go out and you sit in a room with bedside nurses or the guys that keep the boilers and the air conditioning working, they don’t speak that language, and it doesn’t connect with them, so knowing who your audience is and figuring out how to connect with them, how to be able to present the information in their context and help them connect the dots, I think that’s an acquired skill.”
By learning to eliminate administration jargon from his vocabulary, he was able to more effectively communicate with employees.
In addition to learning how to communicate his message in ways that his audience understands, he’s also learned that consistency is key.
“Like any communications theory, No. 1, the message has to be consistent,” Canose says. “You’ll hear me say that over and over and over again, but at the same time, you have to deliver it so many different ways to reach people who have different learning styles and who assimilate information in different ways.”
He does this both in written form via the company newsletter and verbally via town-hall forums, and he’s mindful to make sure that his message is the same in both venues.
“There’s no difference whatsoever,” he says. “That’s where I’m always very focused on making sure it’s the same message just delivered a different way. We really do want to make sure that the key messages are always clear, that the content is consistent, that we’re maintaining a focus on our priority goals and objectives.”