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September 26, 2006

by Celeste Blackman and Ron Luyet

Answer:  People we don’t like.

In our busy complex world we seek to do business with people that we trust; people with whom we feel comfortable doing business—people we like. When our trust is breached we respond in a variety of ways. We might stop doing business with the offender and/or tell others about our experience and encourage them not to do business with the offender either.  We might write a letter, start a blog or post our dissatisfaction in a chat room or on a consumer opinion site, or we might seek redress through the legal system, we might sue! Consider the research reported in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In his book Gladwell summarizes the research on medical doctors who are most likely to be sued.

Gladwell offers an analysis of malpractice lawsuits which clearly demonstrates that some highly skilled doctors get sued a lot while other doctors who make lots of mistakes never get sued. It turns out that patients file lawsuits because they have been harmed by poor medical care and something else. The something else is how they were treated on a personal level by their doctor. Researchers recorded hundreds of conversations between physicians and their patients looking for predictors of who gets sued. Fifty percent of the physicians in the study had never been sued and fifty percent had been sued at least twice. What they discovered: The best predictor of who gets sued was the quality of conversations between doctor and patient.

What turned out not to be good predictors of who gets sued:

• Specific training background
• Rated quality of medical school attended
• Years in practice
• How often they operate
• Credentials
• History of past errors
• Difficulty of cases accepted
• Income

Patients who like their physician and trust him or her, are less likely to sue when mistakes occur. Physicians who had never been sued shared the following attributes:

• Spent 3 minutes longer with patients (18.3 min. vs. 15 min.)
• Began conversations with orienting or context setting comments
• Engaged in active listening
• Were more likely to laugh and be funny during the visit
• Did not provide more details about medication or the patient’s condition

Later in the research trained listeners could predict with great accuracy who would get sued based only on two 20 second samples of doctor/patient interaction and the sound clip was adjusted so that no words could he recognized, only tone of voice. Judges rated: warmth, hostility, dominance and anxiousness and they could predict who got sued. The key predictor was dominant vs. concerned tone.

In conclusion, people do not sue doctors they like—they sue doctors if they…

• sense they are not being listened to
• feel talked down to
• feel they are not being treated with respect.

Trust is the currency of business today and we can all benefit from learning how to build and maintain relationships of high trust. At Business Consultants Network we are committed to helping our clients build and sustain climates of trust where people can work together more effectively by increasing their own personal and interpersonal effectiveness. ~

Celeste Blackman is Director of Business Development and Trainer for Business Consultants Network. Ron Luyet is Vice President of Consulting and Training Services.