When Dr. Anita Patel, senior director of clinical excellence at IndeVets, led a leadership lab at the 2026 AVMA Convention, her message was direct: change is constant in vet med, but most organizations underestimate what it actually takes to bring a team through it.

Veterinary medicine has always been emotionally demanding work. But demand alone doesn't cause teams to fall apart. Poor leadership does.

When the Leader Moves Faster Than the Team

One of the most useful frameworks Dr. Patel shared: leaders navigate change on a different timeline than their teams. A practice owner who has spent months thinking through a shift in scheduling, services, or ownership will land in a place of acceptance or even excitement well before the team hears about it. The team starts that journey the moment they learn something is changing.

That gap is where most of the damage happens. Leaders who don't account for it tend to interpret resistance as opposition rather than as the normal human response to uncertainty. The result is a team that feels unseen, and a leader who feels unsupported.

The fix isn't complicated, but it requires intention: know where the organization is, know where it's going, and communicate both clearly and repeatedly. Invite the team into the process rather than presenting change as finished decisions.

Culture Is the Other Half of Retention

Leadership timing isn't the only structural factor. AAHA board director Gregory Carastro, LVT, published a companion piece the same week arguing that sustainable workloads, realistic scheduling, and genuine recognition matter more to retention than wellness programs alone. A lunch-and-learn on mindfulness doesn't offset a chronic understaffing problem.

Measuring What Matters

Practices routinely measure revenue, productivity, and client satisfaction. How often do they track voluntary turnover rates, internal promotion rates, exit interview themes, or sick leave utilization? These numbers tell you what's happening inside the culture long before a resignation hits.

The practices that win the next decade of vet med won't just be the ones with the best equipment or the highest wages. They'll be the ones that figured out how to take care of the people doing the work.

What this means for you:

  • Talk to your team about change before it's final, not after. Give them time to process.
  • Make psychological safety and sustainable workloads explicit priorities, not just talking points.
  • Start measuring culture, not just performance. Turnover, referrals, and engagement surveys tell you where you actually stand.
  • Don't let sustainability compete with productivity. They reinforce each other.