Conflicted

I work GP as a CSR Lead now, but have years of experience working in vet med as a VA/ tech assistant & animal care plus years of volunteering at a vet clinic while being a manager of a small pet care business.

While I have education relating to animal health and sciences, I’m not credentialed and relied on OTJ training to learn while reading books and journals to understand.

What has me conflicted is that I’m watching the tech/VA team struggle to perform basic duties and tasks. The Lead RVT is the only primary RVT and responsible for training. And taking the poor personality and attitude of the Lead RVT out of this equation, I feel this is still stepping on others toes.

This is where I’m conflicted:

I’ve got this “problem” where I have the compulsion to help, train, and teach others- even if it’s not my responsibility to do so.

My mentality is never sink or swim, but I don’t even have the support from upper management to train my own team properly. I’m told I have freedom to train staff for better performance and client experience. Yet I’m then told I can’t do the kind of training that’s needed. So I’ve compromised and juggle training, creating SOPs and training guides/resources/templates, covering the front and do my own responsibilities without the same accommodations as the Lead RVT (who is allowed to work from home remotely).

We have had an OTJ VA making a lot of mistakes and not knowing how to do a lot of basic things… and this VA has been at our clinic several months now. And they are not the only one - many of them don’t know the correct protocols or record keeping or estimates or how to properly invoice. I’m newer than all of them except this VA.

So today, I trained and walked the VA through the process on how to properly record a treatment because the client was waiting to check out and us CSRs were unable to do so without charges being put into the record. No one on the medical team was helping this VA because we were short staffed with techs/VAs.

I hate that I’m the go-to person for everything without having the ability or permissions to actually make impactful changes to help my team and patients. But I’m not even trained on tech duties here - despite being asked to assist and often being relied upon to assist the tech team to fill meds, room, collect history, etc. I have experience elsewhere doing all of those, but I had to figure out a lot by myself and luckily have been capable of doing that.

Am I wrong to go outside of my responsibilities? I can’t really go to higher management because reports have been already made by multiple staff regarding the Lead RVt. Yet they’ve been employed there for years and there isn’t another RVT on staff to replace them. They’ve been immune to HR related complaints and behaviors that would and has resulted in non-credentialed staff being fired. Having a discussion with the Lead RvT is not productive as they often just start yelling or calling names when anyone says something they don’t like or provides them with constructive feedback or asks them for help.

So then people started going to me instead - but I’m just a CSR Lead… and I don’t know what more I can do without putting more burden on myself. I feel so conflicted turning down people’s request to be supported when they genuinely want to learn and could definitely perform their duties with adequate support and training. Maybe this is more of a vent than work advice, but I wouldn’t mind input if I should really keep to my lane and keep my head down.

If you read this far - thank you for taking the time!