0:00:02 - Mark Henderson Leary

Welcome to Practice Freedom. What if you could hang out with owners and founders from all sorts of healthcare private practices, having rich conversations about their successes and their failures, and then take an insight or two to inspire your own growth? Each week on Practice Freedom, we take an in-depth look at how to get the most out of both the clinical side and the business side of the practice, get the most out of your people and, most of all, how to live the healthy life that you deserve. I'm Mark Henderson Leary. I'm a business coach and an entrepreneurial operating system implementer. I have a passion that everyone should feel in control of their life, and so what I do is I help you get control of your business. Part of how I do that is by letting you listen in on these conversations in order to make the biggest impact in your practice and, ultimately, live your best life.

Let's get started, leaders. Let's talk about hiring. I don't know something about the way I said that sounds like we've talked about this to death and it sounds like it's about to be an ad. It is not about to be an ad. What do I mean by hiring? Maybe I'm not talking about hiring. Maybe I'm talking about accumulation of talent. I love that. That was not how I meant to phrase that, but I think that's the title. So that's the issue, right? So we talk about hiring. We talk about culture, right? So we talk about hiring, we talk about culture. We talk about the process, onboarding, onboarding all the things that go with that lot in the recipe. So, before we dig into that, don't forget if you're stuck, if you're envisioning an amazing culture, an amazing organization that delivers super high value to your patients, clients or whomever, but you're stuck, feel like you can't imagine a world that not only does that but certainly doesn't give you the life you live, imagine you can. If you're stuck, I want you to have that. I want you to have a life you deserve, having created and leading an organization that makes a high impact, the impact that you want it to make. Please reach out. I'd love to help, even if it's in a tiny, tiny way, to get you on your way. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule for just a couple minutes, so with that.

So this topic is sparked by a couple things. I did a talk at a conference in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and did a breakout specifically on people issues and hiring, and then a more recent podcast episode Michael Neal had him on again, talked about his approach, and I guess part of what inspires me is exactly what I said in that title the accumulation of talent. It's. It's that is exactly what I said in the in that title the accumulation of talent, that's. That's essentially the issue that we need to solve for, and we tend to solve for it. We're trying to solve for it in a very tactical way.

So just hire better, to hire faster, and there are just so many moving pieces along the way. There are better ways to get potential talent in the door. There are better ways to build the culture, reward people, but I think the element that has to be really taken to heart is that it is a time-based accumulation. It is like going to the gym. I say this all the time there's no such thing as a life-changing workout. There is a life-changing workout routine and a life-changing commitment to taking care of your health through working out. That ultimately yields a strong body capable of doing the things you want to do. And so I could. I could kind of go on about the million things, but what I wanted to share is kind of thinking of the of the process a little bit.

How do you think of this over time? Because, as I was getting ready for this, this breakout I really wanted to be out of. I wanted to, actually I wanted to answer the question that was in front, that was likely in front of people, because there's this ongoing frustration and there's always. It never is right now. Everybody likes to say it's you know, people are terrible to hire and nobody wants to work, and there's truth to that. But it's never not like that. There's never been a time. And when talent surplus comes, it doesn't come with like a filter, so you get all the good people, you get 10 times more terrible people too, and so it's never really different. You're always panning for gold, so that's not different, that's not new.

But if you're going to spend time and by time I mean a couple of years working on this, and if a couple of years have passed, whether it's two years for an intense cultural transformation or it's 10 years of working hard at a business that you care a lot about, what will you have done that has helped you really accumulate the best talent, that's most fired up about your vision, most capable and just really you really ended up with what you wanted. What do you need to do. Well, of course, I think it's the panning for gold mentality has to be applied. You have to know that there's lots of sand. You've got to build that endurance and, whatever your screening techniques are, whatever your recruiting strategy is, are you using online surveys? You're doing a phone survey? You're doing job fairs? They're all good right, but I definitely like automation. I like the idea of screening quickly and then doing some fast funnel accumulation to get some people out of the way and do some quick filtering and then start getting into the human process pretty quickly. You certainly listen to Michael Neal's podcast both of them and understand what he's doing. But that's part of the process.

But it's this mindset of whatever you're doing to get talent and resumes and at-bats. It's a lot of sand coming your way, and that's not to say the sand is bad, just not what you need. You need gold. Somebody else is going to use the sand to make something with that. There's lots of things you can do with sand. And yeah, I won't even go there, but you got gold that comes to you, but do you keep it?

Because this is a time-based endeavor. How long, if you get a fleck of gold, how long do you have with it? Well, that's a major part of this equation. The longer you have it, the better. Right, if somebody comes in and they're great for six months and then they move on to the next thing, that's not nearly as good as somebody who's with you three, four, five years Now. Sometimes you want people for longer than that. But I also think that a lot of people grow and maybe they grow into your organization. Maybe they don't, and that's not a bad thing. You're going to have people flow through your organization. You're going to hopefully grow them and contribute to them those really good ones and they will grow and move on to somewhere else. And that is a fact of life and fortunately that's real.

If you're going to go through this exercise, this very ebbing and flowing and persistent commitment over time, you want to be as efficient as possible, and how do you think about the levers and the moves you can make, the investments you can make to make it as efficient as possible? And so imagine the way I did this. I drew this on the board. I drew it like an org chart. We call it an accountability chart. But imagine your organization from the top down, the founder leader, which is possibly you or the person you work with three to seven leaders in the organization that run the major functions, the team leads or the managers that report to them, or the direct reports, depending on the business unit, where it goes and however many layers it goes down. If it's a small organization, we're already at the end. If you're a large organization, you got other layers.

It's imagining every seat in the entire organization. But imagine it in the future with every single person in every one of those seats, right, person. It's amazing, filled full of gold, and thinking about how powerful, how aligned, how efficient is that organization? How much do you love going there and being around these people, because they're one of you and you're one of them and everybody's rowing in the same direction. That's where we want to go with this, and if you can get realistic and say it's never going to be 100%, okay, fine. Put in 20% people who have lost their luster or never quite worked out still an amazing organization. So fine, you envision this. Now, what is it today? Look right at it right now, and ideally, what I'd love for you to do is do an actual exercise and draw your actual organizational accountability chart and sort of circle the ones that are really good, really amazing, and start to see where are these great people? Are they at the top? Are they scattered throughout? Are they at the bottom? Is there any kind of rhyme or reason to where these really great people are?

Now back to this panning for gold. Oftentimes the highest turnover seats are at the lower levels of the organization, and those are the ones that are very often very frustrating to us, because people don't seem to care, don't seem to want what we want, are not capable, not interested, not motivated, but they tend to interact with our clients and customers at a high level, and so we feel a lot of pain when they're not the right ones. And so we feel a lot of pain when they're not the right ones. And so if we start accumulating some of that gold at that level, well, even take a step back. Actually, let's go dig into that. Very often you look at this accountability chart with all the gaps, and people tend to solve for this by going to those lower levels and recruiting and filling them first, and that's not wrong, because that's where the pain is felt and you have to get that right.

But if you start accumulating that gold, which is sometimes hard to tell. At first, there's an art to figuring out who is definitely gold, who could be gold and who just looked like gold. Right, if you start accumulating some that are good and some of them Some of them are going to leave. Well, why? Why are these people going to leave? Why are the really good ones not going to stay or never have surfaced as really good, really high potential people who just maybe you never saw it, or they look like they're going to be great and poof. They're gone. Why? And I hope you know the answer, the answer is definitely proven.

We know the answer and the answer is because of the managers and the leaders in the organization, and hopefully you've drawn this out and you're starting to see that, while the top leadership is the most important, not the only leadership, and it is very probable that there's any layers in the middle that are not healthy, that are not rewarding growing, and growing is the key word Because of all the high-performance organizations, which is all the organizations I work with, some version of high-performance growth is somewhere in the formula, because people want to do well and they want to do better. Most people want to do that regardless, but we don't always hire the right people that match with us to make that seem visible. So growth is important. So to grow these people, to give them what they need, they have to have the right leaders and managers, even if it's just a team lead or whatever it is in the organization. So start thinking if you're going to accumulate that gold at the edges of the organization and you don't have the right leaders and managers in the middle, where is it going? Who knows they're leaving or they're not being fulfilled, satisfied. They're leaving massive amounts of potential on the table.

So, when it comes to putting your time and energy into growing the organization, hopefully you can look at this accountability chart and start seeing there's three, four, five critical roles that, if I get them right, we can retain the gold, we can make it shine, we can cultivate it where it didn't seem to be there and we can get the sand out, because great leaders and great managers in the organization are why they stay and how we get the most out of them. And now we can go back and look and see when we're, quarter on quarter, trying to improve our culture and retain talent and you are that business who feels like if you're I mean you may not be. You might be. There's two kinds of camps at this stage the people who really can envision an amazing culture but don't have it and they see other cultures and they're like how did they get there? They really enjoy an amazing magnetism of a well-known culture that people love to talk about and love to work in. And that's not you. Yet this is your path to it, one seat at a time.

You must choose those roles and use the tools to really using tools like in EOS, the people analyzer make sure those critical roles have people who GWC the seat, really get it, really want it and have the capacity to do it. And you're crystal clear on what those expectations are and they're high enough. They really have, especially those seats with what we call LMA, leadership management and accountability, those people managers, because the people manager first and foremost has to be accountable to growing people, simple as that. It's not a secondary objective. They have to be able to do that or even if they overperform as an individual, they will never outperform the rest of the team who's not. You have to have that priority.

So, looking at those seats who are managers with that LMA or that people management, looking at the ones that have the most people with the most important cultural influence and focusing on do I really have the right people in the right seats there? And when we get that, we go back to panning for gold and we get to retain so much more of it. Because think about how much panning for gold we do. How many interviews are we going to go through, how many resumes, how many failed attempts? Don't make it for naught. Make sure when you get a good one, they can stay and create the maximum impact. So hopefully that's useful.

I want you to take this mental mindset and think about the whole life cycle of what it is to hire better, recruit better, and think about the effort and the endurance it takes. But start thinking about where are you going to put that energy. Draw that entire accountability chart and think about circling the ones that are really great emotionally. Now that's another exercise too. If you circle a bunch of people and you go back to your tool, your performance measurable tools, your people analyzer, accountability chart, and those don't match, you've got to calibrate and make sure your standard of excellence for the numbers and getting it one in capacity and the expectations and the cultural. Make sure those match your actual expectations, because that's the standard of excellence, your emotional gut check that you love having on there and they're doing great work.

And so this exercise is designed to reverse engineer that. So you make sure you build that account, you draw that chart of who's there and you just circle the ones you think are right fits and then you get your tools to match that. And then you go back and say, where do we apply our energy to get those others above the bar, to make the biggest difference? And do that quarter after quarter, one seed at a time. Anyway, I hope that's helpful. Reach out if you're confused or stuck. As always, we'd love to hear from you. Give us some feedback, share this content with anybody who can use it. We'll see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson-Leary.

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