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. 

Welcome back practice leaders for another little mini rant. This is a subject that comes up has been coming up a lot lately, so it's a visit slash, revisit around morale. If you've got a morale problem, what do you do? So before we dig into that, if you're stuck, please don't stay stuck. Seriously, it'll break my heart if you have it in you, if you have it in your mind, in your heart, in your vision, to have a high value, massively impactful healing organization with a great culture is delivering on the promise, delivering on the purpose, giving you the life that you deserve with the role that you deserve, making the biggest impact. But if you're not there, if you're stuck, if you feel like you're hitting the ceiling in some way and you don't reach out, that would break my heart. Please reach out. I'd love to get you on path to making that impact. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule to get a few minutes to talk about what that first step or next step could look like for you. But with no further ado, the topic at hand. 

Here's the simple formula Morale is related to winning. If you're not winning, your morale sucks. If you need your morale to be better, you have to start winning. All right, we're done. Catch you next time. Now the idea is and there's lots of tactics. We're not going to talk so much about all the various tactics. Right? People write C to measurables and all the things that go within the tools. I mean, certainly you should be running EOS, certainly you should be using those tools. And if you're not sure about what that is. Please reach out, we can talk about that. Please listen to other episodes. But using the systems, certainly, that's the plumbing. But what do you put into the plumbing and this idea of winning? I mean, it really is this simple. 

If your morale is not where it needs to be, it's because people are feeling like what they're doing is not working. Morale and burnout are cousins, right? Morale is the sense of the overall culture and burnout is an individual experience that is very difficult to recover from, and they have a lot of the same drivers. We'll keep them separate in this regard, but thinking about the common ground, it is is what I'm doing, working, that's it, man. So understand that high morale can be on a hard working team in a difficult time. There can be a lot of sacrifice, a lot of work 80 hours starting early, ending late, doing hard stuff but what makes it worth it is something that makes them feel like traction is being gained, progress is happening, and so if you're in a state of not winning, you have to change that and if and there's a lot to this right so thinking as a leader, taking a step back, you, you know, look at your, your team, look at your objectives. Look at what you're doing. 

You might be in a state where, well, mark, we're not actually winning, things are going the wrong direction. That is, of course, a relative perspective. Now I'm not going to try to get so spiritual on you that your bad day and your tragic circumstances are really. It's going to be hard to you know it's really for the benefit for the longterm. I'm not there on that. I mean, that may be true in the, in the macro scale, but that's not the point In in your hero's journey you are going to have to take steps towards winning right and you're going to have to measure that. Now, of course, I guess it's really important to talk about. 

The first part of the equation is we need to get to 100. We're at 10. We're not profitable until 20. I'm making no units here. I'm just saying, like you know, we're patently failing. We're patently failing against our measurables. Whatever we need to be better at, there's a path to be better at it, there's a path to win. And so if you're obsessed with the outcome being what it needs to be and I get that I'm right there with you some days. I know what success for next year looks like and I am super pissed off that I'm not there yet. I mean, that's real. There are so many things I'm working on right now that have not delivered yet on what I expect for next year that I just get angry, and that's real. But I have to take myself out of the future and put myself into the present and say what are the next steps, that if we do them, we'll be moving in the right direction and those are the wins. And so sometimes it is. 

We want a meeting where everybody is fully engaged, really solving the most important issues, not wasting time on emotional sensitivity and frustration and hurt feelings. We're really talking about those real issues. And so we have another meeting and it's just like somebody went off again and got their feelings hurt and you're frustrated because you know nothing productive was talked about. Was this meeting starting on time? Is it ending on time? You might have to take a step back and say you know what, guys, this meeting starts off terribly already because we start 10 minutes late and then it goes over by another hour. The next win might be can we have everybody here on time or start in five minutes, start within five minutes of the start time, or can we have everybody here supposed to have eight people in the meeting and last time we had six. And so you set a small objective, a small win. And you know, you said we're going to have at least six people in this meeting and tomorrow that meeting happens and seven people show up Unbelievable. You got to celebrate that win. Now you really have to. 

There is I know what a lot of people are thinking like that's, that's a win. Like this team is still gonna bicker about stupid crap for another hour and a half man, I hear you. But you are not gonna build morale if you cannot build on that win now. I'm not saying stay there. I'm not at all saying that. I'm not saying that's the end of the road. But if you, you, there is no other way. There is no other way, there is no other way through this that if you cannot take the win on something small, meaningful, in the right direction, now if six people there's not meaningful to you, don't make that as the win. 

That being said, you're going to have to figure out what your level of small enough is, small enough to get done. And I can just say it like this. I'm not saying you can get there, but I'm saying if you don't, you will not improve morale. That bears repeating. This is not a judgment, this is a formula. Winning, gaining traction, moving forward towards the objectives is the only way to make people feel like their efforts are worthwhile. Therefore, the only way to improve morale. It's that simple. You must digest that reality. So get your mind and get your measurables and get your words and your body and your being around the reality that you will not improve enthusiasm or execution until you can incorporate this reality. 

So what's the next win for your team? Is it an attendance thing? Is it, I mean, it could be firing somebody? It could, maybe. I mean, let's go the other end of that. That was the thing I was going to mention a minute ago. Like if you, if you say you know what, we're going to have six people in this meeting tomorrow, six out of the eight, six out of the 10, and five people show up, man, that's not good and you're going to have to take a win somehow. 

And that win might be saying you know what? We got to make the team smaller. Maybe we got to get somebody off the boat, maybe I've got to hold myself accountable. Maybe you're going to give yourself a win by doing something hard today or tomorrow. Give yourself a win, and that's a great place to start as well. 

We really want the teams to perform. We got to be our highest and best leaders. We have to be doing what we say, and so what do you need to do as a leader? Are you stressed, are you overwhelmed? Are you feeling like you really don't know what to do and you're putting this high pressure on yourself? Are you not giving yourself any compassion for how difficult this is for you to lead the organization? What can you do and reward yourself for? That's a positive ingredient, no matter how small, and I think that's really important. I've done that to myself many times and still do it to a large extent is I get obsessed with the discipline to move forward and I don't give myself the space to feel bad about things going slower or not going like I want initially, and that's been helpful to me to do that. Now. I'm not saying I take off any of the pressure, off the performance, but I do give myself some compassion, for you know being angry about things not being the way I want them to be, cause that's real. You know it's a the world is a chaotic place. 

And prediction. The skill I teach all my clients is to be more and more accurate predictors, but we never get to a hundred percent. We can never predict what's going to happen in the future. So many things are variables and oftentimes, the law of small numbers and the law of randomness. You know, we're going to do these five things that are going to be great in a four out of five. Or you know, land four out of five deals. I mean, that's a sales thing, right? Like we got five awesome deals, you know, and if we get three of them, we're in great shape. Well then, none of them land man, that's tough. 

That happens, though, and we got to be ready to go back into it. And and I do think it's important to say hey, yeah, absolutely, that sucked, that sucked. And you know, maybe if this is the third time that's happened, maybe we've got to make bigger changes. But if this is the first time this happened, the second time, you know, we got to go back to the formula, the things that work, and say this is what we're going to. We're going to feel bad. We're going to, you know, we're going to have a rough Thursday. Friday night, we're going to drink our sorrows away. I don't recommend that, but maybe just metaphorically, do something indulgent. I definitely don't recommend alcohol as any kind of cure or medicine. But, you know, doing whatever we need to do to vent and coming back Monday ready to go and understand what that minimum win looks like and give ourselves the gift of feeling like our actions can be followed through on. We can do hard things and we can build on that and over time, if you're making good decisions, you will see that the morale builds up, and so I guess, taking a step back I mean this is probably a pretty short. Well, we'll see. I say I'm going to go. We're about wrapping this up. We'll see if I go another 10 minutes. 

This principle, the point of this rant, is the principle that if you must look at the organization and find a way to win, you must look at your team and find a way to win. You must look at yourself and find a way to win. And find a way to win. You must look at yourself and find a way to win. Now, if that looks like, guys, we are still making stupid mistakes around people, we've got someone who's a leader, who is not executing the win, is getting them off the team. And if you're ready to do that, that's great, that's awesome actually. But it doesn't matter what the thing is. You must look at the team and look at the plan and be clear of what winning looks like. 

People need to know it, and that's another really important part. It's not enough that you decide that it has to be something that everyone on the team knows and is crystal clear. And when they win and they do the objective, they are rewarded. Crystal clear. And when they win and they do the objective, they are rewarded. Maybe not big, maybe maybe it's a high five, maybe it's a congratulations, but it needs to be some sort of positive emotional reward for, yeah, that was the right thing, that we can win, we can do it, even if it's a tiny little win. We got a first down. We didn't get a touchdown, we got a first down. Amazing, awesome. 

That is an ingredient in winning. Let's keep cooking, let's keep doing that, and there will be setbacks. We got to go back and make sure we got more wins than losses. And if we can't, if we can't do that, then that is, you are not going to be successful, it is not going to go your way. And I guess another corollary on that is that the winning is the most important thing I know with. It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. No, no, if. If how you play the game is having fun, that's winning. That's a different form of winning. You know, I was like that was awesome. You see, that shot that was. We were laughing our butts off and we lost it. That was that's winning. That's winning. You know what I mean? You hear what I'm saying there. 

Winning isn't the only way to win. Might be a better way to say it. I hope that contradiction lands. We have to be clear on the objective, but if you need to ask for a major sacrifice, you might. You might be able to say, hey, we're supposed to have 10 people on this team, we've got six and we're going to get here early and we're going to stay late and we're going to suck it up, and that's going to suck. But this is a tough team and when it works, we're going to feel awesome and we're going to be awesome. That's a real thing. But it has to work and if it doesn't work, you are losing and you're going to lose morale and so understanding when to place the bets and changing the strategy when they don't work to get back to a place where we can win is the only only formula for creating that enthusiastic, committed, high morale, high confidence culture. I hope that makes sense. I'm keeping it under just under 15 minutes. 

Winning and morale and culture inextricably linked. Give us some feedback. Love to hear from you. If you're stuck in a specific tactic, we can talk about how to use the tools to get there. I hope that gets your mind thinking about developing the morale. If you're stuck, of course, reach out. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule Loves to help you along the way. Get you unstuck. We'll see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson Leary.