What is accountability? Accountability means being responsible and being able to follow through with what one is supposed to do? In business, accountability is important to grow your practice. But the type of accountability is determined by the leader. What type of leader are you? Ignore and hope, the heavy-handed leader or are you genuine and you share goals and ideas with your team so everyone wins?
Do not miss these highlights:
- What is accountability in business and how does it make you feel?
- Heavy-handed approach.
- How you choose to address your team creates your corporate culture, it’s important to consciously decide what kind of corporate culture you want.
- Hands-off model, the leaders just pretend they don't see the problems or the issues going around going on around them or they're just too busy and they don't want to see them.
- How to talk to a team member about a situation that is not going so well.
- Accountability actually starts with the leader sharing their vision for the company and explaining to the team what winning looks like for the business and everyone.
- Opening up this dialogue and conversation, your team can help identify who's the best person to do something, what's the best fit for things? How do we process this? How do we accomplish this?
- You can not do it all, the importance of building a team.
Resources Mentioned
Join Us in the FMBI Mastermind Group on Facebook. You can find the Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/5461914567153276/
Transcript of Episode #36:
0:01
You're listening to the Functional Medicine Business podcast featuring Dr. Deb, one of the most creative functional medicine business practitioners in her industry. She shares the wisdom and knowledge that she has gained over 25 years of functional medicine, a pioneer in functional medicine, scheduling, leadership and Practice Management. Dr. Devin has a wealth of knowledge and he's eager to share to help functional medicine become more productive, and for the practitioners and patients to live better lives. Our podcast shares the good and the bad of our industry. Because Dr. Deb knows the pain you live every day building a functional medicine practice with practical tools of how to manage money, taxes and patient care. She will discuss it all with you.
0:54
Hello, welcome back to Functional MBI podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Deb, and I'm really excited to be with you here today. I hope everyone has done their halftime homework from last week. And I would love to hear where you're at with planning your second half of 2022. So if you haven't shared this in our social media, please do that. I'm excited to see what everyone's working on and would love to help in any way that you may need it. Today's show is about accountability. Everyone's favorite topic, right? What is accountability? Anyway, I think there's a lack of clarity around what accountability is, and what it looks like in business. You know, the word accountability is thrown around a lot. And it's used in different ways. And there's lots of emotions that come up with that word accountability, you might feel really excited or nervous about this word, because of what it means for you. And if you have had accountability in your business, or your team before, will completely determine how the word accountability makes you feel. You see from a personal experience, I have felt a little conflict around this word at various times in my life. I need to be accountable to my team, my patients, my family and my business partners. And I also want my team members to be responsible for their duties and accountable in business accountability relates to how we express ourselves how we communicate with our team and successfully get things done in practice.
2:40
There's several different approaches to how to create accountability with your team. One of the approaches is called a heavy-handed approach. And some people say in order to be a good boss, you have to be kind of a jerk. You can't engage with your team, you can't make friends with them, you can't be compassionate for them, or they'll walk all over you. And how you choose to address your team creates your corporate culture. I really think it's important to consciously decide what kind of corporate culture you want. Do you want crazy all the time and chaos? Do you want things to run smoothly? Or do you want your team to solve problems on their own, and the possibility of you not having to control every single decision that's made in your business, when things aren't going the way they're supposed to, you have to address them, how you address them determines how they respond. Now you can be a jerk and you can just call them out and point a finger at them and accuse them of not doing things on purpose and not caring. This is kind of that heavy-handed model of not caring and creating a shaming culture. It creates a unsafe place to work. And if we're not safe, it leaves the team wondering when they're next to be on the chopping block and is their job safe. Psychologically, safety is the number one need for a person in life, not just for work. So it's important to create a model that works to level up you as a leader as well as your business. Now, another way of being a leader is to choose to ignore the situation. Some leaders just pretend they don't see the problems or the issues going around going on around them. Or they're just too busy and they don't want to see them. This is more of a hands off model. They ignore and hope everything will improve and run smoothly without conflict. There's no follow up. There's no deadlines and there's no one supporting the team. When you have a leader that is genuine and their intention is to be kind, your team is not afraid to come to you. They take their responsibilities seriously, they support you. And they want to see the practice grow and be successful. In a team of healthy accountability, the team knows what they're supposed to do, when their deadlines are, in conversations with team members in this type of model leaves them experiencing a positive reaction instead of an abrasive reaction. So when you have to talk to a team member, about a situation that maybe isn't going so great, how I would handle it is to start the conversation by being encouraging and positive, and discussing what is going well with them, then you can discuss what needs to be improved upon. And then at the end of the conversation, you want to end that with something positive as well. This leaves your team member feeling good about themselves while wanting to improve and grow. You see, accountability actually starts with the leader sharing their vision for the company, explaining to the team what winning looks like over the next three, five or 10 years for everyone, not just for the business, but for everyone. And they address why this matters to the company, to the clients and to the employees themselves. They talk about the values that they want to portray in the business. And if you can get clarity on that and begin with that it's a huge starting place, then you can step into the goals and step into some metrics of what's important to the business.
6:54
So maybe it's important for the business to have 300 clients in a two-month period of time, you know, or maybe a metric is we want to grow by 10%, this quarter. When you're explaining those metrics, you always want to tie that back into your team. Why is it important for them? It can't just be important to the company, there has to be a win on the other side for them. Otherwise, why would they do it just to see your company grow, and there's no benefit to them, that doesn't engage them that doesn't make them want to work. So you have to give them that positivity of why it's important for them to help you grow the business, what their part is going to do in the business? How is it going to help the clients? How does it help them grow? How does it help the company grow? And this will engage them and keep them involved in wanting to help you grow your business. When I started out, I was the leader of ignoring and hoping that can only last so long, I was so busy seeing clients that I ignored what was going on around me until my patients started to complain to me about deadlines and things that weren't getting done and falling through the cracks. And then I was frustrated with my team because I didn't understand why why this wasn't happening. Why weren't they getting this done? Instead of going to them and having the conversation about what's happening. I accused them and blamed them. And I would have realized really fast that we were short staffed for the volume of work that we were doing. And that would have fixed the problem. But instead, I chose to ignore it hope my team would do better without teaching them without talking to them without sharing my ideas and thoughts with them. Because when I did do it, I got a little flack from it. Actually, I had team members who said, You told us the business was never going to change. And that's unrealistic from a team members part too, because businesses have to change practices have to grow, we have to stay with the times, we can't stay with a model of thinking in medicine that's 10 or 15 years old. It has to mature it has to evolve. So that model doesn't work at all. And so once I started sharing ideas with my team it became a struggle at first in all honesty, I mean, they weren't happy with me sharing my ideas. They didn't want to grow in the direction that I wanted to grow. And so that made me pull back even more at first.
9:39
And then I became the leader who was the jerk where I didn't care. This is what I wanted. This is how we were going to do if you didn't like it too bad was my attitude. And that type of leadership doesn't work either. The type of leadership that works is when you engage your team and you share with them Um, your thoughts, your goals, and you're, you're positive about it, but you're also holding them accountable. If you ask for something to be done, and it's not done, you deal with it, you have follow up, if you tell them this is what's going to happen, if something is not done, it's like children, you have to follow through with it. You can't say, hey, if this isn't done, you're not coming to work tomorrow. And then they don't do it, and you let them come to work and you ignore it. That doesn't work. And it sends a really bad message to the rest of your team. So you, you want to decide as a team, what is the best way for you to meet your goals? Who's going to be responsible for what? Sometimes I think that one person is the best person to carry out a task, when the rest of the team really feels like it's somebody else on the team, that would be good. And so by opening up this dialogue and conversation, your team can help identify who's the best person to do something, what's the best fit for things? How do we process this? How do we accomplish this? And that takes a lot more stress off of you, and you get more buy in from your team.
11:13
So I'm curious to know, what type of leader are you? Is your leadership successful for you? Or do you need to change how you're doing something? If your leadership style is not giving you the results that you're looking for, it's time to change, learn a new skill, and turn it around. So your practice is what you want it to be. So the last thing that you want from your practice, is to have a practice that makes you unhappy, and it's not fulfilling to you. And it's not giving you the nourishment that you need to grow. That's the place that I ended up because I was ignoring and hoping. And then I became a jerk, my practice became something that I no longer wanted to do. I wasn't happy with it, I wasn't fulfilled with it, I was too stressed out by it. And I just wanted to walk away from it all. And, and I'm here to tell you that your practice doesn't have to get to that place. If you identify early enough, where you're at in this process, and you get some help and support to help you turn around and change. It's very hard to do this by yourself. I couldn't do this by myself, I had to get people that could help me grow and learn and understand and create a better place of work for myself and my employees. And now my practice is thriving again. And I love it. I'm happy, I'm excited, I'm ready to take on new challenges and learn new skills, I'm ready to train my team. And we're ready to start providing services to our patients in a different capacity and everyone's happy. And everyone's thriving. And again, once it gets there, it doesn't stay there without hard work. If I went back to the ignoring and hoping type of leader that I was, this practice would fall apart again, it has to be a practice, where you're continuing to encourage and talk and identify the complications and the struggles that you're having in order for it to completely and fulfill a row and maintain the status of what you've created. Because if you can't maintain that status of what you've created, you cannot maintain your business.
13:35
And I know right now people are thinking that the best way to do medicine is virtually and not having a team and working by yourself, I'm going to tell you that that is a lot more work than you think it is when you have to be the receptionist, the collector, the practitioner, the nurse the triage person, and it all falls on you, it is very difficult to do that. It's a lot of work, it's very time-consuming. And you won't be able to see the clients that you want to see. Because of that there's a time constraint and there's a financial constraint that goes along with that type of model. Unless you're providing all high ticket care, that's a little different. But in today's economy, it's going to be hard to do high ticket continuously in order to make that type of model work over and over and over for you. So I really think you're gonna have to start thinking about building a team. If you want freedom so that you don't have to do every single task that's required of you in your practice. You're still going to need people as you grow, to help send things out to help check people in or make appointments or help you manage your business in some capacity because the reality is, you cannot do it all. It's not healthy for you to try to do it all. And it's not good for your patients either. So when you're thinking about building a team, if you haven't built a team already, I want you to think of what type of leader you want to be. And if you don't have the skills to be this leader that you want, find them now before you actually build your team. So you can start practicing them on a smaller scale. And that way, you'll be successful with them when you're ready to build that team. So thanks for listening again, you guys, I hope this has been really helpful for you. Share in the comments section with us what you're thinking. And again, like always, give us a like or share. It helps us grow our ratings. It helps us get to more people. And I appreciate you guys listening every week be well.
15:50
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others. post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest for me. You can follow me on Facebook at FMBI, join our free group where we support one another and share our struggles. Thanks again and I'll see you next time.