Inspired Teams

by William D. Esteb

I’ve had the good fortune of having several staff members who have been with me—well, three of them were with the old company and came with me to the new company, and some of them have been in my life for the last 14 years. Staff turnover costs you money. You don’t get a bill in the mail. Not only the emotional pain, but also the loss of momentum as you get a new person up to speed. So selecting the right people to be part of your team, and keeping them for the long haul, is really the crucial concept, the overarching position that I want to share with you this morning.

Work With People Who Treat You with Respect

If you want an inspired team—and I’m going to assume that everyone in this room does, or has one; congratulations. One of the key issues here is to, for staff members, to feel like they’re working with someone who treats them with respect. And that’s the first distinction I’d like to make in terms of language. If I were to ask your staff, would they tell me that they work with you or for you? Big difference.

One of the ways you make sure that your staff interprets your overtures as having respect for them—in fact, there’s many in this profession that do not have respect for their staff; there may be some guilty of that in this room, who during the heady days of the 80s and early 90s when we had lots of insurance would burn through staff members in six months at a go: use them up, discard them alongside the road, kick their carcass out of the way, and hire someone else to be at the front desk or to badger insurance companies. Treating staff members like a utility.

It starts with the languaging of the doctor, which is a reflection of the doctor’s internal environment. Does the doctor have respect for the folks they work with? One of the easy ways is to see how the doctor uses language. Does the doctor say “our practice” or “my practice?” Is it “us” and “we” or is it “me, me, me?”

Your staff uses the way you treat them as a metaphor for how to treat patients. If you keep your staff in the dark, they keep patients in the dark. You don’t volunteer information, they don’t volunteer information to the patients. If they’re distant, it’s because you’re distant. When you walk in and see the tonality of a practice in which people are having fun, you know that at the helm is a leader who recognizes that this office is much like a submarine: we’re all breathing the same air. Each of our respective futures is intertwined. It has to do with respect. If you don’t have respect for your staff—and you know who you are; in fact, some of you need to go back on Monday and let some folks go. They’re just passing through. Let me share with you what happened to me.

When I was the writer and producer for that film production company back in the early 1980s, my last stint as an employee, I entered a phase of burnout. Now I didn’t know it at the time, and most people who are a little crispy around the edges don’t even realize it. They just have a very short fuse. They start getting cynical and resigned. And I was having less and less fun shooting documentary films and creating TV commercials and traveling the world. But everyone else would observe, “How exciting! You have a very exciting job, Bill.”

“Well, yeah, but I’m kind of burned out with it.”

“How can you be burned out? Huh?”

“I don’t know, it’s just boring.”

So, Max Paul, my boss, my last boss really, until you became my boss, my last boss said, “Bill, I can tell that there just isn’t a spring in your step like you used to have. You don’t seem to be having fun like you used to.”

I said, “Well, it’s probably true.”

“You need to reinvent your job so that you can get excited again about this film production thing we’re doing, you know?”

“You’re right. I need to do that.”

Couple weeks passed, he pulled me aside again. “Bill, how’s it coming with reinventing your job here at International Media Systems?”

“Well, I’m working on it. Yeah, working on it.”

“Well, get cracking. You need to figure this out. Life’s too short not to be having fun and being giddy and in the moment and being present to your own life. Which you clearly aren’t.”

“You’re right. I’ll give it some more thought,” I mumbled.

So another two weeks passed. Max Paul pulls me aside a third time and says, “Bill, how’s it coming with reinventing your job?”

“Well, it’s just really kinda hard to figure out, you know?”

He says, “That’s no problem,” he says, “because in two weeks time you’re going to have full-time to figure out what it is that you’re going to do with your life.”

I was fired, thankfully. Taken out of misery. And voilà, here I am.

There are people you need to fire so they can get on with their lives, because they lack the courage to resign. You would be doing them a huge favor if you would let them get on with their life, because this is just a stopping point along some path. But this isn’t the destination for them. It’s okay.

So the first principle is, work with people who treat them with respect. If you do not have respect for your teammates, get the right people so that you can.

Unafraid to Tell the Truth

I’m going to encourage every doctor to refamiliarize yourself with a children’s story. Because it may be time to read it again through fresh eyes. And it’s a wonderful little Aesop fairy tale called “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Required reading before your next staff meeting. As I said earlier, there are some in this room who have surrounded them themselves with people who are afraid to tell the emperor he or she is not wearing any clothes!

There’s one other term that you might want to spend some time with. It’s a wonderful word called hubris. And it’s a really interesting catch-22 I want to review with you.

Hubris is a Greek term implying both arrogant and excessive self-pride or self-confidence. Now I’ve got to tell you, when I meet chiropractors who are unleashing the power built into the patient by their Maker, it’s very easy to become very confident and, frankly, a little cocky. You’re working with the powerful forces of nature, and you’re unleashing the healing ability born into that patient.

It is the opposite of the Greek term ariat, which implies a constant striving for perfection and self-improvement combined with a humble awareness that such perfection, cannot be reached. It’s similar to the Japanese concept of kaizen; constant ever-ending improvement—you never get there. Which is why, frankly, I agreed to do this talk. Because I need to hear these words and continually improve my ability to manage, lead, and inspire others. Because my influence on this planet is directly related to my ability to do that.

Doctors, your ability to influence the world, your purpose for being here is your ability to help and influence as many people as possible, and that is directly related to your ability to inspire others, to lead. That’s why this is so crucial.

I get e-mails and phone calls from doctors who say, “Bill, I’m out of school, I’m nine months into practice. I’m my own CA and doctor. I talk on the phone. I’m wearing a headset. I’m doing adjusting. I’m kind of a one-man band here.” And then the doctor asks, “Do you think I may be holding up the growth of my practice?”

Duh.

The moment where you go from a one-man band to hiring that first person, even if it’s a part-time person, requires a leap of faith. And the good news is—and this is what I really need to hear—is that the universe abhors a vacuum. You create a possibility, and then it can be filled. To wait until it’s filled and then add the staff? Too late. You have to add the equipment, you have to add the tools, you have to add the staff before you can fill it. It doesn’t work the other way around.

As long as an individual strives to do and be the best, that individual has ariat. As soon as the individual believes he has actually achieved ariat, however, he or she has lost this exalted state and fallen into hubris, unable to recognize personal limitations or the humility necessary to constantly improve. Gosh, I think we all need to be reminded of that. I mean, here we are, the cream of the cream of the cream of the cream in the chiropractic profession in this one room. It’s so tempting to think we’ve got it all figured out.

Interesting Work

The third principle: interesting work. I can’t think of anything more interesting than working with people in a chiropractic setting. If this patient education thing doesn’t work out, I’m thinking I’d like to be a chiropractic assistant. Now why would you laugh at that?

I get this all the time: “Oh, I’m just a CA.”

Hold on here. Let me see. You make the most lasting first impression. You monitor the office environment in which to create a healing consciousness. You spend more time with the patient than the doctor typically does. You make the last impression as the patient leaves. You’re able to monitor that office environment and to cultivate a sensitivity to the patient’s tonality to uncover tension or fears or apprehensions that may actually interfere with the healing process. You pre-frame the experience the patient has with the chiropractor. And you want to call yourself just a mere CA? You are the healer at the front desk. That’s why that sounds kind of intriguing to me.

The story is told of an individual walking by a construction site. And he asked the first workman, “What are you doing?” And the first workman said, “I’m doing my job, putting in my time.” The next workman was asked what he was doing. “I’m building a brick wall.” The individual continued, asking a third workman, “What you doing’?” “I am building God’s house.” Same project. Same bricks. Different consciousness.

Somewhere along the line, the leader of the organization has a response, a response-ability (the ability to respond) to enlarge the understanding and appreciation of that front desk so that they see really what they are doing. To put simple, even repetitive tasks into the context of building something greater than say, a perfect appointment book.

Recognition for Doing a Good Job

Some think that simply signing the paycheck should be thanks enough. “Not a single one of your paychecks has ever bounced, and where are my thank-yous for that?”

There are people risking their lives this very moment so that we can freely meet in this room. The ability to gather is one of the freedoms of our Constitution. And there are people who will perform much, much more heroically than any of us in this room, who will come home less than what they left, but we will acknowledge them with a ribbon, a banner, in many, many different ways. And oftentimes, we forget that what gets rewarded is what gets done.

Typically what happens—and I’m guilty of this—is I’m looking for where a standard was not met by an employee, where we had a shortcoming, a broken system that didn’t perform properly. And then I criticize instead of looking for things when they go right and say, “Thank you. Good job. Atta boy.” We will do incredible things for approval.

So I remind you that part of creating an inspired team is to make sure that you recognize a good job. It has to do with acknowledgment. I’m told that what causes many marriages to break up is the fact we start taking our partner for granted. And we become hungry for acknowledgment. And we’ll break our vows for that acknowledgment. That is the power that we’re working with here in an employee-employer relationship: recognition for doing a good job.

A Chance to Develop New Skills

A chance to develop new skills, which is one of the reasons why I acknowledge you for bringing the staff here today. Hopefully, they’re going to leave not with just a tropical experience in November, but with a new headspace, something that maybe they’ll be able to use for the rest of their lives, who knows?

Here’s the challenge that I have. I work with six really cool people. Some, like I said, have been with me, contributing to this whole effort for 12, 14 years. And I happen to know that if they stop growing—which is what happened to me at the film production company—if they stop growing, they will start looking for the door. Now they may not know that, but I do because I was there.

How do you help people to grow?

How do you justify paying for the computer course at the community college when that’s a skill that has nothing to do directly with chiropractic? Which could actually end up exciting the staff member, prompting them to go into website design, not doing the front desk? Do you have the courage to help them grow, risking that they might outgrow you?

There are four stages of growth. The lowest, most fundamental level of growth is something that we call unconscious incompetence. Now that sounds rather judgmental, but the fact is that we don’t even know what we don’t know. Now any individual who is new to, let’s say, the front desk, are suffering from unconscious incompetence. They are not really too sure what they don’t know. In fact, it’s a little scary because we don’t even know we don’t know. Most chiropractic students that I meet when I tour chiropractic colleges are suffering from unconscious incompetence—they don’t know what they don’t know about chiropractic. They think adjusting really well is the key. It’s helpful, but not essential.

At some point, you leave unconscious incompetence; this happens to chiropractic students about six months or so into practice. They suffer then from conscious incompetence. Now they know what they don’t know. Now they know what they didn’t know. Now they know what the question is. “Gosh, I need to get new patients in here. They didn’t teach me that in chiropractic college.” Hmmm. So now you know what you don’t know.

At some point, when you know what you don’t know, then you graduate to a very exciting place, a very wonderful place called conscious competence. This is where you do what you’re doing and you know how to do it. Like the first time you walked. Probably don’t remember that. The first time you used a spoon. “I did it!” You do what you do consciously. You’re aware of it.

And then finally at some point, you go into the dreaded, scary land of unconscious competence. This is where we know what we know so well we don’t even know what we know. It’s like driving to work. “[Gasp!] How did I get here?” Remember that? You’re not even present in the car. By the way, you’re the person everyone is flipping off, okay?

Unconscious competence. Scary. Here’s what happens in unconscious competence. When we enter this zone, we do what we do without thinking. And what happens is, we have the opportunity for boredom to set in. This happens at the front desk. This happens with chiropractors. When chiropractors experience this, they will often do other things to become excited about life again. So, many doctors will do wacky things. Small airplanes. Futures trading. Building a building. Going into massive debt. These are all signs that life is boring. “I know I can get jazzed up again if I could just have a huge amount of debt. Yeah, that’s it.”

Here’s the deal. The key to this—because burnout is around the corner when you enter unconscious competence. The key to keeping your staff for the long haul is to urge them back to unconscious incompetence. You create opportunities where the individual can become “dumb” again about something. Now there’s plenty of opportunities for that in chiropractic. For example, some of the staff in this room might want to begin the process of mastering… public speaking.

You can begin the process of speaking at third-grade classes in your area, to introduce chiropractic to third graders. Remember when the third graders go through that week-long process of learning about the systems of the body? Imagine a staff member who’s growing through the opportunity of learning how to speak in public, with school children who don’t know what good public speaking is! It begins by taking on the risk. It’s about the risk of doing something that you’ve never done before. And risking failure.

Maybe it has to do with becoming the marketing guru in your practice. Maybe it has to do with being a computer goddess for the software that you run. I don’t know. But the key is to look for opportunities to become unconsciously incompetent again. That takes massive amounts of courage to do that.

Instead of leaving the profession and dabbling with bonds, money markets and day-trading and all the rest of it, you might want to take another look at why you find chiropractic so boring. When countless thousands of us find it so fascinating.

People Who Listen If You Have Ideas

You’ve heard this story before, but it goes back to what’s happening in many practices.

A young woman, showing up at the first reunion of her new family, was given a famous ham recipe, handed down from generation to generation. In fact, it’s the old, original, dog-eared 3 x 5 index card. “We don’t give this to just anyone, but, Muriel, here is the trusted family recipe for ham.”

“I’ll treasure it with my life,” says Muriel.

The first ingredient: ham. You’d expect that. Second instruction: cut two inches off the end of the ham. “That’s odd. I wonder why. Oh, maybe it’s to get the flavors in. What about the other end?”

Muriel, being curious, sought out her mother-in-law. “Tell me why the two inches are cut off the end.”

“Gosh, honey, I don’t know. It’s just always been on there. Let’s go track down Mary Lou.”

So Mary Lou is phoned. “What’s with the two inches off the end of the ham?”

“I don’t know. We’ve just always done that. Maybe you should go ask Myrtle. I think she’s the one that actually wrote this.”

So they show up at Myrtle’s assisted care facility. After the pleasantries were exchanged, “Muriel has something that she wants to ask you.” So Muriel cleared her voice. “Tell me, Myrtle. I just got this wonderful ham recipe, and I think this is your authoring here. And we can’t seem to figure out the second step.”

“What’s the second step, honey?”

“Well, it says to cut two inches off the end of the ham. Does it matter which end?”

“Oh, no, you can cut off either end. The only reason why I put it on there was because my pan was too small. It wouldn’t fit in the pan so you cut off two inches and it fits in it beautifully.”

Now you may laugh, but that same thing is probably happening in your office. We’ve always done it this way, so we’ll always do it this way.

I love asking the chiropractors questions like, Why do you adjust on the first visit? for those that do. Well, they mumble something about “The patient expects it” or whatever. But they’ve never really thought it through. My suggestion is to use your staff meeting times to question the status quo. In fact, that’s where some of the real breakthroughs are going to be coming from, are from new employees to your practice.

There’s a brilliant book called The Deviant’s Advantage. In 10 words or less, it has to do with the idea that outsiders are the key to breakthroughs. And that’s the same thing in your practice. How can you go back and question the status quo? How can you go back and look at what you are doing and question if it still makes sense?

What I often discover in chiropractic offices is that they’re doing procedures that worked when they were seeing 20 a day, that don’t work as well as when you’re seeing 100 a day. If you take those 20-a-day procedures with you into 100-land, you get stuck. It may get you to 100 but it won’t get you to 150, or whatever your goal is. The idea is, question the status quo. That takes a critical eye. And new staff members are a wonderful way to make that happen.

Chances to Think For Themselves

It is tempting to put chiropractic assistants in a box. Worse is the box that the chiropractic assistant puts themselves in. Or an associate doctor puts themselves in. “Oh, I’m just the associate. I don’t have to take responsibility.” “Okay, guess what? You never will have responsibility unless you take it.” “Well, I’ll take it when I get paid for it.” “Okay, fine. Now you’re stuck in a box. Congratulations.”

This is one that I’m challenged by. I have the annoying habit of telling staff members not only what needs to be done, but how to do it. Rather than simply saying, “Here’s the outcome that we need to achieve. And if you need some help, let’s sit down and talk about it.” By laying it all out, I steal the opportunity for the staff to harness their creativity. So I’m working at this one to make sure that I just don’t give out a series of instructions but, in fact, create opportunities where individuals can utilize their creativity to solve problems. Which is a very, very exciting place to be.

Working with Efficient Managers

One of the ways that you have inspired staff, who are part of a team, who feel like what they are doing is affecting something much, much more than their small circle or domain of influence. Now, this is a tough one, and I’m going to speak on behalf of chiropractic assistants in this room and those who aren’t.

There are two frustrations that chiropractic assistants routinely tell me when I do in-office consultations or when I talk on the phone or get e-mails. The first one has to do with chiropractors who hold up the works by not keeping up with their paperwork. The staff has to beg the chiropractor to do the reports. Because they’re stuck without it.

The second thing that tees of CAs even more is something that many chiropractors do, particularly when they have reached the unconscious competence spectrum. They show up late for the first visit of the day. There is nothing more frustrating than having to tap dance at the front desk while the doctor is still in traffic somewhere. It is crucial that the chiropractor show up on time for the first visit. More importantly, probably the most important: it’s important to be there before everyone else so that you can plan your day, so that you can get centered, so you can create your field of healing consciousness. Waltzing in past the folks waiting in the reception room, “Sorry, there’s traffic,” holding your latte, ain’t cutting it. It sends a signal to the staff—because the staff uses how you treat them as a metaphor for how they should treat the patient—that you don’t care about those patients. If it appears you don’t care, why should they?

A Job That is Not Too Easy

If you want inspired teams, it’s crucial that you make sure the job is not too easy. And this would be a great time for a little interactivity here. Please list, let’s say, two or three job activities or procedures which produce boredom in your practice. Right now, write down two or three things that are boring to do. Hate doing them because they’re boring. Certainly some of you in this room have two or three, maybe more.

What would some of things be? Doing reports is boring. Filing. Taking notes is boring. Being on hold for insurance companies. Entering patients in the computer.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum, what are things that produce anxiety? Apprehension? Uncomfortableness? What are some things that do that?

Your boss. Okay. Patients who have to wait. Appeals hearings with insurance companies. Complaining patients. Medicare. That’s interesting, a whole institution creating anxiety.

Great. Now here’s an interesting thing which, by the way, I would suggest you do at your next staff meeting. There’s an interesting phenomenon called “flow” or “being in the zone.” Flow is a term used to describe the optimal experience of being so engrossed in something that time flies. Athletes talk about this, of being in the zone, where they’re just so focused and just present to what they’re doing they can’t hear the crowd. Have you ever looked up at the clock and said, “Five o’clock! Already?” That’s flow.

It something that present between the extremes of anxiety and boredom.

The key to creating the flow experience in your practice, in your life, is to, first of all, identify those things which cause boredom and identify those activities which cause anxiety or apprehension. Then, you brainstorm ways you can move these activities to the center. What I’ve noticed is that others can often see how to make boring things exciting, and anxiety-producing activities boring easier that the person doing them. So, this would be an excellent staff meeting activity.

Being Well Informed About What’s Going On

This is another one that I have a particular problem with. One of the things that bugs my staff no end is when they find out about a new product from you. You call on the phone, “I’d like to order that Good News/Bad News brochure,” or something like that. When things or policies get changed without them knowing what’s going on, very frustrating. One of the ways we solved that problem is we have regular weekly staff meetings. If you call us at 8 a.m. on Thursday morning, we’re in our staff meeting. It is reserved, sacred team time. We know that if we don’t take care of ourselves, we can’t take care of you. We’ve got to be on the same page. The key is to let people have this time together so that we can regroup and heal as a team.

It is astonishing to me how many offices do not hold regular staff meetings. For those who think you wouldn’t have anything to talk about, here are six or seven points that bring structure and purpose to regular staff meetings.

Reserve a consistent day and time. Make sure everyone knows that there’s a time and place reserved for the team. Trade off leading the meeting. That’s crucial. If the doctor leads the staff meeting, many have a habit of ramrodding a particular agenda through and you have the Emperor’s New Clothes problem. No. It’s a staff meeting. So how about the staff running the meeting?

Postmortem on the previous week. What did we do last week? Where did we have some problems with the UPS guy showing up at the wrong time or earlier than normal, or what have you? We had a situation this last week that we’re going to be talking about where they loaded up the pallet too high and a box fell off and didn’t get on the UPS truck, and so a neighbor of ours comes carrying in this beautifully wrapped box about to go off to one of your offices maybe and says, “This was out on the back, on the loading dock.” “Really?” So we had to track down the UPS guy and there was a little problem with how high and how the pallet is loaded. Use your staff meeting to review the previous week’s activities.

Case review. This is where you have that opportunity of helping a staff member see the full impact and implications of what they do at the front desk by reviewing some particular case. The doctor gets the affirmation of seeing patients heal, seeing them improve, seeing what happens when the life force is turned on. Share a case or two so the staff can at least participate voyeuristically or vicariously in the joy that the chiropractor gets in the back room helping patients. Yes, remind the staff of the obvious privacy issues here, but help your team see a bigger picture than fighting insurance companies or keeping the reception room from stacking up.

Goals and statistics. One of the things we do is track statistics, just like you do. For example, I went back four years to compare what we did on the Monday before Election Day four years ago. We’re always comparing ourselves to what’s happened last year or four years ago or what happens typically the first Thursday of November, or whatever it is. Review goals and statistics.

Role play. This happens particularly when we have new staff members join us. We’ll call that person on pretend phones, asking questions. “Let’s say the patient calls in they say, ‘What adjusting technique does the doctor use?’” Well, that question has a lot of implications, there’s a lot of subtext to that, and unpacking that is one of the things that you do through role-playing. So you help a staff member understand what the questions mean so that the doctor can feel more assured when they’re in the back adjusting patients that what’s being said at the front desk is appropriate and the way the doctor would answer them if he or she were on the telephone.

Preview the upcoming week. You explain, “Well, next week we need to be seeing five new patients. Mrs. Jones will be coming back for her progress examination. Now remember when Mrs. Jones came in originally?” You preview what’s coming. Just like the Breakthrough Coaching Team did before this event started this morning. They gathered right here in front, all of them, and started talking about what this day was going to be about. Envisioning what was going to happen. So they could all be on the same page.

Long-range plans. What are your plans for the future? What are your plans for getting the new piece of equipment? What are your plans for hiring additional people? What are your plans for moving the business? What’s going to be happening a year from now? What is the five-year plan? Are we on track to do that?

One thing we do with our staff meetings is once a month we hold them somewhere other than our office. We get out of the office. Your office has emotional anchors in various places: the front desk, in the doctor’s office, etc. One of the ways of opening up and see things in a new way is to leave that environment and go somewhere else that doesn’t have those emotional anchors. One of the places we go is to a restaurant that’s down the road from our office. You could go to the atrium of a shopping mall. The key is to get away from your office.

Shared Values

If you hire a staff member who has all of the necessary skills, but refuses to get adjusted, you do not have shared values. It is guaranteed to be a short term relationship. “I’ll convert her.” I doubt it. My experience has been that you can train skills, but you can’t train values. For example, you can’t train someone to be “nice.”

This all starts with some of the questions you ask at the interview when you’re considering adding someone to the team. Here are some of the questions I like to ask include.

“Describe the best boss you’ve ever had.” I want to hear from a potential team member their relationship with their previous managers—what about the previous manager or boss did they particularly enjoy?

“Describe the worst job you’ve ever had, and what made it so bad?” And I listen very carefully. Is there anything that he or she is describing that I’m going to be asking this individual to do?

“What’s been the most satisfying aspect of some job you’ve had? I’m looking for an emotional response. I’m looking for what made them giddy. What put them into flow? What gave you the greatest sense of satisfaction and fulfillment? What nurtured your soul?” Do they like working with people? Do they like working with things?

“What do you think would be the best part about working in our office?” All too often I think we tend to soft-pedal, selling the job opening, “Oh, this is fun, it’s easy, you’re going to love the people.” Instead, I think we should be saying, “No, this is hard work. You’re going to have people who aren’t going to participant, there will be skeptics, people who don’t show up on time, etc.”

“What do you do personally to advance your own health?” If we’re going to work in a health care environment, it is crucial that individuals value their health. And, of course, it’s crucial for doctors to value their health as well, since staff members use the way the doctor walks their talk as an example for how they should walk theirs.

Understand the Purpose of the Practice

The purpose of the practice is not to adjust patients. That’s what you do, but that’s not your purpose. It is crucial that the staff understand what the purpose of the business is. It is not to make a gob of money. It is not to see a whole bunch of people. It is not to adjust as many people as possible. I assert that the doing is merely a way of achieving the purpose. What is that purpose? What is your North Star? What is that navigational heading that you and everyone else can use to make decisions?

It is so easy for you to get wrapped up in the drama of patients. For us, it is really easy to get wrapped up in your drama. You’re having a bad day, great. So you call my staff and yell at them. I frequently remind them, “It’s just paper. We’re moving it from here to there. And the people who are helping us move it wear these brown uniforms and drive these big brown trucks. And much of it is outside our control. They’re part of our team, I understand.” But what is the purpose? The purpose isn’t to move the paper. That’s what we do. The purpose is to create successful practices. That’s the purpose. To promote healing and alleviate unnecessary suffering. That’s a purpose. That’s worth getting out of bed for. Does every member of your team know the purpose of the practice?

To Be Fairly Compensated

The last principle, and I save it to the end because it is the least important, believe it or not, is to be fairly compensated. If your staff is worried that the repo man will be showing up in your parking lot, you do not have a focused staff member. You must take care of some basic financial issues here. But you have a little problem. It’s the same one I had. Let me share with you how I fixed it.

You have staff members who see the checks coming in from the insurance company, but they never see the checks going out. Because of this, most staff members think you’re a millionaire. That was happening to me. Everyone saw the sales at the end of the day, “Oh, Bill must just be rolling in cash. I bet he just sleeps in it, just throws it up and rubs it on his body.”

So I started showing the staff the back end. Not the paychecks. That’s still sacred. But all the other bills. “Printing the catalog cost that much? Jeez!” It kind of gave them sticker shock for a moment. Which was the point. The work is valuable and so fulfilling, but the margins are actually pretty small. You might want to let down your guard just a bit and show the other half the equation. The money that leaves your practice.

Inspired teams are the result of inspired leadership. I hope that during the brief time that we have had this morning that I have inspired you to look at what you’re doing, and what you’re not doing, in a whole new light. Thank you for your attention and your affirmation. It is an honor to serve beside you.

Excerpted from
Connecting the Dots
Published in 2005
240 Pages
US $24.95

Not a reader? Bill reads his favorite chapters from all 10 books on Bill's Best.