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165: The Power of Enthusiastic Leadership in Healthcare

November 6, 2024
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Episode Summary

Ever wondered if your leadership aligns with your vision? Join Mark as he navigates the complex terrain of leadership dynamics and practice growth, particularly within healthcare private practices.

Episode Note

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Ever wondered if your leadership aligns with your vision?

Join Mark as he navigates the complex terrain of leadership dynamics and practice growth, particularly within healthcare private practices. We spotlight the magnetic power of passionate leadership and unravel how systems like the Entrepreneurial Operating SystemⓇ (EOS) provide essential clarity and accountability but must be paired with a leader's genuine excitement and connection to their vision to create a truly inspiring and contagious environment. Discover the unique blend of both tangible tools and intangible qualities that drive maximum impact.

Mark challenges you to scrutinize whether your actions mirror your visionary aspirations and if your leadership resonates throughout your organization. Highlighting the importance of open dialogue, Mark encourages leaders to engage with their teams without assumptions, fostering a shared understanding of the organization's direction.

This is your invitation to reassess and refine your approach, ensuring your leadership reaches and inspires every level of your organization.

In this episode, you will hear:

  • Exploration of passionate leadership and its impact on healthcare private practice growth
  • Discussion on balancing complex systems with simplicity in effective leadership
  • The importance of aligning vision with action and ensuring leadership resonates at all organizational levels
  • Emphasis on bold, inspiring leadership and the need for leaders to be genuinely excited about their vision
  • The role of open dialogue and active listening in conveying and embracing vision authentically
  • Integration of tangible management tools with intangible leadership qualities for transformative practice management
  • Invitation for further support and coaching to deepen understanding and application of leadership concepts

Resources from this episode:

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Episode Transcript

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. Welcome to another episode of Practice Freedom. 

One of the things that's been on my mind a lot lately is I don't know a response to a couple things I've seen happen. I am a huge fan of systems right, and so that's me Read all the books, applied all the tools, and I always when I look for solutions to problems, the problems that typically find me are complex problems, and so systems are very often the answer it's my thinking. But by the same token, complexity is expensive, unreliable and high risk, and so simplifying there's a constant push and pull in my life of systems and simplifying and making it easier and more consistent in process and decision making. However, I have recently been really humbled maybe scared is the right answer by seeing sometimes what happens when we get focused on the academics of the systems and the language and the tools, and so I want to talk about leadership and want to talk about how that fits together no-transcript and just what your biggest impact is. But if you're stuck and you don't see exactly how you're going to get there, or you're not getting that traction, please don't stay there. Please reach out. I'd love to help you move along that process and get you on a first step or a next step to getting that practice in the life you deserve. Practicefreedomcom slash schedule for a few minutes and we'll talk about that. 

So back to the subject at hand leadership, passionate leadership. To me, this has become a very I mean it's. We know from concept and principle that leadership is the essence of what we're trying to do, and I have said and still continue to say that management and running a business is tactically very challenging and when we're not good at running the tactics or not efficient with the tactics, all that energy goes to just surviving and we don't get to do the hard, powerful work of leadership. And so this is a bit of that reminder, wake-up call that that is the hard part and it's not always so obvious how to do it. So certainly I'm not taking anything away from anything I've ever said about the importance of using consistent tools and processes to be clear and accountable and have ways to move people in and out of your organization and make it very clear what the roles are. Using the tool, using EOS, using the accountability chart, the people analyzer, the VTO, as a way to make it easy to understand and give you clear instructions and clear feedback as to what's working and what's not, certainly with the simplest tools possible. Absolutely no stepping back from that. But I'm adding back to the mix. You must lead boldly. You must be aware, as a leader, what you stand for and if you look at your VTO and you check the box and yeah, that's all right, I need you to ask yourself in a VTO and you check the box and yeah, that's all right. I need you to ask yourself in a VTO, the Vision Traction Organizer, the eight questions of vision, which really, whatever your one-page document, one or two pages that crystal clear, simplifies where you're going and how you're going to get there. You need to love every word of that and you need to be lit up by it to the point where other people see it too, and I had a great conversation with Michael Silva in a recent interview and we talked a lot about that. We talked a lot about how that manifests in other people, and so what I've been soul-searching manifest in other people, and so what I've been soul searching, thinking about this last decade of coaching businesses and seeing what works and what doesn't, trying to close more gaps Every year, there's some humbling. 

There's something that gets me fired up about how to make a bigger impact, and right now this is my obsession. What is the marriage between the intangible aspects of leadership and the tangible tools of management? And I do think it has to do with an inner guidance that you're using the tools. That's great. Are you stuck trying to figure out the tools? If so, oh, my God, can't do that. Cannot do that. I mean we have to learn things. Let me help, let your coach help, let your implementer help get you unstuck with how the tools are supposed to work and get you back to leading, which is, you know, taking clarity breaks, listening to your people getting fired up about the vision in a positive way or reactive way, hopefully objectively seeing if it's healthy or not. 

But this is really important, to know that your vision, your leadership, needs to be at a 10 out of 10 for what you want. Now, I'm not saying you need to be super charismatic and super loud. That's not. If it's a style thing, that's not your style. Don't be somebody you're not, but do be a 10 out of 10. You and be asking yourself, ask yourself right now is this the vision that I'm fired up about? Do I love this? And is it obvious and contagious? When I'm talking to people about it, does it light them up? 

And I think my most recent simplification of where this is this is in the people. Do you have 100% confidence that the people that you're empowering in your organization to do their work, who have leadership roles and you can look at everybody and you should look at everybody. But to make this more actionable and manageable, look at those people in a leadership role and do you look at them and have 100% confidence that they are carrying the torch that you have crafted, either as a group or individually, however it comes to be. You have to inwardly know, as a leader, we have the right balance of community and individual leadership from you. I'm saying that you might be the sort of the chief of the vision, or you might be a strong community where it's really co-crafted and co-created, and so you, as the leader, have to steward, whatever, wherever you sit, on that continuum. Are you aligned? Are you living up to the high standards of excellence that you know to be true and this kind of goes back to a question that comes up a lot, and I've done other podcasts about this that as a visionary leader or any kind of leader, we know that we have to invite mistakes and imperfections and choices in different ways. 

So we're not going to try to micromanage and micromanagement, being used as a term, that I mean the derogatory version clear management, precise management, process-driven management, culturally appropriate, is not a bad thing. We have a way. You should not be creative in these areas Making sure people are crystal clear on their objectives is not micromanagement. Micromanagement is when we go too far as, measured subjectively, like is it motivating or demotivating? Are we applying too much instruction to our good people and therefore they are underperforming? Or are we trying to apply enough instruction to people to get them trained? Or are we overmanaging people we should not be employing at all? So make sure you're not painting with too broad brush on micromanagement. So clear management, instructing people. So back to that question. 

A lot of people are unclear on how much wiggle room should there be for mistakes and trial and error and generically, I know this is a concept. I like to be specific as possible, but it's hard. It really has to do with vision and core values. Thinking about this is who we are, this is what matters most to us, this is our core focus, this is what we're passionate about, this is what our purpose is, this is what our cause is and this is where we're strong in our niche and our focus. And there's lots of other things we could talk to, maybe division where we're going or rowing in the right direction. So it's really, if you look at your VTO, the top half of the VTO, the vision portion is about that culture is about that purpose, cause and the niche and the core focus and the three-year picture for where we're going. And 10 years from now, what's it going to look like? Those are the areas, that emotional alignment. Those are the areas that you, as leaders, should never compromise. Never compromise. You are rowing the wrong direction. This is not building the culture up. That is not a behavior that builds us up. Should always call that out and never accept less In the traction component, in the methods to get there, in the goal, setting the rock, setting the numbers we're achieving. 

That's where the wiggle room lives in terms of we make mistakes, but we also have to measure, because that's a data-driven thing. Right, the vision portion is very emotional, very subjective, and you have to be the steward of your own truth in that. In the traction portion, we're going to set some numbers and we're going to try to accurately predict those and they are not going to be exact, and that is we know that and the goal is to keep closing the gap on our predictions. We think our revenue is going to be this in the next 90 days. We think our revenue is going to be this in the next 12 months and you're going to be off by a little bit, and if you're way off, that is a reason to course correct aggressively. 

That is your instruction. If it's a little off and the people are trying different ways and some of them are working and some are not, that's your experimentation. You want to create that, create that space to make mistakes within constraints, and so you've got to know the numbers. What is too far? You should know your numbers of what is failing and what is learning and you should debate those. You should know your numbers of what is failing and what is learning and you should debate those. You should never compromise the vision portion. You should never compromise that. You should allow for experimentation within constraints, but you should know that there is a tolerance and you should know your risk tolerance along the way. Hopefully that clarifies that. 

But back to this concept of this leadership. You should be able to look at your leaders and know that they carry the vision. You should feel that they carry the vision and if they don't, you should not tolerate that you should solve for getting them there. You should not tolerate that you should solve for getting them there. And I just can't stress enough right now that strong leadership has never been more important. You have to be leading your organization in integrity, whether it's a spiritually-led organization or it's a performance-led organization. Whatever your organization is intended to be, in the vision you are creating or co-creating, you must passionately exude it and love it, and to the point where that energy, however it manifests in your language, in your emails, in your presence and in the meetings or in videos or however you're being seen and heard, cannot be ignored. 

So my question to you is is your leadership being felt? Do people understand what matters and people have an intuitive essence of right and wrong or, by contrast, is there a power vacuum? Meaning, is there meaning? Is there unclarity of what needs to be done in the vision? So people start filling in the gaps and making up their own thoughts about what can happen as to where we're going. Now, this is a subtle distinction. They should be crystal clear on where we were going and that should be built into the vision. That is not something I mean feedback, of course, but it is not subject to massive interpretation. 

The methods we want people thinking about it. Hey, I have an idea of how we can get there faster or better in a different way. Are you open to that? Yeah, let's talk about it Maybe not right now, but thanks for sharing that and let's keep the conversation going and maybe we'll try, maybe we won't, and let's get it on the issues list, but they should know where we're going and they should be able to raise their hand when we're not. So I know it's kind of conceptual. 

Hopefully it's spurring some thinking that are you in integrity with believing your vision is being followed, it's aligned with what you want? And are you getting it, seeing it, feeling it? And is your leadership permeating every corner of the organization most powerfully through those critical leaders? Are they conveying it? Are they bought in? And if you said, hey, you know what, I want to make sure we're on the same page, tell me where you think we're going and how that's working. That's working and why that matters, and let them tell you and don't make any assumptions. Hopefully that's inspiring, hopefully that gets you motivated. If it needs clarification or if you want some coaching on that, please reach out, happy to help, even if it's just a tiny, tiny little bit to get you moving further down the path. I love to do that. Reach out to me at practicefreedomcom slash schedule and we'll talk about that. That's our time for today. We'll see you next time on Practice Freedom, with me, mark Henderson-Leary.

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