My The Perfect Meeting Structure To Run A Practice

What is the ideal meeting structure that provides the right amount of communication without overburdening us? Real quick, I want to mention that Patrick Lencioni, the author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, also wrote a book called Death by Meeting. And so there's for me, that's very literal. Like I was mentioning, I've had two heart problems in my professional career where I was getting palpitations and electrical issues that they thought at one point I needed a pacemaker. Both of those were when I was investing too much of my personal time and energy to help things go right. And it worked beautifully, by the way, because there's nothing more powerful than the leader being there present with each of the team members, holding them accountable. But as Patrick Lencioni says, in Five Dysfunctions of a Team, probably the best accountability there is is group accountability. So our job as, as business owners and CEOs isn't to, isn't to facilitate, it's to have, it's to inspire them to hold themselves accountable. So how do we do that? Well, the meeting structures, to be efficient and so on. There's a couple of different things that I recommend. The first is the weekly team meeting. So when we talk about team meetings, we're looking at two types of team meetings. We're looking at executive teams and we're looking at clinical teams. So this might be one in the same, depending on your size of company. When we had five locations, at one point I would meet with my executive team. That was me, my head of marketing, my head of operations and her right hand and our head of billing. We would meet for an hour and then right when they would leave, all of the clinical directors would come in and sit down. And with the head of operations and her right hand and me, we would go through the same exact agenda, but with our directors. And then once a week, those directors were having a weekly team meeting with their clinic. So it's the same agenda across the board of what we cover in all three, and it drives a couple of things. So the very first thing we do is a warmup.

That's where in our case, we would do something called a one word open. It's. It takes less than a minute. All right, guys, how you feeling today? Happy, concerned, worried, all these things. We review the meeting rules.

By the way, I have all these agendas. If you want them, let me know. I will. You can white label them. Meeting rules. And by the way, I do this now with all my current companies, with my billing company, with my multiple exit company. Any company that I have partners and team and employees. We have almost 40 employees now in the black. Like I run the same structure because it works so well. Once we get into meeting rules, then we go over purpose.

And values. We have somebody from the team, including me at times share a thought about the company purpose and the company values. This first thing takes 15 minutes. So the total meeting agenda time for these meetings is no more than 60 minutes. Now these are team meetings, these aren't one on ones. And so for clinical meetings we'd have them block time that would overlap with their lunch but would also cut into treatment time because we wanted them to have some degree of like you're being paid to be here kind of thing. But we also knew it was part of their investment in being a part of the team. So they'd bring their lunches and they'd go through this agenda. Someone would share a purpose, vision, values piece. Then from there we go into stats and graphs. And the way that I recommend doing this is what Robert was mentioning regarding the red yellow green approach. This is probably its own module of training so I can't get too far into it. But let me paint to you what the vision looks like for those of you who have, who are doing none of this is going to seem incredibly overwhelming. Just be patient. It's really good that you're seeing the end in mind now. This is honestly better. So when you're looking. So after everyone's feeling connected and they remember why they love the company and they're feeling like a team, then we go, great, how did we do? 1, 2, 3. And then everyone would hold up their graph that they already had. And what we did is we looked at a six week trend of their key statistic that they were, that they owned and it showed the graph of the line. So like this was obviously growing, this was flat, this was not doing well. And so everyone would go around and look at each other's graphs and, and report on their statistic by mentioning the main reason. One or two reasons that people love to like politic and just explain themselves away. Like we make it really narrow. Give us one or two reasons as to why that statistic is in that state, why is it doing well, why is it suffering? And then what's the one thing, if you read the book, the one thing that book base, Let me summarize the whole book in one sentence. When we know the one thing by so doing will eliminate or make unnecessary everything else. We have them share their one thing they're going to do that week for that statistic to help it go right.

Some people week after week are in a downward trend. If that's the case, we put them in the last part of the meeting, which is the last half hour, which is the parking lot.

Parking lot is where we put items for discussion that require group effort. And it can be anything. It can be training, it can be clinical training.

It can be stat support. So that John, the physical therapist who's been below his minimum standard for two weeks in a row isn't having to just talk to the owner, he's talking to his team and, and they're going, hey John, how can we help you get your stat up? It creates this culture of like crap, I have to hold my stat up to my team and it no longer becomes about you. Which is what it usually is when we're holding those discussions. If I can keep my owner happy, I'm fine. That's not what we want them thinking. We want them thinking, if I can keep my team happy, I'm fine. Right. And that's when the pressure comes off of us. It's hard to even describe the freedom of what that feels, feels like. But when you get to that point where you have a director who's tied in financially and they're managing their team, they're leading their team through these statistics in these parking lot items, that's when it really grows. And so this is the weekly agenda. And we do the same thing on the exec level. We do the same thing. So the, the graphs at the exec level when I had five locations was more than just people holding their stat, it was me pulling up a spreadsheet that I created and I'm happy to share, that shows the key statistics for each clinic by individual and it automatically was formatted to go red, yellow, green, summarize the clinic, the individual's efforts. So it was a little bit more, more in depth and we would pull out the key issues that way and solve problems that way. But at a one location company, this was enough just to have that. But it's really important that if you are the person running that meeting, that we work immediately at getting a right hand, a future clinical director, if you will, who's going to run that meeting for us. That is a vital step to get somebody else running that team meeting. Then what we would do is we would do personal check ins and these I never allotted a specific amount of time for. I didn't schedule them other than to say like with, with my key people. So I would only meet when I was CEO of that company with those four people. My head of marketing, my head of operations, her. Her right hand, because she was kind of like in between. And then our biller. So I'd meet with them every week with my biller. That was a scheduled meeting, but it was 15 minutes. And it was more than, what are you working on and how can I help you? She would go into some billing depth. And that's what we do for our clients in the black, is we create that level of clarity that fast. But when it comes to the other people, it was just, what are you working on and how can I help you? And it was a standing timeframe where it wasn't officially scheduled, but they knew I'd be checking in with them. And sometimes it was just a phone call because we were, you know, in very different geographic areas. At one point, you had to drive three hours from one part of my company to the other. So we weren't always physically together. But I just pick up the phone, hey, I was just thinking about you. What are you working on? How can I help you? And she knew what I was doing. They were all female, so they knew what I was doing. She knew what I was doing when I called. But then the owner, the directors would do the same thing. It wasn't scheduled. It was just like on the fly. So directors would typically use their admin time to do it.