Culture Focused Practice

Hey, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper here, and you're listening to the Culture Focused Practice podcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining me. Welcome for the first time, maybe fifth or 10th. That'd be fucking awesome.

Okay, today we're gonna talk chaos. Do you ever feel like your practice just operates out of pure chaos? Maybe that's like a lately thing, and maybe it's just sort of a constant thing. Chaos is not culture. Like, it's not a culture strategy and it's not culture period, and it's definitely not a leadership strategy or tactic or anything that serves people who are seeking to lead.

This episode is part of an EOS foundations for group practices miniseries. So basically, I'm trying to call out the chaos that so many group practices live in and not just ideally, not just venting about it, but really trying to break it down and fix it.

So helping to break down white chaos isn't a form of leadership. Why and how EOS gives you an actual framework to calm down that sort of chaotic feeling. Why we as the owners or maybe leadership are the ones that inadvertently and sometimes directly make chaos worse.

And also maybe just think of this whole experience as a lifesaver thrown at you when you're adrift in the chaotic sea of group practice ownership and leadership. All of that anyway wrapped up into a few episodes.

So if you listen to last, the last episode that was published, it was my first owner's room, but it was really about hiring. And I think specifically in that there can be chaos in hiring. We're zooming out a little bit bigger- that chaos isn't just, it doesn't just live in hiring.

It's not just a hiring related issue. It's. It's everywhere. If you don't learn how to recognize and sort of structure it out, it's, it ends up permeating the entire practice, your entire practice.

So the agenda for today, then, just to help you sort of stay with me. One, we're just gonna talk briefly about how chaos is not leadership. Two, how culture's gonna happen, period. Three, we're gonna talk about EOS as a blueprint. Four, seeing yourself in the chaos. Five, we're gonna do one big reframe, and six is a, it's an a action step, I guess. It's an ask, it's a takeaway, so to speak.

Before we go further, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. You subscribing equals more people like you subscribing and benefiting, or at least having access or seeing this, it pops up for them. And then you can easily binge listen to episodes if you miss them. All. I think that's it. Let's go shall we?

Oh man. Chaos is not a leadership style. I don't, I just, you know, I feel like this is so obvious, but it still has to be said. I can think back to when I very first started my practice and I guess maybe I should say, I can think back to when I very first started really thinking about my practice as a group and really trying to grow it and it was, it just was chaotic.

And it, not because I was trying to make it be chaotic, but because there was just so many things that needed to get done, nobody else to do them, and no real clear understanding of the entire structure that I was doing.

I didn't understand, like I couldn't see how there are different. Roles and different responsibilities within each role, and I couldn't understand or see that the number of hats I was wearing sometimes simultaneously and also just sometimes trading on and off. Like I'll take this one off to put this one on.

When you're in the midst of that, you're just doing everything. This is again, earlier on, but I would say even until I got to a decent size and then that chaos really started to catch up to me and. I also, I mean, even at that time as I was in the landscape of trying to build this out and trying to grow things out, it cost me in other ways, no, I'm up till two in the morning working on a spreadsheet because we need data.

And not only is that sleep, but that's also getting in the way of my experience with my family. And so what I think it looked like on the receiving end is that I was busting my ass, which I absolutely was. And that I was willing to do anything to make sure that the practice was being tended to also probably true, but I, that wasn't leadership.

It wasn't me seeing things clearly delegating appropriately, and also like framing out the structure in a way that was one, sustainable, but two, scalable. So feeling busy and like living in chaos is. I think to some extent it was about survival and really trying to get this thing going. But that is not the same thing as leadership.

So being busy is not the same thing as being a leader, making sure you're doing everything that needs to get done. It's not the same thing as leadership. That's just working hard. It's grinding great. Those things are necessary, I think sometimes and don't translate to pure, unadultered leadership.

A segue from that to culture is that if you are living in chaos and sort of assuming that's a leadership style, you might also think or feel or assume that your culture is happening regardless of you.

Culture happens in one of two ways. It happens by default or it happens by design.

If you are living in chaos and you are again busting your ass, trying to get all this stuff thrown together, trying to make everything organized in any way that seems possible without actually seeing the big picture, you are building out culture.

I don't know what it is, but there's something that's being built out.

On the flip side, if you're not spending time tuning into culture, not only as a way of seeing it for what it is at any given moment in time, but also building in ways of like assessing it, for example, you can't directly influence it because you don't have baseline data to say, oh fuck, we need to do this.

Like this is a problem. We need to change this thing. So if you don't design it with some sort of structure in place, it's probably gonna end up feeling chaotic. I am of the opinion, I would say, of the strong opinion that culture starts from the top. So this is like a Jocko Willink Extreme Ownership sort of philosophy.

We as in the leaders, do directly influence the vibe and tone of the practice, whether or not we're doing it on purpose, like by design, like what I'm talking about, where we're baking things into all of our systems, period.

And those things we're baking in are related to culture or whether we are living in chaos and that is permeating the entire practice and that becomes the default culture. So it's happening. Culture is happening, period. It's either gonna be by default or it's gonna be by design.

The biggest fork in the road moment for my practice was the point at which I randomly interacted with somebody doing a painting bid for me, and he brought up Traction and I bought it and I read it and I was just fucking blown away. So this is a segue to our agenda item number three, which is that EOS is a blueprint.

So think of EOS as the blueprint for getting out of reaction mode. In the beginning when I was feeling and being very chaotic, it absolutely was reactionary. Everything was throwing shit together and reading a book and implementing something, and listening to a podcast and realizing like, oh my God, I need to do this thing.

And something felt important. So I started to build it out, and it was just all really based on sometimes the exact need of something I felt, you know, I would say I felt like I was building the bridge as I was crossing over it. That's hardcore how it felt.

What I didn't have was like a blueprint for what sort of bridge is gonna be most supportive for the number of people that I need to cross it, and how long will that bridge last and how long is it gonna take me to build it and what's it gonna look like and what materials do I need? I didn't have anything that was kind of guiding me, that was like a a, just a visual sort of a vision of how this looks or a visual for what it would need to look like.

I was just going based off of my own feelings and thoughts about what was needed in any given moment, and also maybe in the next month or two, that was it.

So when I say chaos, it might not have felt chaotic on the outside. It might not have looked that way to others, but it was chaotic. It was chaotic to me, and I think to some of my team, it felt the same way where they would have these whiplash moments, you know.

My point is having a visual. Blueprint, something like, you know, you're putting a puzzle together and you see the puzzle box, you see the picture on it. It's like, oh, got it. That's what I'm doing. Cool. Just to have that sort of final product would have made a huge difference early on, first of all.

Second of all, was that like major pivotal fork in the road experience for me, when I stumbled across EOS. That is the blueprint.

I couldn't have told you in words that I didn't have this thing. I didn't have EOS, I didn't have a structure, but I knew the entire time I was building this out that I was missing this bigger picture, and I didn't understand how to even ask for what it was that I needed, and I didn't know how to language it.

I, I just knew something was sort of missing some conceptual piece. Because I couldn't grasp the, the sort of really high level view of what it was. I knew the different pieces, but I didn't understand how they all fit and worked together.

That is what EOS did. It helped me see this big picture for structure, as well as get really nuanced and detailed and know exactly like what section it lived in, what section that nuance and detail lived in.

So I can get stuck in the weeds and like drill down into the weeds. But I know that this weed is in this plot of land, which lives in this acre, and this acre is part of this farm, and this farm is part of this city or town or whatever.

With EOS, for example, I could see all of it, all of it sort of layered on top of each other. And what got me out of reaction mode with EOS was being able to implement these, they call them L 10 level 10 meetings or L 10 meetings where you have a specific area where issues live and you are constantly sort of tuned into the numbers and the metrics that are relevant for your group as well as you have a place where you're sort of keeping problems like you have a, a, an issue or a problem, or even an idea bucket, and you're working through the most important ones on any given week.

And so you're constantly tending to sometimes fires, most of the time you're tending or at some point it shifts to, you're tending to proactive thinking about, this is coming down the pike, we need to make sure that we're doing X, Y, and z.

At some point, after implementing EOS and having this like large framework understanding of what's going on in the practice, you're able to be way more proactive about things.

Okay, let's keep going. We're gonna segue. My segues are never smooth. I just sort of jump from one agenda item to the next. Uh, seeing yourself in the chaos, this is agenda item number four.

So. What can be really difficult is recognizing when you are, I would say enabling the chaos, but also potentially creating it.

So when you're in the midst of chaos, it's really hard to see yourself. Clearly. I know this from well, personal experience, and also anybody who's in the thick of a storm. You can't wrap your mind around what the storm looks like from the outside or from the top, from a different angle. You are in the thick of it.

So what typically happens is when that storm finally passes and that dust settles, then you can start to see how you are the one who's been sowing chaos, and whether that's due to a lack of consistency or a lack of space to think big, where you can't conceptualize outside of this exact thing that you're working on.

Maybe it's a lack of delegating, maybe it's a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities. All of those things feed into you are sowing chaos. You are creating havoc, you're wreaking havoc at the place that you're trying to probably build in structure, and you just can't see it because you're, you're the one doing it.

You're the one that is, you know, creating the chaos. So it's hard when you're in that space because you are creating it and enabling it, and it's really difficult to see. What I will say with that is having something like EOS sort of automatically shuts you down from doing that because when you're, once you have sort of systems implemented and and people in the right place, it's hard to create chaos in the same way.

Like it's really difficult to do that. Case in point, I remember one of my very first, gosh, was it a focus day? Hmm. It was one of my very first annual two days with my leadership team at the time. So it was me, my clinical director, and my director of operations. And the clinical director role for me was always crystal clear.

Like I sort of, when we built this out, like I knew, oh, clinical director responsible for this, here are the scorecard. You know, here are the accountability, the metrics, the measurables, the, the responsibilities for the role.

Totally clear. The director of operations role was always fuzzy. I think even to an extent currently, like anything, an operations land can be much fuzzier for me to like articulate and see. I don't know if it's because I just hate operations that much or if it's because. I don't actually have any idea.

It just takes me a lot of brain power to like shift over and I have to sit with it to really see it clearly and I usually talk out loud about it to see it clearly. So we're at this, one of our very first two day meetings. Our, it was our very first annual two day meeting. My clinical director's there, my director of ops is there, and thank god she said this to me.

We're sitting there and we're talking about the roles and I remember, I think I was talking about visionary at the time, I think I called myself managing director 'cause I was more an integrator as well. But we hadn't shifted entirely into the EOS language.

And I don't remember what, how this came up, but my director of ops said to me, Tara, I don't know if you trust me in this role. I can't guarantee that was the exact language she used, but that was the message that she was sending. I don't know if you trust me in this role, being in the director of ops role.

I 100% trusted her in the role. By her saying that it led to a conversation about my perception of these roles, how it was being received by her, and also how my lack of ability, or lack of maybe willingness or comfort letting go i was blocking her from not only being able to do her job effectively, but also it was sowing distrust. It was, she was sort of doubting whether or not I thought she was the one that was right for the role and it ended up also creating chaos because it's confusing for people who are reporting to her, reporting to that role.

It ends up being confusing. They're not sure where I end and this other person begins it. It just ended up creating chaos. Thank God she brought that up to me, first of all, because it created a discussion where we could flesh out what was going on. And what it came down to is that I think I just don't like operations so much that I, I felt bad that somebody else had to do this role and.

Which is silly to like think about. It's like, I feel bad, so I'm gonna keep stuff that I hate, even though she likes that stuff and doesn't want anything to do with visionary related things, you know? So it's just funny 'cause the roles are really appropriate to who we are as people. And at that time, this was like the start of that discussion.

You know, we had never even talked about that sort of stuff. So my point is. I didn't see at all how my lack of role appropriate delegation was getting in the way of her being able to do her job. Her thinking that I don't trust her, absolutely not the fucking case at all, and also creating chaos for people around us.

None of that made sense until we had implemented EOS and started to talk clearly about these roles and the responsibilities started having open and honest discussions about our experience of doing this together. Incredible experience, for the record, that was an incredible meeting.

And I really, I hope that that highlights what I'm trying to say about this, you know, recognizing when you are enabling the chaos or when you're just creating it, period.

To shift into agenda item number five. The big reframe is that EOS changes the game because it it forces you to slow down strategically in order to go fast sustainably. It's not that it answers all of your problems.

You still have to do the fucking work. It gives you that framework to understand i what's happening. So you have the strategic systemization of things. You see where things live, you see how it's supposed to go. You have this direct approach for solving problems. And when you can do this and you can do it well, shit's gonna fucking go fast.

You're gonna work through things fast. You're gonna be way more proactive about stuff. You get to go fast in a sustainable way, not in a, you know, we're flying by the seat of our pants and ah, now I have to build a bridge as I'm crossing it, you know that feeling again, which gets us right back into chaos and that's a waste of everybody's time and energy, frankly, I'm tired of feeling chaotic.

I think something about this is recognizing that slowing down systemically especially and strategically- that is not failure in case it feels like it is, that's leadership.

When you can see a system in a structured way and you can implement it with intention, you can recognize how things can't go fast in the way that they did when maybe you very first started.

They, it's not possible. You're not a little speedboat. Now you are a maybe a. Small yacht, or maybe you're a cruise ship or maybe you're a ginormous yacht, or maybe you are, whatever. Just something big that's gonna take a while to turn and also requires a lot more interconnectedness between all the layers of who's doing what role.

You have to make sure that the system is streamlined and structured in order to, you know, speed and like, then let's go. Like now let's go. We can't turn on a dime anymore, but because we can look and anticipate things, we're able to maneuver in the fastest way possible to get around icebergs or other ships, or what the hell ever is in the middle of an ocean.

I don't have any idea other than terrifying fish and giant whales and things that live in the Mariana Trench that give me nightmares. Aliens in the ocean, y'all. There's aliens in the ocean.

If you know you're stuck in survival mode, but you just can't break out of it, like you just keep creating chaos, you keep reacting you, it's just all about, oh my God, there's fires everywhere. Like it's just chaos everywhere. This is. Probably the main reason I created an EOS Mastermind.

It launches twice a year, it's a six month experience where we go through and we figure out how do we integrate EOS into your practice in a sustainable, scalable way. Everything is recorded. There's a cohort of people you'd be going through this with, and doors will open very soon, so make sure you get on the wait list. You can go to www.taravossenkemper.com, hover over work with me, go to the EOS S Mastermind.

There'll be an option to join the wait list from there. You'll get all the dates and dates from that point forward, so you'll figure out what's included, all the costs, all the things will happen from there in your inbox. So make sure you sign up for the wait list. Hit me up if you have any questions.

Otherwise, have a fantastic rest of your day.

It's been great seeing you. Thank you for making this incredible. I will see you next time. Bye.