Culture Focused Practice

Hey, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper here, and you are listening to the Culture Focused Practice Podcast. Thank you for being here with me.

Okay, so hear me out. You are not running a machine. You might think of your group practice as a well-oiled machine. That's fantastic, but it's not a machine. It's a living organism.

Most systems, even the fantastic ones like EOS, don't fully address the emotional and cultural heartbeat of your practice. They're designed to be systems. They're not designed to be living organisms.

And while something like EOS resonated with me very deeply, it didn't fully scratch the conceptual itch that I needed with regard to the way that I looked at my practice.

All of that is why I developed the Living Practice Framework™.

Before we get into that, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any deep dives or new episodes coming out, whether about the living practice framework or about structure or culture or leadership, or all the shit that I love that's messy and human and alive. So plus it makes it easy to binge listen. So

That said, let me cover an agenda real quick for you, parameters for the episode. We'll talk about the origin of the living practice framework. We'll get into the five main elements of it. We will run through a brief scenario and putting it into practice as agenda item number three. And then lastly, we will briefly touch on how to start, so how you can take this and implement it on your own.

Okay, so let's do this. The origin, I think it is not a secret that I have a high level of adoration for the Entrepreneur Operating System developed by Gina Wickman, EOS is fantastic. When I first stumbled across it, I remember feeling like, holy shit, like this is the thing that I've been looking for. I've been trying to understand the systems and the structure of a business, and I didn't have the words to say that at the time that I learned about it but that's what I was wanting, in retrospect.

As I implemented EOS, I realized there was more things that were important to me than were included entirely in EOS. And maybe they touched on some components, but I didn't ever get the sense that they were fully fleshed out in a way that matched what I saw as their level of significance.

And so to some extent, EOS almost felt a little bit incomplete. Like it's a huge component for a successful and healthy practice, but it is a component. It is not the practice in its entirety.

And so this living practice framework emerged because there were some cracks that EOS couldn't quite patch for me. And again, I have to say, you know, I love EOS, so I'm not dogging it. I'm not putting it on a blast. We actively use it, and it is a part of something that we use that is a larger framework.

So some of the cracks, for example, there were things like cultural disconnects, potentially almost like identity, confusion, stagnant team energy, where things are just kind of off and you're checking the box from an e os perspective, but it's not vibrant. You feel like there's something missing and slash, or what you've done from EOS, for example, isn't really hitting the mark of what you need.

And again, for me, that points to, like, something is missing. There's something that is richer or slightly more robust or like a conceptual component that I just, I'm not getting from EOS in the way that I need.

As a result of that. I had to grapple. I grappled and I let shit percolate and I thought out loud and I thought in my head and I talked out loud and I talked to chat. And I, I developed my own because why the hell not?

I had a framework that had been developing for me throughout my time using EOS that was a little bit bigger for me. And I realized the more that I did this, the more that I saw and talked about practices as being living entities. And so this living practice framework is a systems oriented approach to viewing and leading a group practice that integrates structure and culture and leadership and people and marketing as a dynamic living organism.

And so let's segue to the five elements. So agenda item number two, the five elements of the living practice framework. This is hardcore gonna be surface level because I could talk much more in depth about any one of these. That's not for this episode.

I will highly likely do more detailed episodes on the five elements over the course of the next few episode releases. But let's cover these real quick.

So the five elements of the living practice framework are leadership, EOS slash structure, culture, employees or people, if you wanna say that, but I say employees and marketing.

So when I talk about leadership, what we're talking about is a porous and permeable membrane for the whole organism. This membrane filters everything coming through, translates it so that it is digestible by the rest of the organism, and also filters messages that are going out.

And so. Leadership is responsible for the maintenance of this whole organism and the filtration of things coming in and out. That's leadership.

EOS slash structure. This is a central pillar. I do not think that any organism will be sustainable without a central pillar or structure of some sort. For us, that is EOS. You can think of it like a spine in another way, but it's a very strong and central component to the whole living organism. It is not everything, but it is wildly important.

The third element is culture. Think of this as the foundation. I always think of it as a foundation that the pillar rests on. I don't think you can have culture without structure, and I don't think you can have structure without culture, and realistically, you need both for the entire organism to be healthy.

Culture is our foundation, though. It's an ecosystem, it sustains life or it suffocates it. You already know when a culture is unhealthy, the toxicity and the damage that can do, and you know, the level of vibrancy that a practice can have when that culture is thriving and healthy.

The fourth component is employees. I think of these as like these little energy orbs sort of floating around the entire organism. They bump into things, they react with everything. They shape everything. Employees are not cOGS in a wheel. They are these little floating orbs inside the whole organism that go around and touch every single aspect of it.

They are crucial for constantly shaping, constantly reacting to, and I would say even that constant bumping into things is a way of testing boundaries consistently. Not in a way that's pushy from an employee perspective, but in a way that ensures that the boundary that's set up is solid and strong. So it's a good thing.

And then the last element to the living practice framework is marketing. So this is like the energy and the light that radiates from the living organism. It's an outward facing signal.

But the reality is that it's only strong as a function of internal alignment. So marketing as an element is reflective of the health of the organism to anybody that interacts with it.

I really do think of it like light radiating from a cell, you know. It is that outward facing signal. Too bright and you might blind others and slash or that could be a sign that shit's about to explode. Too dull and it doesn't attract anything, and it's a sign that like something inside this is shriveling up.

Like this isn't a good sign. So those are the five elements, very broadly speaking, leadership, EOS slash structure, culture, employees, and marketing. Again, this is an overview of the framework, so we'll go into more depth in the future.

I do wanna say that there are two more elements, but they are not standalone elements. They are just very important components of the organism, but I don't treat them as standalone. One is financial health. And so this is part of the structure piece, especially part of EOS, and you really get there through structure or in my case, EOS based tools.

And another is feedback. I can't see any organism thriving without feedback systems in place. And so feedback lives in leadership and culture, but you can almost think about it like a nervous system. It keeps things very responsive and very human.

So I like to highlight those two as sub items almost. That financial health is sort of a sub item to EOS slash structure, that central pillar. And then feedback is a sub item to leadership or culture? Both probably, but it's a sub item to leadership and slash or culture.

And so they're important enough to name, but they are not standalone items 'cause they're so baked into other parts of the framework.

So the goal with this Living Practice Framework™ is not just solving issues. You can solve issues through the issue solving track of EOS. So issues solving is absolutely baked into the Living Practice Framework™. But that's not the goal of the framework.

The goal is to nurture an entire ecosystem. This is where energy and clarity and trust and alignment all come together. They're all felt, people have a very visceral experience with interacting with it. Not just, they're not just managed. They're felt deeply.

And when you have the right people, I think also they're felt intuitively. So we can formalize what we're doing by way of structure and having this framework and when the right people are on, they just immediately add to the organism in a way that feeds more nutrition into it.

Okay, so let's shift real quick and let's do the scenario. That's a little bit of an abrupt transition, but we're gonna do it anyway.

Example scenario, and then I will show you in practice how the Living and Practice Framework™ might look. You've implemented EOS. Your scorecard is tight, your meetings are humming, roles are clear, and still something feels flat. You can't really put your finger on it, but your team vibe is off.

People don't speak up in meetings unless prompted, you're hitting your rocks, but it doesn't feel energizing. You're doing all the right things, but you don't know why. It feels like you're leading a machine. Instead of living, breathing, fallible humans.

You start to wonder, is this a culture issue? Is this a leadership issue or is the structure itself missing something essential?

If we look through a Living Practice Framework™ lens, here are the questions we ask. I'm not gonna say here are answers. I'm gonna say, here are questions that we ask.

From a cultural or foundational perspective, we might ask, is there emotional resonance? Is there shared ownership, or is there just surface level alignment? We might ask ourselves, are values embodied or are they just listed?

From a leadership perspective, leadership being that porous membrane, we might ask ourselves, are we regulating the tone and the energy and sort of the relational dynamics of the entire group? Are we letting things in that we shouldn't? Are we not allowing enough to filter back out? Are we shifting into managing tasks or are we shifting into running meetings, which are important components, but not all of leadership.

When we look at it from a people perspective, remember people being the floating orbs that interact with the entire system. You might ask yourself, are my team members in relational motion with each other? Are they siloed by their seats? Are they siloed by their projects? Are they encouraged to engage and interact with each other? With the system? Do they feel seen or do they just feel like they're being tracked and assessed and like they're a number?

From a marketing perspective, marketing being the energy that radiates out from the living organism. Is your practice radiating a shared ethos or are they just doing good work quietly? Are internal dynamics affecting the external message?

Is there alignment, from a marketing based perspective? Is what we say we do reflective of what we actually do? Is how we market and who we market to reflective of who we are and how we want to show up in the world?

And then structure from an EOS perspective. You might ask if what you're doing is serving your organism or if it's overriding it. If you are so stuck in a specific tool or structure that you are losing sight of the people that are around you and the humanity of running a business.

The goal in all of this is not just to solve issues. The goal is to nurture an ecosystem where there's energy and there's clarity, and there's trust and there's alignment, and that all of those things are very viscerally felt, not just managed.

And how you do that. As a great segue to our last agenda item. Mind you, that was smooth, little smooth operator over here. How you do something like that is very, very easy. There's three things, three little steps. I'm gonna give you one.

You don't need a full framework install or overhaul. You don't need to scrap what you're doing. You don't need to say fuck you to EOS or structure or whatever feedback system you have in place.

So step one is just let go of that notion that you need to overhaul or completely revamp something that currently exists. Don't do that. Step two, ask yourself of those five core elements, leadership, culture, marketing, employees, and structure, which element feels the weakest?

Which one feels like, oh, that really needs some TLC, little bit of time and love and consideration. That's my TLC. That's good.

And then the third step, just choose one small shift. Don't fucking reinvent the wheels. Stop it. Don't do that. Just take a very small thing you can do and shift it. It might be a little tweak.

My favorite thing to do is follow a problem all the way back to as close to its inception as I can find, and then from that point, figure out what's the very smallest change I could make then that will have an impact on the trajectory of this thing as it moves back forward.

So I always think about if a plane is five degrees off or even one degree off, the significance that has on the destination in 500 miles. We're doing the same thing with problems. If you're saying that leadership feels the weakest of all of the elements.

Maybe you realize that you are spending all of your time managing tasks or all of your time coordinating meetings. Just trace it back to like, what's the approximate timeframe that started. You could do something like that, a question like that, or you might ask yourself, is there something internal for me that is getting in the way of letting go of delegating meetings?

Or you might ask yourself, is there a seat or a role in place where I can pass this over. Or you might ask yourself if you stopped prioritizing time to not work on tasks and just to spend time thinking. It might be a very small tweak where you just add an hour to your calendar each week that is sacred time for you to sit and think and ponder life or the business or whatever.

Or you might do something else like pass over two tasks this week, get rid of two things that are weighing on you. My point in all of this is that you don't need to overhaul everything. Identify the element that feels the weakest, and then choose a very tiny shift within that element to adjust and then go from there.

And. Rinse and repeat. Easy peasy, right?

So let me recap this episode then, for all my listeners out there, all two of you, I'm just laughing at myself, okay? You know what? But if two of you benefit from this. That's enough. 2 5, 200 10,000. I don't give a fuck. If you are benefiting, that's what I'm after.

Recapping. Your business is not a machine. It is an organism. That's recap number one.

Recap number two, the Living Practice Framework™ is a systems thinking approach that allows you to see your group as a living organism. It's comprised of five main elements, leadership, structure slash eos, for us in particular, culture, employees, and marketing with two sub components, financial health and feedback.

And the goal of it isn't just to solve issues, it's to nurture your ecosystem, to start to think about it as a living entity and nurture it as such.

If you love this as much as I do, which is highly unlikely, but possible, join the membership inside the Living Practice Membership is where we bring this framework and this conceptual paradigm to life.

The membership is how we focus on building sustainable living practices. You can join at www.taravossenkemper.com/the-membership.

And in there, of course, you're gonna find resources and tools, but you're also gonna find me twice a month doing a live training and a live q and a, as well as a variety of recorded trainings and q and as. And you're gonna find a sense of community of group practice owners who are wanting to build practices that really combine business with humanity.

That's what this is all about from my perspective. That's what this is all about.

That's all I got for you. Thank you so much for being here with me. I think I say it every time, but I will continue to say it every time. Super appreciate your time. I know how valuable time is and I'm looking forward to the next one. I'll see you there. Bye.