Episode 224 | The 5 A’s of Accountability: Action

Maureen Werrbach (00:00:01) – You’re listening to the group Practice Exchange podcast where the business development resource for group practice owners, where we talk candidly about business ownership and leadership from practice building tips to live coaching to real talk episodes with other group practice owners where the resource you’ve been looking for to help you grow your group practice. I’m your host, group practice owner and entrepreneur Maureen robach. 

 

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Welcome to the Group Practice Exchange podcast. This is your host, Maureen. We’re back. Today is our last final episode of our six part series on the Accountability Equation. Today we’re going to be talking specifically about the last A in the five A’s called action. If you haven’t listened to the first five episodes, I encourage you to go back five episodes and listen to episode 219 on 224. Right now, start at 219 and it’s going to give you a deep dive into what I’ve built. It’s called the Accountability Equation, where it helps group practice owners build accountability measures from the ground up. So today, we’re on the last part of the accountability equation, which is action. And so we’ll dive deep into this. The most useless process most business owners go through is to track metrics and do nothing with them, to not look at them regularly, to look at them and move on without action, to not engage in any action.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:02:32) – Action is the fifth and last part of this accountability equation, and it’s where you and your team take all the information that you have at your fingertips about goals, accountabilities and metrics of your practice and take action to move the needle forward. Action is a required step in successfully having accountability measures in your practice, because without action there is no accountability. So the first thing that you’ll learn when you join the Accountability Equation Group is how to build a team leadership agenda for your leadership team. The purpose of these meetings are an important tool that holds each team member accountable to contributing to your business’s success. They’re a chance to get the leadership team on the same page and focused on the right activities to achieve your practice’s quarterly goals. The team meeting is also a platform for you to work through issues and obstacles or make certain decisions. The thing to remember about this leadership meeting is that it’s not a status update. Status updates are like clients who come in monthly and use the therapy session to go over all the things that have happened the month before without any forward movement.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:03:44) – I know we all know what that is like, and I’m sure we all know what it’s like to have a team meeting that is so useless where you just circularly continued to go through discussing the same issues and problems without resolve and this team leadership agenda will break that apart. Essentially, you’re having a person on your leadership team who’s a timekeeper who will make sure that nobody goes over time in the agenda framework, and you’re going to have a person who takes notes. And then we have a very clear framework that goes through celebrating first, anything positive that’s happened, you’ve got five minutes to celebrate across the board. You then are going to go through your accountability tracker and each person is just going to name their accountability. And whether they’re on track or off track, literally, that’s it with no descriptions, no going in deeper as to why, but just saying, you know, this is my accountability. I’m on track. This is my accountability, I’m off track. That’s it. No deeper discussion about it.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:04:48) – The purpose of this is really for accountability holding. It’s not to go into finger pointing and blaming or explaining as to why, because all of those are reasons why leadership meetings tend to be very useless. We then are going to go through what your quarterly goals were. Remember, those quarterly goals are the micro goals that help each leader reach their accountability measure, their big yearly accountability measure. And then you’re going to go through any biweekly to do lists because your leadership team will meet every two weeks and will have little to do lists that they engage in that moves their needle forward in terms of things that they’re accountable for. And then you’ll conclude with what you’re working on to help make your part of your practice’s overall accountabilities move forward. So if you think about it, you have a real action planning through line from a biweekly agenda action item that helps you meet your quarterly goals. You then have quarterly goals that help you meet your larger accountabilities, and those larger accountabilities are inside your accountability tracker. So if we have a really quick explanation for this, because I know listening to this on a podcast.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:06:03) – Is much harder than seeing it visually. We’re going to use an example of a recruiting and onboarding lead who has on their accountability tracker a yearly goal of bringing in 13 new clinicians above what they had at the beginning of the year. So let’s say your practice has 20 clinicians at the beginning of the year. That means at the end of the year the recruiting and onboarding lead is responsible and accountable for having 33 clients at the end of the year. Remember just saying you want to hire 13 new clinicians isn’t helpful because what if you lose 15, right? You’re actually two less clinicians than you were at the beginning of the year, even though you hired 13. So in this example, the recruiting and onboarding lead has the goal of bringing on 13 more than what they started with at the beginning of the year. And that takes into account those that have left. That is a large yearly goal. Now as part of their action planning in one quarter, they might realize that on average three people leave a year and that lets them know that every quarter they need to bring on four new clinicians to account for that loss and reach the target that they have at the end of the year.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:07:25) – So in their quarterly goal, they might say, I have a goal of bringing on four new clinicians this quarter, the micro goal to the larger accountability, but then they have biweekly team meetings with the leadership team and maybe they realize that hiring is not as easy as it was before. Right? Most of us are realizing pre-COVID hiring was much easier than post-COVID hiring. So maybe on their biweekly to-do list, they have to do of talking with the clinical director about potentially bringing on provisionally licensed folks because that seems to be a little bit easier these days. And so their biweekly to do list is just to have a discussion with the clinical director about whether bringing on provisionally licensed folks is part of the mission and values of that practice, which will then help move the needle forward of maybe having another little biweekly agenda action item in two weeks time where they are going to talk about what things need to be on a job offer for a provisionally licensed person versus a fully licensed person. You see where I’m going with this, right? So there are three things that go hand in hand from the biweekly agenda action item, the quarterly goals and the accountability tracker that all bring together the ability for each leadership person to get their accountabilities met.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:08:53) – So that’s essentially what the action section of the five A’s is in short form. I want to end this quick episode by letting you know that the Accountability Equation quiz is still up on my website. If you want to see where you fall on our Accountability Equation quiz, but also to check out our program, we have an in-person program that is two days, eight hours a day with me and just a handful of other people where we’re going to be talking about how to build literally every part of the accountability equation. But we also have a virtual online on demand program that if you can’t come in person or you like to do it on your own, you can purchase that and be able to build your own accountability equation from the ground up. I am so excited about what I’ve built. It’s taken me over a year to put all of this together and I’m really excited to see how it benefits all of us group practice owners in helping our teams be accountable, seeing our profits soar, seeing our expenses go down, and seeing overall contentment with our leadership and clinical teams as a whole.

 

Maureen Werrbach (00:10:05) – So I hope to see you in the accountability equation, whether it’s in-person here in Chicago or if it’s in our virtual group. See you next week. 

 

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