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TRIGGER WARNING – THIS EPISODE CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
What do you do when you suspect that your new hire could be a bad hire? How can you rectify the situation and avoid future ones like it? Why should culture and clinical skills be interwoven throughout your hiring process, not just the practice itself?
In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok discusses spotting a bad hire before they burn out the team through EOS with Dr. Tara Vossenkemper. Note: explicit
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Meet Dr. Tara Vossenkemper
Dr. Tara Vossenkemper, PhD, LPC is a group practice consultant, speaker, and host of The Culture Focused Practice podcast. She helps practice owners and leaders build thriving, sustainable organisations by blending depth, clarity, and emotional intelligence with practical systems and structure. Tara draws on her own experience growing a successful group practice — including hiring, culture building, and leadership evolution — to support others in navigating the complexities of practice ownership without losing themselves in the process. Her work emphasises seeing a practice as a living ecosystem where culture, leadership, people, and processes are interconnected and essential to long-term health and growth.
Visit Tara Vossenkemper consulting and listen to The Culture Focused Practice podcast.
In This Podcast
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Look at culture fit as much as clinical skill
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Use the full power of values in your practice culture
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How to know whether the new hire is a good or bad fit
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Dr. Vossenkemper’s advice to private practitioners
Look at culture fit as much as clinical skill
For me, it all has to start with having a clear role and a clear seat defined, with clear accountabilities and responsibilities. This is like an EOS concept, an entrepreneurial operating concept, where there [are] seats and then functions of that seat … that’s different from a description. (Dr. Tara Vossenkemper)
When you are hiring to fill an open role in your private practice, you don’t want to hire the wrong person.
Hiring an ill-fitted team member costs you time, money, and energy, and it can disrupt the flow of your existing team.
One of the ways to avoid this is to use EOS thinking, an entrepreneurial operating concept, to fully identify five to seven key roles that this new hire would have in the position.
It is more than a simple job description; it’s sketching out the landscape of responsibility and where accountability falls.
I refuse to bring somebody on my team who is sound clinically, and not a cultural fit. It’s not going to happen. I don’t care how good [clinically] they are. So, it has to be both. (Dr. Tara Vossenkemper)
If you want to know if someone is a cultural fit, ask them core values-based questions.
Use the full power of values in your practice culture
Could your team tell you what your values are?
Do you know at any given moment what your practice’s values are?
If you or your team can’t explain them, then it means that they aren’t being lived out fully, every working day.
“We have values!” Okay, but you have to be actively living these things out. That’s a foundational premise to the entire rest of the hiring process, and I would actually say to team culture … values need to be lived out … [and] actively talked about. (Dr. Tara Vossenkemper)
How to say values-aligned when you hire someone new:
- Tara’s practice uses a slow 90-day onboarding process
- With the new hire, they often have meetings and touch-points to make sure that the new hire is secure and becoming well-settled in the new working environment
The length of the onboarding process, I think it helps them to feel more at ease and more connected, and also helps us to really stay in tune with how the person is doing. (Dr. Tara Vossenkemper)
How to know whether the new hire is a good or bad fit
If Tara notices that something isn’t going well with a new hire, she:
- Listen to her intuition while also listening to external factors. She stresses the importance of listening to your feelings while understanding that there are factors in reality that are more at play.
- Take stock of the situation in reality and try to pinpoint exactly what it is that is not working out well.
What is the thing that’s going on: are my emails not getting responded to, and if not, have I communicated the need to respond quickly? … I think that if you’re in that situation, I think there are a lot of practice owners who give way too much grace and leeway, or they like the person a lot … but they are not a quality employee in terms of performance and metrics … Those have to be teased apart. (Dr. Tara Vossenkemper)
- Be clear on what the problem is: are they cultural? Or are they clinical, or performance-based? Are there solutions that could be applied?
- How much time will you give the new hire to try to rectify the situation once they know that you are dissatisfied?
Dr. Vossenkemper’s advice to private practitioners
You cannot have a solid business with employees if you do not have a strong culture. They are interwoven.
[The] structure of your business is baked into the culture of your business; it’s not separate. They’re not two parallel pillars … It’s like DNA, it’s like genetic code … Don’t ignore one thinking the other is most important, because it’s not. They’re both equally important. (Dr. Tara Vossenkemper)
Sponsors Mentioned in this Episode:
Learn more about how Alma could support you in building a thriving private practice at helloalma.com/joe.
Work with us one-on-one!
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Visit Tara Vossenkemper consulting and listen to The Culture Focused Practice podcast.
Check out these additional resources:
- When You’re Ready to Burn it Down with Dr. Elil Yuvarajan | POP 1332
- Practice of the Practice Network
- Group Practice Launch
- Group Practice Boss: www.practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss $149 a month
- PoP Group Practice Owners Facebook Group
- Free resources to help you start, grow, and scale
- Work with us
- Practice of the Practice Network
Meet Joe Sanok
Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners who are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.
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