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This is the practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sam, accession number 1076. I’m Joe Santos, your host, and welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast. Joe Sanok 00:01:23 I am so excited to help you build a thriving practice you absolutely love. today we’re talking a little bit about leadership. And, you know, it’s interesting, I in some areas of my life, I am very meticulous. I am very, clear on what I want. And in other areas I am not. I think when it comes to kind of business and ideas, I tend to be more of a let me be a visionary, let me come up with it. And then I need people that are saying, here’s how we’re going to do it. And so I’ve learned that about myself. I’ve learned that I often need to like, take a step back. I need to have people help me conceptualize things. And part of becoming the leader I want to be is empowering other people, teaching other people kind of what I want. And, you know, having some checks and balances, all sorts of different things. But I definitely screwed that up over the years in a lot of different ways, which is why I’m so excited to have this conversation today with Laurie Smith. Joe Sanok 00:02:19 Now, Laurie is the CEO of a prominent executive coaching firm that specializes in health care. She’s a certified coach through the International Coaching Federation and has more than 25 years of healthcare leadership experience. She coaches teams internationally in uncovering blind spots and leveraging strengths for success and leadership impact. Laurie, welcome to the practice of the Practice Podcast. Laurie Smith 00:02:41 Hi, Joe. Thank you for having me. I’m I’m happy to be here today. Joe Sanok 00:02:44 Yeah, I’m really excited about this. you know, next week we kick off Level Up week, which is, you know, twice a year. We do 16 webinars in four days and have all this content. And one of the things that we so frequently talk about is, you know, going from solo into group, you know, you put on all these hats, you’re you’re the accountant, you’re the lawyer, you’re the social media marketer. You do it all to keep your costs and your risks down. And then you start to hire your first or second or third clinician. Joe Sanok 00:03:12 You might hire an assistant, a billing coordinator. And the skills that it took to be successful in solo practice are very different than the leadership skills you need to run a team. And so let’s just start with that type of person. They’re, you know, going from solo into group. They’re building that early team. Let’s start with just traps. Like what what are some of the things that you see? People just screw up when they’re at that phase of just starting to grow a small team. Laurie Smith 00:03:39 Yeah. Oh my gosh. Unfortunately when you’re starting to expand and grow, there are so many traps to fall into and they’re pretty easy to land in. Nonetheless. Absolutely. Overwhelm is one of them. and time management time can so easily get away with us and at the end of the day, we sometimes end up filling our time with things that were probably not as high priority as some of the things we didn’t get to, because we didn’t have time to stop. And strategically, strategically think about how are we, how are we using our time, how are we leveraging it and reflecting at the end of the day about what we accomplished and what we didn’t, and where we spent our time? Was it worth missing those things that we didn’t get to? Oftentimes that self-reflective time feels like downtime, non-productive time, but really flipping the way we view that and seeing as a as one of the most productive times that we have, will save so much time in the long run being proactive. Joe Sanok 00:04:49 Yeah. And what would you say goes into that? What goes into really like looking at your time management, thinking strategically like, like what other. Let’s stick with traps. What other traps are there that people can fall into. And then we can get into what people can do about it. Laurie Smith 00:05:04 Yeah. Well, one of the the most common traps that I see is letting your calendar run you instead of you running your calendar. And we sort of fall into this victimhood. And I have done this. I have to be very cognizant of this myself. But we use that calendar as kind of a roadmap, and we put our head down and we just go from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, without really thinking, is this the best utilization of my time, and how do I leverage my subject matter experts and the team around me so that I can manage my time effectively? The hard part is that we are often feeling like we’re triaging things off of our calendar that are important, and that’s true. Laurie Smith 00:05:48 They are important, but it doesn’t always need to be us that is doing each one of those things. In order for us to be the most effective, we have to have good, strong time management. I was coaching a physician leader one time, and he made the statement that he feels people who cannot organize their their calendar probably have an inability to manage a business, a division, an organization, whatever it might be. And it was a little bit of a profound statement. At first I thought, well, that’s catching me off guard a little bit. And then he’s right. If we can’t manage our calendar, how can we manage something as complex as an entire business? Joe Sanok 00:06:33 Yeah, I feel like that’s one of the things that early on, when I really started putting everything into my calendar and viewing what I put in there, as important as the clinical work that I was doing at the time, that’s when things really shifted, because, you know, I wasn’t making excuses. I wasn’t looking at a list. Joe Sanok 00:06:51 I wasn’t doing anything based on how my energy was for the day. It was this is in my calendar. I set aside half an hour here to work on this, and chose not to take a paying client to work on this thing, so I need to do it. I need to show up for myself and and even just that mindset of saying, if I dink around for half an hour in my business, that’s a half hour. I could have left early and gone and been with my kids. So really, when I’m not effective with my calendar during the day, I’m actually stealing time from my family too. are there any other mindsets like that that you find helpful in regards to how people think about time? Laurie Smith 00:07:25 Yeah, I think that you hit the nail on the head. Number one energy is finite. We don’t have this infinite bucket of energy. And so thinking about how we allocate that as a resource, you’re blocking time on the calendar is a great way to make it more face up and visible. Laurie Smith 00:07:43 The things that still have to be done, that might sort of fall on the back burner in the background and allow other things to take up that time and space. But the other mindset trap that we we get into often is negative self-talk. I see a lot of that and that negative self-talk. That’s non-productive time, right? If you want to label anything non-productive time, it’s negative self-talk. It’s not getting you anywhere. And it sort of gets you into this funk of maybe I’m not worthy, I’m not capable, I can’t do this. Well you can. That overwhelm sort of comes up insidiously sometimes, and having that heads up time to think about what is your strategy moving forward and reflect on did I use my time wisely? Is part of managing that overwhelm and helping to mitigate some of that negative self-talk? Meditation is a great way to look at that. You think sometimes that meditation feels like non-productive time. It actually can be incredibly productive time. There are some great studies out there using functional MRIs that show even five minutes of meditation before going into something that is a heavy, complex issue or topic can really help you to have better outcomes and be better critical thinker, better problem solver, better collaborator in many senses, than if you’re just running from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next. Joe Sanok 00:09:13 Now let’s talk about those early stage group practice owners. They start to build a team. what are some leadership skills or actions or mindsets that you’d say are essential with those early teams. So we’re talking three clinicians maybe, you know, an assistant, maybe a part time builder. you know, a small team, like what do they need to be doing thinking, and, and kind of like, yeah, like, where should they be spending their time? Laurie Smith 00:09:38 Yeah. I love working with teams large and small. And there are four pillars that I think are really incredibly important to sort of simplify and think about as you’re building a team. I call it the star model. it’s S is self-transformation, T is team transformation, a is adaptability and the R is results. And in that order intentionally right. If we don’t understand ourselves and do that inner work that that inner game runs our outer game, then we don’t understand the impact that we’re having on others. How do our thoughts and feelings impact ourselves and impact others? And what do we do about that? And then thinking about the team really establishing that foundation of trust, because that is the secret ingredient to so many pieces coming together and being successful for a business. Laurie Smith 00:10:35 Part of that trust is creating psychological safety and part of psychological safety is the ability to embrace healthy dissent, right? We shouldn’t all be having the exact same view. I oftentimes tell my teams, if I look around and I’ve got a room full of bobbleheads agreeing with me, I 100% know I’m not the smartest person in this room. We’re missing something, and we’re so much more strong if we have these differing views, perspectives, thoughts, and we leverage that that knowledge resource collectively. And then with adaptability, especially in anything, health care changes a constant and sometimes change. Leadership is project oriented. It feels like there’s a start and to finish. And with adaptability, it’s how do we navigate those challenges that come our way that weren’t expected and oftentimes weren’t welcomed. Right. COVID’s such a great example of changes that we had to make on the fly and very quickly and be adaptable to. We didn’t want it. We didn’t welcome it certainly wouldn’t have chosen it, but we had to adapt to it and figure it out and then results as we’re building that team, gaining that trust, having good, strong self-awareness and understand change, leadership and adaptability. Laurie Smith 00:11:55 How do we pull all of those skill sets together to get the results that we’re looking for? And part of that is creating shared vision and purpose. I see a distinct difference between groups who have a shared vision and purpose and those that don’t. It’s the visual between a collegiate rowing team smoothly cruising through the water at a great speed, versus bumper boats at the state fair, where everybody’s kind of bumping into each other. Are we on the same page, moving toward the same North Star? So those would be four key areas that I would focus on as I’m building a team. Joe Sanok 00:12:33 Now, as you’re, as you’re continuing to build after that. You know, people, you know, start to fill up their clinician’s their, you know, usually kind of what you start when you have three or so people works to we’ve seen anywhere from 7 to 10 clinicians. And then after that people start having to think about clinical directors, you know, more kind of layers of supervision, oversight. The owner really can’t do it all, nor should they. Joe Sanok 00:12:57 So when they’re really looking at scaling, you know, above ten, up to 50 or so, what are those leadership skills people need to be employing? Laurie Smith 00:13:05 Yeah, I loved what you said at the beginning when you said you are visionary and you know that the operational logistics and minutia sometimes are not your strong point. That’s the first thing is to have that self-awareness for you. Who do you need to surround yourself with that can fill in the gaps that you have? Because we all have them. And when you have a small team as a person comes or goes from your team, that’s a great time to reevaluate The skill sets that each member of the team has. And where are your gaps as a skill set? even something as simple as strengths finders, you can do those assessments online very quickly and easily map out where each one of your team members falls in there, and pretty clearly see where the gaps are, and look for someone that can fill in those white spaces that the rest of the team doesn’t have. Laurie Smith 00:14:01 When you’ve got a small team, those job descriptions may shift and change depending on the growth and development of those that have been on the team for a while, and those that you need to find with those skill sets that we need to level up a little bit. So it’s got to be fluid as you’re looking at who to bring on depending on who’s coming and going. Joe Sanok 00:14:34 Something always comes up when you’re running a private practice. 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You know as people are coming and going like if we were to think about kind of the big buckets of of running a growing practice, the ones I think of and you can kind of add or subtract or kind of add some nuance to this. It’s usually, you know, the air kind of side, like who’s who’s hiring, who’s paying attention to that. Is that the owner? Is it an intake coordinators that someone like that? We’ve got kind of the intake flow of clients and the client management. We might call that kind of customer service. we’ve got the money side of it. So bookkeepers, you know, attorneys looking at liability, accountants. Joe Sanok 00:16:15 just the, the billing that happens to make sure people are up to speed and then probably like the marketing side of things. So the website, all of those ways that people find out that you exist, what would you add to those different areas? I guess I’d also add a fifth category, which would be like the clinical side. So making sure that people are doing good work, that they’re finishing the progress notes that, if they don’t know what to do with a client, they have a supervisor that they can go to. So I just listed kind of five big clinical areas. what would you say in regards to thinking leadership wise as, as the owner that’s maybe not doing all the operations. They may not even be doing clinical work anymore. like what at that level, when they’re looking at kind of those five different areas, should they be thinking about? Laurie Smith 00:16:58 Yeah, that’s a great question. And if you’ve seen one organizational chart or one business group chart, you’ve seen one because they’re all vastly different. Laurie Smith 00:17:08 And it depends on the needs of the team and the the purpose and vision of that team. One piece that I see missing frequently, and this could fall under your HR bucket, is continuous development for your team, whether that’s personal professional development, leadership development, team development, whatever that might be, particularly as we’re beginning to see so many more generations cross collaborating. Newer generations place a high value on organizations investing in their continued development. It’s really important for them. And as we continue to grow, we don’t want to stay stagnant. We want to be able to continue to have that growth mindset, a positive mindset, understand how to overcome future challenges and current hardships and what that looks like. It’s easy to cut some of those things from a budget, because they’re not necessarily, that baseline foundation operational necessity. But when you’re thinking about teams that are outperforming others, they are focusing on those areas. Joe Sanok 00:18:22 yeah. Joe Sanok 00:18:23 Now when you like for me, I love the model from lean manufacturing of plan. Do check adjust. Joe Sanok 00:18:31 where you know you’re planning what you’re doing. you’re going to try it, you’re going to check it, and then you’re going to make adjustments over time. And I love the assumption that it’s not going to be perfect. And you’re going to have to have monitoring. You’re going to have to have iterations of it. when you think about the ongoing nature of leadership, what maybe habits, or rhythms would you say good leaders have that they’re doing, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, annually? like, what are some of those rhythms look like when you see top leaders that are just killing it. Laurie Smith 00:19:06 From the standpoint of their own development or their team or with regard to change. Joe Sanok 00:19:12 I would say, you know, wanting to grow their business. But then also, I never want to have people growing their business at the expense of their own health, their family, their joy that it should be adding to their life. It shouldn’t be subtracting. And so that whole just like hustle culture thing, I like I and most of my listeners don’t buy into and I’m you you don’t seem to either. Joe Sanok 00:19:33 So so I would say probably some personal development in there. But like, you know, when you see people that are successfully running their business, they can navigate challenges. We’re not going to just have a business that never has challenges. If if we don’t have challenges, we probably aren’t pushing hard enough. but what are those top leaders doing regularly that helps them stay educated, helps them stay grounded, helps them inspire their teams, know what’s going on. Just like being a good leader. Laurie Smith 00:19:59 Yeah. Laurie Smith 00:20:00 That is incredibly important. We know that when we’re not taking great care of ourselves, we are not optimal collaborators, problem solvers and critical thinkers. There’s great data out there to support that, seeing what some of the strongest leaders are doing, it’s more of a work life integration. We used to talk about work life balance, which is nearly impossible in many ways, that 5050 balance. But if we think about work life integration or work life harmony, sometimes we may be putting more energy and time into work. Laurie Smith 00:20:36 But then how are we offsetting that down the road where it’s more time and energy on family or whatever it is that’s meaningful and a little less time on work? There are seasons of developing businesses that your pedal to the metal a little bit, and then how do you offset some of that time, even during the week? Think about it as smaller increments or chunks, or even during the day, seeing how your brain is functioning when you are just going nonstop versus taking even five, ten, 15 minutes of a break makes an incredibly huge impact. Mindset is such a powerful tool for a leader to have and so often underestimated with leaders. One of the biggest shifts I see with clients that I coach is around mindset. And as you’re doing that hustle, you know, as you talked about, I don’t ascribe to that either. This whole notion of multitasking has been really greatly debunked. We’re not doing great work when we’re multitasking or we’re running on an empty cup. We’ve got to be taking great care of ourselves, and mindset is a part of that. Laurie Smith 00:21:56 Meditation has been shown to really help improve areas, especially in emotional regulation. I saw a study that was really pretty fascinating, where long term practitioners of meditation actually had structural differences on their MRIs, particularly in areas of the brain that involve emotional regulation. So we’re starting to tie some of these things that theoretically, we thought were true with some physical science and data to back that up. Meditation is a tough one. And, you know, I have been doing it for years, and I was terrible at it when I first started. My mind was wandering all the time. Still, sometimes it does, but that’s part of that being forgiving of yourself and making it a practice. You can do a meditation and sometimes less than five minutes. There are very quick ones out there, but that would be a couple of the key areas I would say to focus on. As you’re looking at how to be the most effective leader, time management mindset, work life integration. Joe Sanok 00:23:05 yeah. No, I’m with you. Joe Sanok 00:23:07 That whole idea of slowing down and allowing our brains to have the best ideas, you know, our our best ideas seem to come when we’re taking a shower. We’re going for a walk. We’re on a long drive. And maybe we just have music we like playing. And it’s one of those things that, That I think that as we slow down, then it becomes clear the best use of our time instead of using our time with everything. so I’m with you on that. the last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? Laurie Smith 00:23:39 I would want them to know that they’re not alone. oftentimes when I’m coaching clients, they feel like they’re the only ones that are dealing with a certain situation or feeling like they’re not worthy. They’re not capable. Really understanding that you are worthy, you are capable. You got where you are because you are incredible in your skill set and leaning on the team around you as you move forward. Laurie Smith 00:24:07 You don’t have to do this by yourself. Joe Sanok 00:24:10 so. Joe Sanok 00:24:11 Good. If people want to follow your work, if they want to connect with you, where should we send them? Laurie Smith 00:24:16 They should head over to my website, which is Dot Lori Lee leadership. Com Lori Lee leadership. And they can also find me on LinkedIn. Joe Sanok 00:24:33 So awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the practice of the Practice podcast. Laurie Smith 00:24:38 Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Joe Sanok 00:24:49 Yeah. When it comes to leadership, I think just starting with that baseline of, you know, where are we at, what’s going on, what’s what’s happening here. The more that we can just pay attention to our joy, and how that’s impacting the team. I mean, that’s such a great starting point. Just today, I was doing a free consulting session with one of our next level practice members that won it through a competition that we did, and they were working on their niche. They’re like early on in their practice. But this person, she was a attorney before she became a therapist. Joe Sanok 00:25:22 And, was thinking, you know, I know the attorney world. Do I want to focus on kind of burned out attorneys that maybe are drinking too much or having marriage issues? And as we talked about it, it was it was low hanging fruit that she could develop a practice like that. There was something that was like, do you want to do that? Is that the population like you left law? And so just that idea of we get to create the business that we want to create, we get to create the systems. We get to decide who we want to work with, where we get extra training, all of those things. And so I hope that you are thoughtful in regards to just what you’re creating and how you’re thinking through it. We’ve had some amazing podcasts in the last few days, so if you missed any of them today. Yeah, we talked about being a better leader. yesterday we talked about how to raise your rates really high. before that we talked about having better IT and systems and using AI. Joe Sanok 00:26:13 before that, we talked about being less distracted, and before that we talked about are you burning out? So a number of things that are kind of around leadership and this this is just part of that series. we’re doing the show almost daily and, we love it. So make sure you sign up also for Level Up Week. That is right around the corner that kicks off on Monday over at practice the practice.com/level up. You can see all of our speakers. Also on Monday our membership communities all open back up. So another cohort of next level practice if you’re in solo practice. If you are starting a group practice, you can join the next cohort for group practice launch and group practice. Boss another cohort of bosses coming in together. So we are so excited to have these membership communities all serving you, so sign up for that. Also, we couldn’t do the show without our amazing sponsors and gusto is our sponsor today. It’s who we use for payroll HR. It just makes it all easier. I mean, whether it’s Paychex, payroll taxes, setting up enrollment. Joe Sanok 00:27:13 Man gusto does it all. They also help with doing health insurance 401 K onboarding commuter benefits, offer letters, all those sorts of things. It’s no surprise that 99% of businesses say the value that they get for gusto is totally worth the price. And were one of those, head on over to gusto.com/joe again. That’s gusto.com/joe. it’s going to be a great decision to just streamline all of that financial side of your business. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silences Sexy for that intro music, and this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers or guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.