Five Steps to Building an Interdependent Team

1. Know what kind of game you are playing and if you’re all playing the SAME game.
Get your team on the same page. If the game you were playing was basketball, it wouldn’t work and you wouldn’t win if 3 of your teammates thought the game was tennis, football, and volleyball. Find out where everyone is at and bring everyone up to speed.

2. Move from activity-based thinking to outcome-based thinking.
It’s not “do more” equals “achieve more”. The equation is “do less” equals “achieve more” by taking actions that directly correspond with the outcome you are out to produce. My team and I call this the DPO (Daily Primary Outcome) for each position, team member, and the practice as a whole.

3. Shift from “surviving” to “thriving.”
In order for your practice, team, and you to thrive, you have to do what I call, Raise Your HDL™. In life you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you THINK you deserve. Nothing more. Nothing less. Consider that we all have an imaginary container that we have built in our minds that limits the capacity of all the things we can have in practice and in life. Imagine how removing that limit on what’s possible for you, your team, and your practice could impact the BIG game you are all playing.

4. Communicate only with facts and outcomes.
I like to call this Managing By Agreement, or MBA. What has worked for my clients and for my own team is to only deal in facts and outcomes. This doesn’t mean that all deadlines will be met. What it does mean is that when there is a broken or missing agreement, the parties involved only speak about those agreements, not how they feel about the agreement, or the drama that could have been caused from it, but simply on the facts.

5. Acknowledge being invisible.
I t’s having your DPOs being fulfilled time and time again, with no one blaming another for any time they aren’t, your team enjoying being at work, your patients receiving world-class customer service, your game being won, and your team working like the well-oiled machine you’ve created by following these five steps.