Chiropractic Practice: How to Build The Right Team For You

Hello everybody and welcome to Thrive in Five. I’m Dr. Dennis Perman and I’ll be your chiropractic coach for today. The material we’re gonna be addressing now is how to build an incredible team. It turns out that research done in the 1960s at Columbia University uncovered a four-part system for the development of all team and team building. Whether you not know it or not, or like it or not, is always gonna be dependent on these four characterizations. So let’s talk about them a little bit. The first part of building a team is forming. Forming means choosing the right people to be on your team. The second is storming. Storming is where you, everybody on the team who has formed, everybody voices their opinion all at the same time. It could be loud, it could be cacophonous, it could be unruly, but it’s essential for everybody to get their points across cuz that’s what leads to the third phase, which is norming.
Norming means bringing out of the storm, all the different rules and standards that you’re gonna be able to use in order to create the team. And then ultimately performing. Performing is after you’ve formed nor stormed and normed. Now it’s time for the team to do set out, to do. So let’s look at this in the context of a chiropractic practice and figure out exactly what we would need to do. Well, let’s look at forming. How do you know which players you need? You probably remember when you were back in chiropractic college, you were asked to do an exercise where you traced a drop of blood from the heart to the hand and then back, or where you trace the nerve impulse from the spinal cord down to your big toe and back. Well, you need to do the very same thing with your team. But instead of a drop of blood or a nerve impulse, let’s think about a patient.

The patient is going to go through certain phases and you are the one who has to determine what kind of team you need. So they’re gonna call the office. You need somebody to answer the answer the phone at the front desk. They’re going to arrive at the office. You have to have somebody who’s going to show them, sit over here, fill out this paperwork. You doctor will be with you in a minute, and so on. You might need somebody in the back who is going to help you take care of people. You might need somebody in a business office who’s going to help you keep track of the money, do this drop of blood exercise and you’ll be able to figure out what players you need. And that’s the secret to forming. Now, storming, everybody realizes that even if you are the head of the team, you wanna make sure that you have everybody’s input, cuz you want everyone to feel like they have a stake in the development of the team and in the performance of the team.

So you must hear out all of the different players to find out what they have in mind. In the absence of that, it’s just a dictatorship. And there’s nothing really wrong with that in most contexts, except it doesn’t make the players on the team feel like they’re part of the team. The whole point of this mastermind, the whole point of this thrive in five, is to find a way to be able to cause the team to feel fully engaged and connected. So you hear out what everybody has to say, even if it’s ridiculous, even if it doesn’t fit with the grand scheme of things, you hear it out cuz everyone must have a chance to vent their spleen and to talk about what they have in mind. Now, once you do that, now as the leader, you can bring together the salient ideas, the critical positive ideas that came out of the storm, that’s norming, where you create the rules and standards out of everyone’s input, where you now create the policies and procedures whereby you’re going to function as a team and ultimately that leads to performing where you as a team get to do all the things that you would wanna do.

That’s the reason that you formed, it’s the reason you went through storming. It’s the reason you normed, and now you’re ready to perform. Now, a few words to the why’s, storming is messy. It’s inconvenient, and it’s not especially comfortable, but it’s essential except in the, in the situation where the leader just decides, this is the way we’re gonna do everything and nobody has any input. But you’ll find that often it’s hard to build and maintain team under those circumstances unless you only attract people who are dedicated to follow. If you want creative, dedicated, entrepreneurial flavored people, you want to give them an opportunity to be able to speak their peace, to contribute to the body of knowledge, and then you as the leader, get to norm the standards and then ultimately, it takes you to the place where you’re performing. Now, what’s important about this, what’s important about it is if you and your team are going to function to help as many people as possible, then you’re gonna want to have all the most contemporary, modern distinctions on how to do that.

There’s a concept called the six essential strategies and the six Essential Strategies. I’m not gonna go into the detail of that right now, but if you want, you’ll be able to run your camera over a QR code that should manifest on my screen momentarily, and you’ll have those six strategies available to you. You will learn what the most successful businesses and the most successful chiropractors do by accessing this QR code. It’ll take you to a landing page where you will learn six essential strategies that will help you to become immensely effective in practice and in life. Truthfully, it’s not limited to chiropractic, but as chiropractors, you’ll be able to use these ideas to great advantage, to help as many people as possible and to make as much money as possible for your future and for the future of the people that you care about. So this is cutting edge material. I hope you’ll, I hope you’ll go ahead and access it. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and I do appreciate you watching Thrive in Five. This is Dr. Dennis Perman, signing off for now.

Checkout our other Thrive In Fives

Don’t forget to learn about our Practice Growth Calculator