Ben Lynch: G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to improve practitioner performance. We're diving into mentoring your therapists. And trust me, you'll want to hear Hannah's take on how a simple shift in your pre-mentoring structure can lead to more accountable practitioners. Plus stick around for when we discuss how to ensure your mentoring actually leads to tangible outcomes.

Hannah Dunn: One of the biggest changes recently has been just renaming it from supervision to mentoring.

Ben Lynch: We want team members to be problem solvers, not just sharing all of the problems.

Hannah Dunn: I think if you talk to any OT or physio or speechy, they'll basically say that they expect to have an hour of mentoring a week or a fortnight. I think if we stop and say, why do we do it that way? Yeah, that one, three, one is really important in relation to creating that independence.

Ben Lynch: What is one problem? What are your three proposed solutions? What is your one recommended solution of those three?

Hannah Dunn: We were in a session and they said X, Y and Z and we're like, that's what Hannah says. And I'm like, yeah, that's what Hannah says because Clinic Mastery taught Hannah to say that, right?

Ben Lynch: Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinic's policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And, in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email hello@clinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. Let's get into the episode. All right. It is episode 373. My name is Ben Lynch. I'm again joined by Hannah Dunn, Director of DOTS and OT Service in Melbourne. You were just in my neck of the woods in the beautiful McLaren Vale, having a meet up with some friends and some colleagues. Just tell listeners how good it is down south here in Adelaide.

Hannah Dunn: It is beautiful. It was really nice. And there was a little festival on the water of food that unfortunately for those vendors, it was pouring with rain, but we went over and had something to eat and drink, which was good. It is beautiful. Just being able to walk around and have access to so many different wineries. Always a win.

Ben Lynch: It is sensational, you know, like 45 minutes really from the CBD down south through McLaren Vale, up north through the Barossa, we're spoilt for choice, and then maybe 30 minutes and you're in the Adelaide Hills. You know, it is God's country here in Adelaide. I know Melbourne folk tend to think that, you know, it's just a small country town, but it's beautiful. It's beautiful. And that's why we're hosting our 2027 Summit here in Adelaide when it's just peak festival season. The big golf tournament will be on, there'll be like the Fringe Festival, maybe close to Woon Adelaide as well. It's where South Australia gets its tagline as the festival state, because it all happens in March. Anyway, you can hit us up for some tickets and members, make sure you claim your massive discount on the tickets there. Now, before we get into it. There's a couple of episodes that link to this conversation that we're going to have today that are worth sharing for folks. So I'm going to share my screen. The first one is episode 333. We called it the end of year review that every high performing clinic owner prioritizes. So this is looking at every therapist. how much they generated and how much you paid to them with all entitlements included to get an understanding as to who's really a good return on investment. And there's always nuance around the culture addition, but go check that one out. The other one that we did was episode 348, why focusing on results alone won't fix team performance, though we are going to speak a lot about the mentoring component and how that leads to progress. The other episode was episode 353, why most CPD continuing professional development doesn't change clinic performance. Hannah, you revealed what you do at DOTS and how you make sure the CPD you commit to has a direct link back to the development of that individual practitioner. That was a fantastic walkthrough. And today is going to be very similar to that. We're going to emphasize the mentoring, the one-to-one supervision, the conversations that you have in your regular check-ins. Now, these are part of the podcast, which we deliver to you for free, and we'd love a review. We publish a show every week, but if you could give us a review on Apple or Spotify, And for the members that are tuning in, many members tune in, I'm showing now the learning portal. And you can see on my screen there's 23 modules here that relate to your mentoring rhythms, the structure pre, during, and post. Go check them out. Make sure you've installed a number of the systems that we use in your mentoring, some of which we will discuss today. But the actual substance, the things you implement are available to you there in the learning portal. Alright, so Hannah, I think our previous conversation that was most close to this around the CPD, we were sort of challenging this idea that, hey, you spend all this time and money on CPD in the clinic, but how can you actually look back and say that that's moved the needle, that's actually created progress or change? The competency, the confidence of your team is better. And it just put a bit more of a return on investment lens on your CPD. In a similar way, I want to have a conversation with you about mentoring, like one-to-one and different people have different structures, whether it's tied in with supervision, whether it's just specifically one-on-one sessions that you have with a therapist. But let's go into what are some of the things that you feel are essential to mentoring therapists and that leading to actual outcomes?

Hannah Dunn: I think today's a really good conversation because I think one of the things that I commonly hear when I'm coaching is, we provide so much support and we're doing so much for our therapists. And I guess my question becomes like, what does that really mean and what does that look like? And I think for us, one of the biggest changes recently has been just renaming it from supervision to mentoring. Like I think it has a different, um, feel to it that when you're mentoring.

Ben Lynch: Tell me, yeah, why, what, what happened?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, it feels like a partnership rather than supervision that feels like I'm coming in to be supervised by you, so you need to sort of run it. Whereas when we called it mentoring and sort of spoke about the different terms, we felt that mentoring was more a collaborative approach that was really important that the mentee was really taking action ownership and that there was more guidance occurring rather than direction.

Ben Lynch: I realize that we often talk about the language being subtle, but perhaps significant in terms of changing behaviours and attitudes towards certain things, whether it's renaming the waiting room to the welcome room and the mindset that your receptionists sort of carry through and how they behave there, through to, as you're suggesting, supervision to mentoring. If I'm understanding you, it sounds like Maybe you're expecting some behavioural changes from your team to be more active in that process rather than passive and like, or like I'm telling you what to do in supervision. Is that correct?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think it just has that shift of them feeling more empowered and it does feel like, you know, that business owners get mentored and that new grads get supervision. We don't want to feel like we're watching you or creating some learn dependency that you need me to do this. So while there is some supervision aspects to mentoring, depending on the level of the clinician, we want to build that out. It's one of those situations we do what we do because we've always done it. Like I think if you talk to any OT or physio or speechy, they'll basically say that they expect to have an hour of mentoring a week or a fortnight. Like that's just what we get and that's just what we do. Whereas I think if we stop and say, why do we do it that way? Like, why is it that way? Is that because it's clinically proven to be the most effective way to deliver support or is there other ways we could go about this? Now, we absolutely provide fortnightly our mentoring in DOT, but it does make me question, and we are talking about this currently, about whether that is the most effective way to get the outcomes because it is a one-size-fits-all in a way, which we know is not necessarily the way we want to support our teams.

Ben Lynch: interesting. I really want to go down the one-size-fits-all line, but let's just go to the outcomes that you spoke to because that sounds like a reasonable place to question, well, is what we're doing helping us progress according to those outcomes? Those could be different depending on the clinic type. It could be career stage, like you said, a new graduate, different from a senior therapist. How do you think about the outcomes or what are the outcomes that you're referring to? Is it like related to patient satisfaction, patient outcomes?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I think we're thinking about one also about how they're turning up to mentoring. So like one of the big shifts that we had was when I joined Clinic Mastery, you know, we used to have supervision and mentoring where you just came, like it was booked in at 11.30 and you just went and saw them at 11.30 and then you kind of got into whatever it was you wanted to talk about. There wasn't a lot of structure. Whereas now, just like with the members that we coach, Ben, we have a focus sheet, they answer those questions and even more recently, which is a change that some of us have made in Clinic Mastery too, there's a prompt that comes to their channel in Slack that they now just fill out and therefore it's all in the one place and it's right in front of you and it also provides that reminder to get it done. and also holding people accountable that if that's not done, that in the first five minutes of the session that we talk about what is top of mind, where do we want to go and what are we doing and what's a win. I think when we're seeing that people are being proactive, they're bringing their questions, they're you know, really engaging and then they progress through to a point where they've always been proactive but the questions just aren't there as much or we're kind of filling the time that we have because we've booked it in. So, that's when I think we need to be thinking and one of the trigger points that we want to be thinking about is this something that we need to review. Maybe it's not the very review the frequency but the duration. Maybe it's that we review that it's half an hour instead of an hour or 45 minutes and trying to keep that tighter. Also, when you talk about what are the measurable outcomes that you're looking for, it's about are they achieving and working independently? So, are we still reviewing reports? Are we still having to prompt calendar? Are we still having to look at the numbers and prompt them around what their numbers mean and that they've got shortfalls? So as long as someone is meeting KPIs, then we can be a little bit more, and all those other things we just spoke about, a little bit more flexible maybe in the way in which we work. And no one on our team do we not have no supervision. And there's not a point that they get to where it's like, no, you don't need mentoring at all. Everyone of course has mentoring, but it's just about whether it's, um, for the hour, 45, whether it's fortnightly or monthly potentially, but no further out than monthly.

Ben Lynch: So would you say with the mentoring structure, it's largely about supporting the team members to fulfil their role, meaning that we've got some expectations in a role description, position description, and the one-on-ones allow us to basically make sure that we're checking in, that they're ticking off essentially everything they need to do to succeed in their role. Would you say that's how you think about the one-on-ones in mentoring or is there something different to kind of the main objective of having these in the diary?

Hannah Dunn: I would say that is step one, that step one is making sure that they're fulfilling their role. But I think step two is that it creates a space to have conversations that may not have happened otherwise. So maybe there's something from a cultural perspective that's niggling at them that It feels like a big deal to make a time to bring it to you, but if they're already sitting in front of you in mentoring or one of the team who's a team leader, it's like, oh, by the way, this sort of thing came up, wasn't really sure what to do about it, but this is what I did and this is how it goes. And I think that's the conversations that we miss out on when we don't have good structured, regular check-ins. And I think then the next stage is we also want to look at career progressions, not just what they're achieving now, but what is their next phase? Where are we training them to go? And where do we want to extend them a little bit more? Because I think without mentoring, without people bringing their things and say, hey, look, I want to look at being a mental health OT and I want to work and look in this area. But then there's also the side where other people know things about you that you don't necessarily know about yourself. And maybe it's someone else saying to you like, yeah, great, we can do that. But also we've noticed you're really good working with X, Y, and Z client. Is that an area in which you want to extend your skills? Or we really are looking at you to be our next coordinator or team leader. You know, we'd love to upskill you in those areas so that you're ready even when a role becomes available.

Ben Lynch: Oh, there's so much goodness here to unpack. Very keen to do so. Let's go to the self-reflection element that you touched on that seems to be a key link, I think, to the One, reliance on the owner or the mentor feeling. We often hear them say, I feel like I'm always having to drive these people to perform or to level up. It feels like there's a big reliance on me to make sure they tick off these things on their to-do list. It'd be great if they stepped up and took more ownership. And to your point also of the subtle shift of supervision to mentoring and it being collaborative. We use a focus sheet. There are many forms, literally, that you could use, but we typically use a Google form. You mentioned a Slack thread. It's a set of questions that a team member is going to answer before the mentoring session so they come prepared. Ideally, to avoid what you called out, which is so true of many mentoring sessions, is you kind of just rock up and it's like, What's top of mind? And typically it's a tough client. You know, I got this complex case I need to work through and sure that's worthwhile solving and coaching them through that. But it often means there's never any of this proactive stuff that you're talking about of career progression and CPD planning and how are we helping you grow and evolve. I want to just come back to the idea of the structure of the actual mentoring session, because you said we could play with variables, the frequency, the duration, who's leading it. Let's talk to the structure. Not that there's some absolutely right structure, but what have you found useful in balancing in those times the ability to have time to talk about the, as you said before, the cultural thing that's been top of mind, but they're not going to book a meeting, so there's an outlet for that. There's an outlet for… Celebrating progress is a, there's an opportunity to talk about where their CPT goes moving forward. There's so many of these things that come into kind of the melting pot of the mentoring session. So talk to me about the structure, the elements of the structure of the actual sessions that you found useful for allowing those different types of conversations to come up.

Hannah Dunn: Yeah. So we've had a few variations, as you said, there's lots of forms in which they can be. What we're trialling at the moment is that it's just really short. So it's what is your win, which we think is important because sometimes we can get so stuck in the mindset of everything's hard. And so reminding ourselves about celebrating those wins. Then having what is top of mind and there are prompts in there. Like, is it about policy? Is it about team? Is it about procedures? Is it about clients? Like what is top of mind? Uh, have you booked into professional development and what is your PD plan looking like? We definitely have it written out, but just fortnight to fortnight. And then recording our discussion and recording our actions really clearly. And that is as complex as the one is currently. Previously, we've had questions around how does team feel at the moment? What are your energy levels like? What's your team's energy levels like? Which is beneficial when there's a problem, but what we actually find is that it just starts to, well, what we found is that it just takes up time that maybe The amount of time it's relevant is not equal to the amount of time it's not relevant. And so just having a prompt in the top of mind, is there anything around team has been enough for the minute. I think, yeah, whatever structure works and just knowing that you can play around with it and add questions in and pull questions out. At the moment, our focus is on calendars again, and just making sure that there's good flow. Cause we've had some short staffed. um, moments in our admin team. And so a question to our, uh, therapist at the moment is just around, uh, is there anything you want to address with your calendar or is it filling in flow? And so we swap that one question out every couple of weeks or months, depending on what we want to train or support the team around. So it's a really live document. And I know that I've spoken before around us pulling our mentoring back to just two clinicians in our clinic rather than there being a lot more because we hadn't necessarily done training well previously. But I think that's been really helpful for us to get consistent on this. And now we're at the point in which we're looking to train some other team to bring them back into this fold because things have been more automated and systemized.

Ben Lynch: Amazing. I think that helps, right? We've talked so many times on previous episodes about typically you take your best therapist and make them the mentor to the other therapists on the team, but the skills, the art of mentoring is you know, unique in itself. And so if we don't have some systems in place, we're throwing them in the deep end and they may not be effective. They're just having these conversations. They don't get sort of control over where are we going with all of this. One of the things that this self-reflection pre-mentoring session really does is, it solves a bit of the accountability piece. Often, you know, clinicians will say, we spoke about that with our team members six weeks ago, they haven't done anything about it, or we forgot about it. And so, if you've carefully structured some of this preparation, then the accountability is taking ownership by the practitioner in this instance to review, or have I completed all of the actions from the previous session? You know, we've used a question like that, or what do you need help with in order to complete the actions from, you know, the previous session or from your plan, whatever it might be. So, it really helps. throw it back onto the team member, the practitioner in this instance. Another one that we've often looked at and referenced is the 1-3-1 model, which is we want team members to be problem solvers, not just sharing all of the problems. So the one is, what is one problem or challenge that you're faced with at the moment? What are your three proposed solutions? And then what is your one recommended solution of those three? And that might be sufficient. We might actually go with it, or we might sort of coach and guide them on some alternative options. But that is a useful part of the mentoring framework or coaching framework as well, is helping people become problem solvers as well.

Hannah Dunn: The other thing that we hear a lot is I think there's a big difference between we have mentoring once a fortnight and that's the only contact and support that we get versus I get mentoring once a fortnight and I've also got professional development that we get to attend in house once a fortnight and we've got external mentors and I've also got an open door policy with this person. so on and so on. I think while both of those are very different situations, I think they can both be problematic. I think sometimes we get to the end of where someone says, yeah, we are fortnightly mentoring plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, and we've actually found ourselves in a situation where we've created this learned dependency where people can't actually get anything done without checking in with you or without letting you know and seeking that praise. And yeah, that 131 is really important in relation to creating that independence and also separating out like what is the dollar value of the amount of support we're providing versus them being able to see clients at that time. But also, are we overcompensating and is it truly support or are we just wanting to be able to market ourselves in that way to say, look at everything we do?

Ben Lynch: Well, very interesting point. I, you know, from time to time really enjoy going on to SEEK and looking at job ads in different professions. I was on it this morning. And quite notably, a lot of clinics are promoting their mentoring and training as like they sort of put it front and center as a key selling point for the next generation to come in. And I understand why, but we also see a wild variety on the back end because we get to see inside a lot of clinics. Um, and so it's quite interesting as you're pointing out that maybe some of the challenges we see from team members, practitioners down the line of like, they're not hitting their strides, they're burned out and it's like, you're hardly seeing anyone and, or, or they keep coming back for more and more training and they're not doing enough doing. How much of that is, you know, in the communication on the recruitment side, the screening side, there's, there's a whole bunch of. you know, filters and elements and systems that go on there. But it's such a key thing that's advertised when we're trying to attract the next generation of practitioners. So if I come back to the. At the end of the day, at the end of the quarter, the end of the year, how do you know that your mentoring, the mentoring component is actually leading to results? How do you want to define that? Do you connect the performance development plan or the CPD plan with mentoring? Do you just anchor it to one KPI? Is it several? How do you look back on a period of time and go, yeah, we think the mentoring we're providing is leading to great progress. How do you make that assessment?

Hannah Dunn: Formally, at the moment, we don't, but you've raised a good point that we probably need to. But if I was to think about how we would be doing it or what we do just throughout the year, it's around us thinking about, are we having an impact? Are we seeing change? And is that clinician progressing? And the reason in which we pulled everything back was because it was clear our mentoring wasn't working. What wasn't working was that we weren't hearing about things at a leadership level that we felt like we could have made changes to previously. We felt like our mentors didn't have the level of skill to support them. So what's working now and what we would assess as being successful is that our mentors have the skills to support quite complex problems, that they're not having to seek leadership support until it is at a point that they are out of their depth. And also that the progression in which we're seeing with calendar changes is at a level that we would want to see that people are at full capacity. I think also retention. I was in a group mentoring this morning and we were all saying our wins. And one of my wins is that we've got Emma coming back to the team and Emma's been on the team for eight years, she's been on mat leave and it's her second time returning from mat leave. And I think that speaks volumes. And I think that is a sort of thing with when we talk about team retention, that that is directly linked to mentoring as well, because we've definitely had moments where we've lost someone from the team that we seriously reflected on. If you had had better mentoring, would you still be here? And I think if we're honest with ourselves, the answer is yes. And it's not the mentor's problem. It's not the mentor's fault. It's our fault for not providing the right training to that mentor. But it just really highlighted to us that something needed to change.

Ben Lynch: And yeah, was there like a common thread? Maybe this is just a one-off sort of person or case, but without going into too much detail, was there something like, well, this was maybe it was a personal connection side that was really missing or what did you learn from that experience?

Hannah Dunn: What we learned is that we were asking too much of our mentors to focus on the billable side of stuff and not having our team leaders support that to allow our mentors to be more focused on the clinical side of things. But what was really happening is the mentors were coming in, there was a couple, and just sort of saying, OK, what do you want to talk about? OK, we'll talk about that. And then that was it. There was no, it was what you initially said around just seeing it as an opportunity to discuss cases. and not an opportunity to actually support them as a professional in that professional landscape. It was more so like, yes, you're ticking the box of seeing some clients and we've problem solved some clients. And that's not what we want from our mentors. It's not just to hear what's not working or what you need help with, um, mentees. It's what, what we want to do is challenge you and stretch you and not just leave you just coming and ticking a box of we've seen this person and not having the skills to recognize when someone was feeling overwhelmed and that then therefore how do you fix that with putting systems in place and ensuring they understand the resources available to them.

Ben Lynch: So how have you tackled that from maybe a systems level so that it's more intentional or there's, you know, anchors in the diary or the structure so that those things, you minimize the chance that those things don't just sort of fall by the wayside? Do you run like a mentoring rhythm? So every month has a theme, every quarter, like how do you make sure those things don't just Yeah, we did it and then, oh gee, we used to do that nine months ago, but it's just fallen off the radar. How do you make sure that your mentors cover those important things?

Hannah Dunn: Yes. We have a mentors meeting once a month, which we check in around there's common themes that are coming up between the mentors and then also have a mentor training program once a month where we target specific skills that we feel like the mentors need. So we might be talking to them about what are the resources or what do we find when people aren't completing their notes? How are we supporting them to ensure that we can get that done? And those strategies, making sure that we're all aware of those and sort of doing like case studies on what are some of the common themes or issues that we're seeing. So that's how we're targeting it at the moment. And I know there's clinics that have like emerging leaders programs and those sorts of things where they're making sure they train people on those areas, like being able to read certain books or like the coaching habit. Yeah, making sure that they have the skills to understand how important silence is and how important it is, as you were saying, not to provide the solutions.

Ben Lynch: Yes. That's a really great point and one that we often see in the community, right? Especially when, say, a clinic owner decides to access like a mentor mastery or a practice leaders where we can help with some of their training in those leadership roles. But they kind of just like put them in, they enroll them in that and they go, off you go. And there's no meeting, as you said, between the leader and the clinic owner. It's just like, all right, go and do your thing. So I love just even that connection point that you've got regularly with those mentors or leaders. to know how they're going, what are you hearing, what are some of the things we want to do in the next month. It might be let's make sure we've got an up-to-date desire statement for every one of the team members or that we're talking about their CPD plan for the next year.

Hannah Dunn: I think there's two things, sorry. Go for it. Two things that you just said that I really don't want to skip over is that yes, we've got the CDP, like their plan is in the same place in which their dashboards are. So they've always got that document open and it's in front of them, which I think is important that you've got a system that keeps those goals at the forefront. But the other thing that you just mentioned is a mentor mastery and the practice leaders program. And I've had both of my leaders in those programs and one of the biggest things that has come out of them is they will say, we were in a session and they said X, Y and Z and we're like, that's what Hannah says. And I'm like, yeah, that's what Hannah says because Clinic Mastery taught Hannah to say that. And just creating that common language, like it is really helpful. Like simple things, like you mentioned the 131, it's like that's the sort of stuff that will come up in mental mastery and practice leaders. And then when you've mentioned it to them, they're like, oh, we've actually heard of that before. And so it creates such good consistency across the team that it's that training that while you say it's important that you meet, it's also the language and the key learnings that they will take away that will help you as a leader also lead them because they get it. It's not you saying it all the time, it's someone else giving them the same sort of direction.

Ben Lynch: It's a really good point. I think that's the whole part of like CPD or training together in general is being able to create a common understanding, you know, just simple terms as well that were like, ah, yes, I know what you mean when you say, have we got a desire statement or a CPD plan? We understand what our version is in our clinic. There's a consideration here around the outcomes of the mentoring that I often think about. And like you said, it doesn't have to be that every month we're doing this, but periodically, it's worth just asking the question, as you said, for the time that we spend taking people offline, recovering their wages, to do this mentoring. Can we actually say that it is leading to changes? Or are we just fulfilling a promise that we set in recruitment? And like you said, we're just doing it because that's the way we've always done it. And there's a couple of things that come to mind, which are sort of some degree of self-rating of competence and confidence from therapists. I think if a mentor is really helping, a practitioner develop in certain areas. They're helping their confidence and their competence, you know, whether it's in a clinical assessment or condition or understanding marketing side, understanding the KPIs, the numbers, and just being able to say, okay, over the next month or three, we're going to be focusing on a certain area. And I want to get a gauge, almost like a simple pre and post How confident, how competent do you feel in these areas? Where are some gaps? And then let's work on that over the next three months and then let's reassess. It's probably not foolproof, but I think it just starts to get you thinking in outcomes and going, okay, we don't want these mentoring sessions to drift off into another direction for several in a row. and then go, we didn't follow through on that outcome that we were trying to achieve, which was to help you feel super competent in seeing this type of client that comes through the door. And the other element is actually asking the team, if we break down the mentoring that we provide, how important is it to you that we provide X and how satisfied are you about X in these different areas? Because we might be, I think, So often we think we've got a really good idea for what to do, a system, a change. Turns out if you removed it, people wouldn't care too much. But for some reason you think to your point, well, we just do it because we do it this way. So I think there's a good opportunity actually to get some feedback in a structured format, in a survey. How important is this to you, this element of mentoring and how satisfied are you? And are there any comments for how we could improve the value that it provides?

Hannah Dunn: I think two things that I really hate that I hear from people at times is we move mentoring all the time because something else comes up, like a client visit is way more important. Don't do that. Like it, it sends a message that it's not valuable and it's not worth as much as a client appointment. And the other thing is, oh, my clinicians turn up and they always say, I don't know what to talk about, or I don't have anything to say. What will stop that is that pre-work, the preparation, and when the preparation isn't done, doing it at the start and eating into that time. So, yeah. And I love the way that clinic mastery will always say, well, what are the best doing? The best are showing up and they're prepared for their sessions. And that's how we progress.

Ben Lynch: It's a great point because we've had that experience many times where a meeting gets shifted and shifted and then all of a sudden people just go, well, it's not that important. And then they start to just slacken off and you go, oh, how did we get here? And it's because we moved it too many times. So I love that. Do you connect the CPD stuff that we spoke about on that previous episode, where you talk about, okay, what's part of your development plan? Do you connect that with the mentoring in any way? Sort of the structure of the outcomes towards it, slash how do those things kind of come together?

Hannah Dunn: So if someone wants to go to a professional development course, they need to take it to their mentor and they need to have a discussion in mentoring first. And on our request to attend a PD, it has a tick box to say, I've discussed this in mentoring and we agree that this is part of my learning and development plan. And so they're already acknowledging that they have already had that conversation because as management, we need to approve it potentially from a financial, but also we want to know that there's not eight people on the team who have applied for the same PD. If we had individual mentors approving it, we could end up with too many people there or not feel like it's the right balance. And so, um, they need to have discussed it there. It needs to be on their plan. So they need to pull up their plan if they're not already all over it and know exactly where it fits in and then they need to apply for it. So, and then they also create a plan before they attend it about how they're going to feed it back to the team. Is it going to be a handout? Is it going to be a PD plan? And sometimes they won't know the answer to that beforehand, but we just want it to be a thought. Like, we want you to think about what it might be. And you might just say, look, I think I'm going to create a handout about this. And then when you get there, you're like, actually, I'm going to do a half hour presentation at one of our team times or whatever it is. And so that can change, but we just want to make sure that they're aware that they will be feeding that back and we will be, your mentor is all over it. And that's how we make those decisions.

Ben Lynch: just the exercise of having to be thoughtful about how am I going to apply this and how am I going to help the rest of the team sort of level up in these areas because I came to this workshop or conference or whatever the case may be. I think that's super valuable. for me, is coming back to the preparation and the intentionality over how we're going to help you grow and develop, just like you would perhaps for a patient. Hopefully, people have got a treatment plan or a management plan with some goals attached to it. Same is true if I'm hearing you in a mentoring capacity. It's like, how are we going to help you? What are some key outcomes that we want to work on? Of course, You know, you come to the next mentoring session and you've had a really tough client or two and we need to help you with that. Okay. But we don't want to lose sight of the bigger picture and have a bunch of sessions that are really ad hoc. We actually want to have a plan. So what you're saying is maybe it's over the quarter, maybe it's six or 12 months. These are the key things we're going to work on supporting you with. Coming back to that mentoring side of things, that mentoring promise at recruitment. And then how do we, in our structure of the mentoring through the reflection forms beforehand and the structure of the session, make sure that we actually give enough time and space for those things to be talked about? In terms of making sure things get done, that's the accountability, the actions post-mentoring. Because I hear a lot of people say, we have great mentoring sessions. We were able to solve problems. But then I kind of look back and we had this great conversation six weeks ago, but I'm not sure anything changed. I'm not sure we actually did what we said we were going to do if there were clear actions. How do you account for that?

Hannah Dunn: I think you spoke to it before around saying that like, so if we've got all those actions there, whether it's a focus sheet and you can look at what the actions are above or in your Slack channel, whichever way you record them, it's so critical that you record not only what is going to happen, but who's responsible for that happening. And then, as you said earlier, asking, why didn't that happen? What were the barriers? Why didn't we see that change? And making sure that that's it. Yes, things fall off the radar. And yes, there is going to be times that you say, and, you know, acknowledge that, yes, that fell off the radar. We need to pick that back up. Or even just having a quick review of the last three mentoring sessions and seeing if there was anything that has fallen off. Really, yeah, the ways in which we try and keep it actionable.

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Hannah Dunn: I think the other thing that we do is, and toilet training for OTs is one of those things where we've got so many resources on our hub and on our drive, and there's so much knowledge in our team. And it's something that we work on so regularly that when someone puts in a request to go to an external PD about toilet training, my answer is, have you used all our internal resources first? And if the answer is no, then we need you to watch those videos that are there first. We need you to look at the handouts that we've already got. Because while we absolutely value external mentoring, and yes, we think that you need to go to some PD, could we better spend our time going to something that's more complex or, and yes, toileting can be complex, let's not get our OTs angry or anyone out there, but in regards to, is there different PD when we've already got the resources and support from those things within the, from those trainings externally? And if the answer is yes, we've done all of that, and there's clear reason why we want to go to this one, absolutely, we'll support it. But I think what we see commonly is people going to all these courses and never creating resources, never feeding back, and then it's team member after team member being paid to go to these sessions when we could have leveraged off someone else who had been previously before going. That's not to say you're never going to go, but it might be at a later date.

Ben Lynch: I love it. It's just coming back to if every decision is an investment decision and we're looking at a return on that investment. One of the obvious or natural places to go is financial, but it can be in many other ways. We're going to produce some of these resources that allow the rest of the team to level up and improve their competency in serving kids with toilet training challenges. That's really useful, just asking some of those questions. How can we make the most of this investment? And looking at what happens afterwards in a CPD case. That's a terrific way to think about it. I love it.

Hannah Dunn: And the other thing that comes to mind that we hear is, oh, so-and-so just never turns up to mentoring or they're always moving out. And our first question is, do you have a process and a policy written about this? Because without that, there's nowhere to fall back. So you need to have in your practices the process and the policy, the expectation around what does this look like? Because if it's not written down, it's very hard to keep people accountable.

Ben Lynch: And I think to your point earlier of making it really personalized, at the end of the day, I often think what's in it for me from the perspective of the other person. And I think if you can answer that really as clearly as you possibly can, or even you just literally ask the question depending on the context and whatnot, Hopefully then you can frame it in a way that they see the relevance and the importance. It's like, you want a career progression towards being a mentor or a supervisor or an owner, or you want to be able to vary your caseload in these certain ways. Well, let's work towards a development plan where we can justify doing that, or you're in a place where you're competent enough to be able to do it. Whatever the case is, how can we make this as relevant? to the individual by understanding how they might think. I like to do this mental exercise and assume they're super selfish. What would they say like, no, I'm only doing it if X, Y, and Z, and try and operate at least from that perspective in designing it or communicating it. That doesn't mean you're guaranteed to make it work. We'll make mistakes, but I think it's a reasonable place to start the thinking from when coupled with a good process and policy around it as well, that helps.

Hannah Dunn: The, um, this is a bit of a side tangent, but, um, Travis, one of our other coaches shared with a member who I just happened to be in their channel and see him share this. They asked about how do you manage a short-staffed situation? And he just replied with like this process and policy that I was like, who even thinks about having a process around short-staffed? And it was so good. It just like outlined, you know, like there are things that are going to fall to the wayside. These are the things that we deprioritize, like emails might take longer to reply. And then are you also looking after yourself here? Are there ways you can look after yourself like, um, and know that this is just a season? Like, and I just, it really made me reflect and think. It's everything. We need to have everything written because these, like those conversations I have time and time again. And I was like, imagine if I'd had this written down and was just able to give it to our admin team or give it to our OTs and say, it's just a season. It's just, and we know what we need seasons.

Ben Lynch: well, you're what core value coming back to like good communication solves everything. Is that how you say it?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, that's how we say it now.

Ben Lynch: That's how you say it now. And it's always humbling when, and you and I've had these conversations online, offline of like, when you go back to errors in misunderstanding or miscommunication, whether because it wasn't done or It was done, but it was done poorly and you just, you go, ah, it all just comes back to, and at the end of the day, a policy or a procedure, it's all just communication, right? So, there's just a good lesson. More and more over time, I have this bias towards writing things down because things get lost or, you know, we had this phone call about something. I thought you said this. No, I said it like that. And there's no sort of like, ah, this was the source of truth. This was the understanding afterwards. So, I think the more you can have a writing culture, the better it is or if you know using fantastic tools like we use Fathom a lot to automatically record things because you forget and it provides wonderful summaries and so on and so forth. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here. I'm just looking back at my notes. I've taken a heap of notes here on the mentoring side of things. I love talking about the mentoring and CPD side of a practitioner's experience because it's something that a lot of clinic owners do market in their recruitment process. They realize it's important for a number of reasons to deliver great experiences for patients by having competent team members. And it's also quite a joy to teach and mentor and coach team members. I think this is something that I've seen a lot in clinic owners. They love teaching. They love helping other health professionals. So if you can have a structure around it, it's definitely more rewarding, more fulfilling and gets better results.

Hannah Dunn: Yes.

Ben Lynch: Well, as we put a bow on the episode, we're probably going to see you in a few months' time, I'm sure, back on the pod, but you are taking a break from the pod. Thank you so much for all your contributions, all the stories and all the processes that you've shared, but I'm excited. I'm sure we'll have you back on the pod in a little bit. Thanks. It's been a ride. Thank you. Well, you can head over to clinicmastery.com/podcast for all of the show notes, all the links that we've spoken about, and go check out those previous episodes that we've talked about as well. That sort of brings all of this together into a nice little system. All right, we'll catch you on another episode very soon. Bye-bye.

Hannah Dunn: See you later. Bye.