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.

Jack O'Brien: This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to develop leaders and reduce the reliance on you as the bottleneck in your clinic. We're diving into the three pillars that you need to get right in order to develop a healthy leadership culture. And trust me, you'll want to hear Andrew Daubney's take on leaders being friends with their teams. Andrew Daubney I labelled you as my number one talk at the summit.

Andrew Daubney: My talk was focusing on creating leadership teams with intent rather than hope.

Hannah Dunn: That says, leadership exists to uphold standards, maintain psychological safety and act early, and that quote was from Daubs at the summit.

Jack O'Brien: Leadership must be viewed as a responsibility, not a reward.

Andrew Daubney: I had tears as I was walking this out to the team.

Jack O'Brien: And what happened? And they left. And is that OK? That is perfectly fine. People do love a title. That's almost a yellow flag, right? If someone's pursuing a title… I mean, I was pretty excited when you said Hannah's our co-host.

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 clinics, 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. All right, let's get into the episode.

Jack O'Brien: Welcome back to another episode of the Grow Your Clinic podcast. I am your only host today, Jack O'Brien. With me, I have co-host Hannah Dunn, famous, infamous, not sure what WOC refers to you as, but we'll go with famous from D.O.T.S OT for children down in multiple locations in Melbourne. Welcome, Hannah. How are you? Thank you. Good, thanks. How are you? Yeah, fantastic. And joining us, our guest here today, Andrew Daubney owner of Rebound Health, exercise physiologist by trade. We won't hold that against you. And I'll say this, Daubs I labelled you as my number one talk at the summit, so I guess we can – sorry, Hannah. Sorry, Hannah.

Hannah Dunn: No, it's fine, because I actually also did the same, that I had all these notes that I was like, I've got to go back and watch the recording of this one, and I want to show my team this one.

Jack O'Brien: There you go. Undisputed world champion. We'll get you a belt for the next summit but your talk on leadership at the summit a couple of weeks ago was world-class and so we're looking forward to diving into that today. Welcome to the podcast, Daubs

Andrew Daubney: Thanks, mate. Happy to be here.

Jack O'Brien: Very exciting. So before we dive in, listeners, as you would be aware, you can always get the show notes, transcriptions, any downloads and next steps from this episode over at our website, which is this clinicmastery.com/podcacst If you want to work with Clinic Mastery or explore what our programs look like, see if there's a good fit, maybe you need to fill your books, grow your team, optimize your operations, then we can help to explore what that looks like. Send me an email, there ain't no AI bots in my inbox, so you can email me, that is jack at clinicmastery.com and a human will reply to you. I'd love to, before we get started, folks, welcome a couple of new members to the community. Who have we got here? We've got Richard, we've got Jord, we have Tom and Katie. So welcome to those folks. Also, a whole bunch of new Allie members or users, clinics. So welcome to Beck. Welcome to Geraldine, welcome to Lara, and welcome to Willem. There is a number there. So if you want to check out AllieClinics.com that's how you can dashboard your data, house your resources and playlists, and ultimately mentor your team. That is AllieClinics.com Hannah?

Hannah Dunn: Yes.

Jack O'Brien: Give me a score out of 10. How did I go with the intro in Ben's sentence?

Hannah Dunn: Very good. I liked getting a bit of engagement throughout it. So we can level Ben up if you're listening.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, I'm sure he will. I'm sure he will listen. So the summit, a couple of, let me tee this up. So at the summit, this is how it works for those who were not there. If you're not a member, then you weren't there because it's for our members only. But through across the two days, we have a range of keynote talks. We have a range of business owner only talks and practitioner or team member only talks. And then we have some summit sessions. These are rapid fire, short, sharp, and shiny multi-speaker panels. So it's kind of one key idea and then we get to grill the panel. Andrew Daubney was one of those and spoke to three pillars of high performing leadership teams. It was the leadership talk. of all leadership talk. So, Daubz, take yourself back to the hotel the morning of your talk. You're in the elevator and someone says to you, oh, we've got 16 floors. Give me the elevator pitch of what you're talking about today. What's the elevator pitch?

Andrew Daubney: The elevator pitch is that oftentimes leadership teams have come about without a set intent. They tend to have evolved over time and people end up in roles that they may or not be suitable for, but just as perhaps a way to retain people as opposed to what does the business actually need to thrive? What does the business need from a leadership team? So my talk was focusing on creating leadership teams with intent rather than hope.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, great. Well done and we've made it to the ground floor. So, okay, Hannah, I'm going to ask you, at what stage should a clinic, and you can define stage, revenue, team, appointments, et cetera, at what stage should a clinic owner start thinking about a leadership team where they go from just being themselves the solo leader to a team of leaders, maybe it's the second layer of management. What point do you think we should start thinking about that?

Hannah Dunn: I definitely think we need to think about it earlier than most people would be thinking about it. Like, I think we really want to be clear on where do we want our clinics to get to and what that will look like. Because what happens that we see so often is people get to the point where they've got full caseloads they're carrying and they don't have time to work on the business. So they don't even have time to think about leadership and it becomes reactive. But if we can do it when we're starting up and we're thinking about at what would it take me to get to a leadership point, then we have those triggers at front of mind clearer.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. Daubs is there a particular headcount, revenue, locations, like when should we start thinking about this?

Andrew Daubney: I would dump down Hannah's response there. I feel like it's just a – it is something that you should be thinking about all the time. Certainly, you know, there are There are financial points on the journey where if you're going to redistribute a team member's time from being purely clinical to, you know, looking after the team or working on projects or creating resources or supporting other members of the team that, you know, you do need to have oversight of your numbers to be able to make an informed decision. on that. But again, like to my point before that, I think it's better to plan what you want to do rather than to react to a situation where all of a sudden you've got no time, you're juggling all the balls and then you realize that, you know, your team members are not getting the, as much care and support as you want them to. And so you're reacting to that situation by bringing other leaders into the, into the clinic.

Hannah Dunn: And I think just on that, um, what we find is that practices, if they're not thinking about leadership, when they're recruiting their clinicians, they all of a sudden have this team that needs leadership. And then everyone feels like it should be someone in house, but sometimes that person isn't there. And so if we're thinking about it in recruitment, we can think actually the makeup of our team needs to include someone who I would think about putting in a leadership role.

Jack O'Brien: Uh, okay. I'm going to play contrarian, devil's advocate. What if we have a team full of practitioners that all want to lead? Because I know we see clinics sometimes that are too bloated or they jump to giving everyone a leadership title too soon. I think we've had this conversation about dogs, if I'm wrong, Hannah. Correct. This is a temptation of clinic owners to want to create pathways, to create opportunities, and all of a sudden, we've got this bloated middle management for a total headcount of like seven and a half people. So, I guess what we're talking about here is really where clinic owners go wrong, right? They don't think about it in recruitment or they give titles too soon. Andrew, have you seen much of that?

Andrew Daubney: I'm pretty sure we did that.

Jack O'Brien: Right, right. Okay. So, if we move on from like when, I'm going to share my screen, one of your slides from the session here, Daubs around why leadership teams should exist. And so, if you're watching on YouTube, you'll be able to see this. If you're listening across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, firstly, Give us a review or rating. We're watching you and we know that you haven't. But secondly, come and join us over on YouTube. You can see the notes here. But Daubz, for those listening, do you want to perhaps speak to some of these elements here of like why leadership teams should exist?

Andrew Daubney: The first reason why a leadership team should exist is to remove the founder or the owner as the bottleneck, right? Like, we have many, many things on our plates and systems should, if we invest time in creating systems, they should reduce some of the legwork that we need to do day-to-day. The second reason is to protect the culture. So, and I think this feeds into your point before, Jack, about not just elevating great practitioners into leadership roles, because a leadership role is more than just being a great practitioner. It is about supporting the business and upholding the standards and the culture and the values of the clinic when the owner or the founder is not in it day-to-day, week or whatever.

Jack O'Brien: And I'll interrupt you there. A mentor of mine, Dave, was talking about this recently in a personal context. But it's like when you are part of a team, you kind of agree to the culture. You agree or abide by it. But when you become a leader and you're responsible, your job is to protect and promote the culture. This isn't just a tick box. It's like, no, no, I am responsible for ensuring this culture is upheld, right?

Hannah Dunn: Can I give you a quote that I once heard? that says, leadership exists to uphold standards, maintain psychological safety and act early. And that quote was from Daubs at the summit himself. And I just loved that so much. I think it just resonated so much with me that that was what I wrote down and it just made me really think about like the psychological safety of our team and also the acting early was just so much more than like just thinking about leadership being standards-driven or… So, so true.

Jack O'Brien: And speak to the sustainability point there, Daubs. You know, really leadership is the scaffolding or framework upon which we can build, right?

Andrew Daubney: Oh, very much so. And again, I think this is one of the things that differentiates an excellent practitioner from a very competent leader is the acknowledgement that in a leadership role, you are responsible for your team's output, not just your own. You know, a lot of practitioners, particularly ABAs or physios or whatever, you know, we sit in our rooms, and there is a degree to which we are much more comfortable and accountable for the work that we do in a clinical role. But as you start to grow a team, and as people see you as a leader within that team, or you're promoted to a position of leadership within a team, then you become responsible for that, you become accountable for that. And some people, like leaders, that are natural, good leaders, thrive in that sort of environment where they are more than willing to accept responsibility for team members. And I lift people up to the standards that the clinic has, whereas others, they fall back and it's like, well, that's them, that's not me. I'm comfortable in myself and the output that I have, which is a trademark of a great practitioner, but maybe something that in a leadership role is they're going to struggle with.

Jack O'Brien: It reminds me of another quote, not from Andrew Daubney but from Pat Lencioni, obviously one of the guys that we speak about a lot around this podcast. He wrote a phenomenal book on the traits of an executive or traits of a leader. He says this, he says that, leadership must be viewed as a responsibility, not a reward. You don't earn leadership as a bonus or an incentive, right? Leadership is a responsibility, almost a burden that we willingly shoulder. And to your point, Andrew, I think that's a really key one not to skip by, that there are certain character traits or personality traits that would mean someone would fit the bill of a leader and others just won't. Yeah. rightly or wrongly, see the world through an entitlement lens or I deserve this leadership role and that's okay. But generally speaking, they're not the ones who'll stick around when the going gets tough, who'll take responsibility and own that accountability, right?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah. And something you spoke to at the summit in regards to the best clinicians are not always our leaders, which I think we know as practitioners often and through our experience. But the one thing that you spoke to, and I don't know if this was the exact point, but it's what it made me think of, is we're so used to in health that our performance is ranked on how well we get billable hours and see clinicians, that we don't have good markers for measuring what a good leader is. And that was so powerful to me because I know that our best clinicians aren't our leaders, but I hadn't thought about the fact that we rank our clinicians based on their usability, like how well they're seeing clients, that we don't focus on those other skills.

Jack O'Brien: So, are you saying there, Hannah, that the best performing practitioners, as far as their clinical excellence indicators go, they're not the ones that should automatically be promoted to leadership?

Hannah Dunn: Yes, and I think that's what Daubs is saying too.

Jack O'Brien: Right. It's a key message for clinic owners because Daubs we see this mistake all the time, right? Clinic owners promote the best practitioner. Of course, they deserve the leadership role and it's like, well, what if they don't have the right traits? So how do you start, Andrew, how do you start identifying and looking for some of those traits in your team?

Andrew Daubney: Couple of answers to that question. So the first one is a desire statement answer to that question. Do we see people putting into the documented version of themselves in three years time that I want to be in a leadership role? When people have articulated that, then it's a prompt for us to dig a little bit deeper and see why is that important to you? What sort of leader do you want to be? If you were a leader, how would you want your team to talk about you as a leader? And I think the answers to some of those questions allows us to work out, is this a sort of person that is going to thrive in a leadership role in our clinic? Or is this a conversation that we need to go like, you're a great practitioner. Keep doing that. teach clinical skills to other people as opposed to, you know, other leadership roles that we're sort of talking about.

Jack O'Brien: So you're literally asking those questions. They're not rhetoricals. You're exploring them in conversation.

Andrew Daubney: Very much so.

Hannah Dunn: And I think when we said that our best practitioners are not always the one spirit of leadership, the other thing can be true in which we can see people who have really good leadership, but they might not be able to manage their calendar well and things. And so we need to make sure that all those things line up. They might be our best performer, like one of our top performers, but not the top performer, but we absolutely want them to be doing the do so they can coach the others. I just don't want to skip over that and think, because I think that's a common thing we see.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. Again, I'll play contrarian, Daubs. There's someone on your team who exhibits obvious leadership qualities, but maybe they're not aware of it or they haven't verbalized it or put it in writing on their desire statement. To what degree do you suggest that or coax that out of them or do you wait for them to table it?

Andrew Daubney: No, no. We want to have a pipeline of leaders coming through. We don't want to end up with a key person situation where you have one person in a clinic that is very, very important and things will break if that person was to leave for some reason, which is why recruitment is very important and making sure we've got the right people coming into the clinics, but then have this pipeline and nurture people through that process of like, And we do this through our growth planning, so annual performance reviews for team members, where we're like, we're seeing this in you. Is this something that you feel like you would be interested in exploring? Could we give you some books to read? Could we give you some Grow Your Clinic podcast to listen to? Could we, like, help nurture this so that you can become the type of leader that we want to have in our clinic. Like, we can teach you the wrong, but we can't teach you – or it's much harder to teach you kind of the personality characteristics. Jon Matel, leadership author, talks about moral authority in that space, right? The idea that people are seen as a leader without having the title of a leader. Yes, you can act as a leader without being a senior or a team leader or this or that. And it's the behaviours of going the extra mile. One of our values of rebound is picking up the slack. You can do those things and people around you will see you as a leader before you have a title of a leader.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, that's right. We want people to exhibit those traits, behaviours, actions, outputs, outcomes before they change their Slack bio or their email signature. It's actually got nothing to do with your email signature. It's got to do with how you show up. By the way- People like a title. Sorry, Hannah. People do love a title. Oh, they love a title. In a way, I'm just thinking out loud, but that's almost a yellow flag, right? If someone's pursuing a title, for me, that's a flag to go, hmm, maybe I need to see if they're seeing leadership as a right or a reward rather than a burden or a responsibility.

Hannah Dunn: I mean, I was pretty excited when you said Hannah's our co-host.

Jack O'Brien: In fact, you're a co-host too.

Andrew Daubney: The result I get from you, Jack, all the time is that leadership is an act of service. run. It is not about elevating you above other people in the clinic or feeling that there is now some difference because I've got extra words on my business card or on my email signature. Leadership exists to serve the team. Again, there are people and personality characteristics and moral authorities is a big contributor to that of people that are likely to do well.

Hannah Dunn: Sorry, Jack, I feel like you've got a point. The thing I was going to say is two things. You spoke about doing some training with those people. A lot of the clinics that we work with, the best, what are they doing? They have what we call an emerging leaders program where they've got really good structures around that but now I've forgotten what the other thing was. The other thing about not elevating you above the team, one of the most common things that I find in my clinic and clinics I coach is everyone was on the same level and now one person's been elevated into a leadership role or whatever, if we're not, however we look at that. And they're all friends. And now we've got to navigate a different relationship as friends versus managers. And we do a lot of work around how do we separate those two. And I saw something, um, that resonated with me. It was probably an Instagram reel, if I'm honest, that was like, um, As a director of a company, you can't be friends with your team. And I was like, oh, that's really an interesting view. And I wonder what, like, what are the boundaries and where is that? I'd be keen to hear your view and think about it.

Jack O'Brien: Let's say that before, Hannah, you, do you agree or disagree? One word, agree or disagree?

Hannah Dunn: Disagree. But I think there is some merit to it. That sounds a bit like Peter Flynn. I disagree. Peter Flynn, see, you can make decisions.

Jack O'Brien: Well, as a high D personality, I was expecting you to have an opinion. Andrew, hard agree or disagree and you can give context as well.

Andrew Daubney: Yes, I disagree.

Jack O'Brien: Okay. So, people can be friends with their team, peers.

Andrew Daubney: I was talking with one of our team, our head of AP, Archie, about this because Again, I'm sure this is similar with your clinics, Hannah, that a lot of our new team members that come into the clinic get referred by existing team members in the clinic.

Hannah Dunn: Yes.

Andrew Daubney: And I feel like that's a good thing that people want to work here and they go and tell other people that you should work here.

Hannah Dunn: Yes.

Andrew Daubney: But when you do that, you end up with friendship groups that come in to the clinic.

Hannah Dunn: Yes.

Andrew Daubney: Artie was talking about this really well, because the way that he was framing it was that if I'm friends with someone, like if I'm friends with you, Hannah, or you, Jack, I can be honest with you. I can go to the pub and have a beer with you, but if you're, I don't know, you're late with your notes, you're not showing up the way that we intended, then my friendship allows me to be like, hey, what's going on here? And I think to your point beforehand, like when people try and like muddy the waters there or try and be like, well, when I walk through the doors of the clinic, I'm this person, but when I'm outside, I'm this other person. Yeah. Yeah. Difficult to navigate.

Hannah Dunn: Yeah. And sometimes we just name it, like we encourage, and this is, yeah, we've like, sometimes there's a lot of emotion involved in some of these relationships. And so sometimes we encourage just saying, Hey, I find this difficult conversation to have with you, particularly because of our friendship, but let's just have a chat around work. And, you know, as you said, we can be open and honest with each other.

Jack O'Brien: This is probably contrary to some of the more traditional thinking, but that's ultimately what we believe at CM and across all of our clinics is that leaders can be friends with their team. The point is that you get to make your own rules. We don't have to abide by someone else's arbitrary rules from culture bygone. We get to define what that looks like and how relationships play out. Andrew, how specific your talk was. If we move on through, you mentioned the moral authority piece. By the way, I don't want to skip by the little play on words from your little rebound value statement that you slid in there. You're like, we pick up the slack and that plays on the word rebound. And I really appreciate that. Rebounds like it's wonderful. Nevertheless, let's talk about moral authority. If I'm going to share the screen briefly for those watching along, can you speak to us about what you mean when you say moral authority?

Andrew Daubney: For us specifically, it is people in the business displaying the behaviours aligned with our values. And when people do that, when people share, when people uphold our standards, when people help other people to uphold our standards, What that leads to is what we were talking about before, is that leadership without a title. The idea that without giving people a specific name, that they are still recognized as a leader within the business. And what that allows for the future is that when that person does get given a title, then the way that the rest of the team respond to that, it's like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Of course, of course they should believe it because they've done all of this stuff and I see them as that.

Jack O'Brien: You know, some of this language is quite strong and this is a high bar. Maybe talk to us about how intentional that high bar has been.

Andrew Daubney: So this slide is from our three-year vision document, something that I walked our team through at the beginning of the year. So our current three-year plan is 26 to 28. A lot of the sentiment from this comes from Steven Pressfield, which is a book called Turning Pro about Really, the big theme of it is like, you know, if we were to look at this business and what we do and the leadership as no longer amateur, no longer dabbling, no longer just like making it up as we go, but if we were to professionalize all of these different components, what would it look like? And so this resource, this book, this team alignment thing is really about pulling people up to one of the standards that we are trying to set, not just being comfortable with where we are now.

Jack O'Brien: I love it, you know, some of that language for those listening along, it's like we expect, we believe. And even, you know, there's words here like, you know, small team of committed, capable leaders will always outperform a large team of passengers. Even just that word passengers, you know, evokes an anti-value, as Ben would say, of like, we don't want to be passengers. We do not believe in comfort cultures. And so, we're really helping people self-identify and rise to the level of this standard. I'm curious, how was it received?

Andrew Daubney: I had tears as I was walking this out to the team. It was received 99%. Well, I knew that when I was presenting this that there was a cup, there were one or two people that were like, this might rub them the wrong way, but I was still willing to do it.

Jack O'Brien: And did it end up playing out that it rubbed them the wrong way? What was the outcome?

Andrew Daubney: One of them, yes.

Jack O'Brien: And what happened?

Andrew Daubney: And they left.

Jack O'Brien: And is that okay?

Andrew Daubney: That is perfectly fine. I think one of the things that this has done and Hannah, I imagine this is similar with DOTS as well is that By working on our culture and our values and all of these things for so long, our business is becoming slightly cult-like. We are so clear on who is going to do really well with us and who is not. that we're not compromising on our language on what we expect from people. In fact, it's become much more clear. And that clarity means that when we bring people in, we are much more certain they are going to thrive with us.

Jack O'Brien: Culture is downstream from cult. And cult in a positive sense, of course, we're not talking anything nefarious, but it's like, what do we believe? How do we behave? That is when we use those words and culture is an outcome or reflection. of that. Hannah, I'm curious though, how do these standards conversations go for you when we talk about lifting the bar or setting the standard at DOTS?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah. Well, in about six months, I hope as well as Daub's presentation, I think for us, we're 75% of the way there and so the things, the times in which we let ourselves down is when things aren't documented and so This is what DAWBS has done is create such clear communication in every element of what they do. And so when DAWBS said, like, we know who's going to thrive on our team, the reality is sometimes people sneak in that we think are going to do well, but what it allows us to do is recognize that so fast in those three months probation. And that's what, yeah, I was just going to add to that. Um, which is also such a positive and I think, um, it allows it to flow through no matter what the discipline or skill set. So your multi day have, um, admin, um, whereas for us, we're OT and admin, sometimes we get a bit hung up on the OT standards and you know, that doesn't necessarily go across. And so I think, um, thinking as a whole clinic is so valuable and I think also like people will do values and expectations and put them in a drawer. It flows through your clinic all the time and that is where that culture comes from.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, question for you both. Put your coaching hats on for a second. There'll be many clinic owners listening along here who this resonates with. They're like, oh, that's what I want. That's what I need. But I haven't established that from the start. I've got a leadership team. I've let some stand. I haven't said anything. The Kim Scott quadrant, I'm in the ruinous empathy. I don't really confront much. How might you coach someone through thinking about resetting standards?

Hannah Dunn: I think often we find leaders aren't clear on what their standards are, like the director themselves is definitely step one. Like, are you really clear on what is the expectation and what are your values and what is it that you want from your team? And then getting it documented in a way that we can support the team. And then being able to take that to our team and potentially it's our leaders that we start with and progressing that throughout the team. And as Daub said, you will lose some team members along the way. Um, you know, we have clinics that we coach that we think, yeah, we know why your team's with you and it's not for the culture. It's for the huge salary that you're giving them that isn't allowing them to get that somewhere else. Or, um, and so we know that when we implement some standards and expectations that those people are the ones that we might lose first up.

Jack O'Brien: Would you add?

Andrew Daubney: I absolutely love that and I think that's 100% true. The thing that I try and coach people through is you're making a decision based on what is the best interest of the business, not the people. Don't try to appease what people want all the time. This needs to be a business decision. If you're going to create a role, what are the CDIs for that role? What does success look like? Where might it go wrong? What training can I provide you to be able to do that role well? Because we can always re-look at organizational charts and look at position descriptions and all that sort of stuff, but that needs to be done through the lens of what does the business actually need this role to do? Rather than this person saying that they want to do these things, how do I create a role for them?

Jack O'Brien: It's tricky tension, right?

Andrew Daubney: Well, it should be a win-win, right? If you can create a win-win situation there, then that is the best outcome. But I think what I have seen is that we tend to placate those team members and just create the perfect role that they want without the accountability, without the reporting, without the ability or necessity to have difficult conversations at certain points in time.

Jack O'Brien: I want to get to that perspective on numbers and KPIs and accountabilities in a moment. My two cents, if I was talking to that clinic owner who's like, I've let it sleep, what do I do? I'd say a really good practical action is to sit your team down and own it and apologize. Put your hand up and say, I've done the wrong thing by you by letting you get away with this. It's time for us to wipe the slate clean and we're collectively going to define what the standards are that we expect of ourselves and of each other. Maybe they set the bar too low and that's okay. As the leader, you get to say, okay, let's level this up. What would we expect of ourselves if we were to set the bar higher? Own it. Take responsibility. Wipe the slate clean and start fresh and then stick to it. That's what integrity is, right, is doing what you said you're going to do. It's not easy, but when you look back in six, 12 months' time, you'll be grateful that you had those conversations, that one or two did self-deselect. If that happens, that's okay because you need to have confidence that your culture will resonate with the right people and it will be a magnet and attractive to those who will fit it really well.

Hannah Dunn: And when you said like they might set the bar too low, I think a common question is, well, what is the bar and where do we set it? And I think the way that we know that is through discussions with other clinic owners, through coaching, through understanding where those clinics are, because there is so often that there are questions in the Slack community of CM that say, hey, I've got an expectation that my team as a new grad are hitting five billable hours. Is that what other people are doing in this space? Or what are the expectations around a psychologist? Because I just think we don't know. Like, it's hard to know.

Jack O'Brien: It's such an, it's an art. And this is, this is really the stuff that ChatGPT and Claude can't give you, right? It's, it's only learned in the trenches. It's learned alongside folks who have been there, done that, got the runs on the board, uh, and can mentor you through to avoid some of that, um, you know, brain damage along the way. Daubs let's talk about expectations, CEIs or KPIs. Again, one of the mistakes that we see clinic owners make is they put someone in a leadership role and they're unable to define what success looks like. What's the definition of a good job? So how do you think about that? How do you talk about that? And maybe what are some of the specifics around leadership KPIs? That's a big question.

Andrew Daubney: If I am going to give somebody a role, then they have to know what success looks like in that role, right? That has to be to at least some degree objective. If we go granular on this, if a new grad comes in and their expectation is to be billing 60%, well, then it's the leader's role to facilitate that. Where I see things slip a little bit is Well, what happens if they don't meet that? What happens if somebody has been in their role and they are consistently not meeting? Where is the system or the process that dictates what happens if a team member is not consistently meeting their expectations? And oftentimes, there isn't one. It's like, oh, I don't know. Maybe I'll have a chat with them. Maybe I won't because if if you as a you'd be owner of the clinic, is it clear on what that process is? Then that leader is not going to be clear either. And so they don't know what tools they have to be able to course-correct, right?

Jack O'Brien: Really interesting. There's a couple of key components here that really stood out to me. And specifically, again, for listeners, we're looking at a slide here of like, what are the expectations of leadership roles? What does the success in this role look like? What support is provided? What accountability looks like? But really what stands out to me is succession readiness, i.e. the ability to replace yourself over time. And also that performance is benchmarked by the health of their area, department, scope of responsibility. Performance is measured by health, not output. Doing more isn't a measure of success. Health is the measure of success. Can you speak to those two bottom points there, Dorps?

Andrew Daubney: I am always trying to work myself out of my role. Always. Because when I do that, it allows me to focus on things that are actually going to grow the business more. And so I'm always trying to operationalize. different components within the business. Because then when you do that, it's not based on a person's opinion or how they're feeling on a particular day. It is, well, is the performance of this person in line with what our expectations of their level are? Can we either promote that person or reward that person or have a difficult conversation with that person if it is clear that expectations are off a little bit?

Jack O'Brien: So, I'll just play contrarian again. That's my common role here today. But if I'm thinking about a leader who maybe that clinical leader or department leader thinks, that sounds nice to have a succession pipeline, do myself out of a job. But literally, what happens if I do myself out of a job? Maybe I feel like I'm at the top of the pile. There's nowhere for me to go. That feels really vulnerable. I have uncertainty over my future. How would you speak to those concerns?

Andrew Daubney: One of the things that we've learned is that as we continue to grow, roles that don't exist now will need to exist in the future. And through growth, and this is part of the visionary role of a founder or an owner of a clinic, is to be thinking or be managing the business as it is today and the business as it needs to be in three years' time. And so you have an idea or a blueprint of, well, if we grew another 30%, how would our structure change or how would our structure need to adapt to accommodate for that? Then we can guide the team members from that place of scarcity and from the place of like, well, I need to hold on to these things because this is the value that I'm giving. Two, well, when we are this size or when we are bigger, then there are, and I can't necessarily put my finger on it, but the fact that we're having this conversation to me means that when these roles come up, you will be the person that I go to, to discuss what we could include in a future position for you.

Hannah Dunn: So is that how you're getting people

Andrew Daubney: scarcity mindset that we're trying to recognize in people that you're holding on to these things. And if we move more towards abundance, well, what would that look like in this role?

Hannah Dunn: And is that how you're keeping team that maybe there's not a leadership role for from a financial perspective and a roles perspective? Because I'm sure we're quite similar in that our teams stay around for a long time. And so it gets tricky sometimes to sort of find those spots to make sure that they're still able to grow in their careers.

Andrew Daubney: Very much so. There is professional development that they could do. There are books that they can read. There is a plethora of information that can help them find what sort of leader you want to be so that when roles come up in the future, that you are going to be the natural choice for that role. One of the things that we define, and it's in that slide that you shared before, Jack, is that, again, this is a John Maxwell quote, that the role of a leader is to create more leaders. That can mean KPIs and CEIs, but it can mean just like checking in on people. And it can mean taking out the bins when the rubbish is full. And it can mean, you know, putting your hand up to go and present at, at events and things like this, right? There's, there's no limit to that, but they're the behaviours that we're looking for.

Hannah Dunn: And do you have a ratio of leadership from like one leader to five team members or how do you work out how many leaders you need for the clinical? Do you have anything?

Andrew Daubney: That's a good question. I don't know where I picked this up from, so don't check me. I, I heard one time that a good ratio is like between four and six to one, like that seems to be the ideal volume, uh, more than seven. And it's like, like, that's a lot of people to be looking after. Um, let me try and keep teams within that sort of four to six number. Is that similar to you?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, well, it's been similar, but we have also changed to take someone off the tools to sort of oversee a few more people. But it's a question I get often in approaching and one that I think is nuanced at times. But what I have read is, yeah, one to five, which is four to six, so same area.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, there's probably a few ways to think about it, right? There's the human level and I absolutely echo that. One human to four to six makes a lot of sense. Seven's too big. You can't remember everyone's partner's name and kid's name and the personal element. But it doesn't necessarily mean one FTE to five FTE, just to make that explicitly clear because there might be a financial way to look at it and maybe we think about, well, from a salary component, it might be 10% of that team's salary is allocated to a leadership piece. And so it might be it's like 0.3 FTE to five humans, right? So I don't want our listeners to get misled that you need a full-time leader for five practitioners. The point is that it's one human for five humans.

Andrew Daubney: And it doesn't have to start there either, right? It could be more like where this is ideal situation we're talking about.

Jack O'Brien: And so then the final piece that you spoke about, Daubs from that moral authority piece through the KPIs and then authority, really, we talked about a decision matrix and really practically empowering, giving autonomy, scope, etc. So you want to talk through what a decision matrix is and why every clinic should have one.

Andrew Daubney: It is a very simple or it can start as a very simple reference point for who can make decisions. And particularly when we're talking about the easy application here is financial decisions within a business, right? Who can buy print ink? I don't know about you, but like I used to get that question every month. Like, can I spend another $600 on print ink? And I'm like, why are you asking me this question?

Hannah Dunn: What am I going to say, no?

Andrew Daubney: Another one was team gifts, right? So for anniversaries and birthdays and things like that. Can I go and spend a hundred dollars on some flowers for has birthday.

Ben Lynch: Of course you can.

Andrew Daubney: A decision-making matrix is an example for us, one of the line items in this. Who can buy birthday presents and anniversary presents and how much can we spend? But it allows our practice manager or one of our client care team to be able to take that task and know, okay, well, this is the birthdays that are coming up this month. This is the budget that I've got to spend. I've got access to the credit card, so I can go do it. So I don't need Andrew when it comes to birthday presents or anniversary presents.

Jack O'Brien: How did the team feel when they received something like this?

Andrew Daubney: Wonderful.

Jack O'Brien: Why?

Andrew Daubney: Because it reduces friction, right? It is for them to have to come to me for the same decision every time, it just means that they can get on with their job and it's another asana item that could be ticked off without me having to like little green emoji tick.

Jack O'Brien: It's a sign of trust, right? That we trust you with this and ideally over time that's a growing scope but it releases people to do what they do best. Daubs one of the final slides here was around leadership, and we spoke at the start that it's a characteristic, it's a trait, it's all of these things, and then you finished with this notion that leadership is taught, not assumed. What do you mean by leadership is taught?

Andrew Daubney: What I mean is that type of business that we have, the type of business that exists right now is a reflection of all of the stuff that we have been through over the last 10, 15 years of operation, right? We went through the COVID. We're going through this NDIS turbulence at the moment. We have gone through work cover changes, we've gone through periods of rapid growth and periods of plateauing. The business that we have now is in part a reflection of how we navigated through those challenges. We have got a good cohort of people that are in the team now that were with us in COVID that worked out like, oh geez, okay, all of a sudden we can't see people directly, we have to do telehealth. Now we've got all this time on our hands, what are we going to do? How do we support clients through? the ability not to come into the clinics. And so what you get through all of that are these stories of like, well, we just did this or, you know, we decided to do that. That was terrible. So then we pivoted over here. When we bring up leaders into roles, I think it's important that they understand some of that context. that they understand how this business came to be where it is now because of all the challenges that we've been through in the past. So that we don't end up making mistakes or foreseeable mistakes that we could have highlighted if we just had shared some of this knowledge. So that was the point of that slide. It's like it's passing on the stories of our culture and stories of our challenges in particular, where we made mistakes and where we would have done things differently in hindsight. so that those leaders know that context and are less likely to make the same mistakes that we did.

Jack O'Brien: Ultimately, leadership is a skill, right? It is transferable and trainable. Now, it's not for everyone. It's not an easy skill but so much of the behaviours and the outputs are learnable over time despite their complexity and that's the art of us as good leaders developing other leaders is transferring that context, transferring that skill, drawing out the potential in someone that doesn't yet exist but is there in potential form. Hannah, how do you think about leadership as a skill that can be taught?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, absolutely. I think Daub spoke before around resources, books, podcasts, like what are we giving them to upskill them? And I think what has been one of my biggest mistakes in the earlier days and owning this was that we didn't do any training for our leaders. We just sort of put them in and sort of supported them, but there was no formalized training, whereas I think you really need to think about it like it's not a skill that they've learned at uni. And for those people who do have those natural leadership qualities, they will embrace that, they'll learn more, they'll do it. And those that maybe aren't as naturally to it will take time to really upskill themselves and see if they can get there. I think it's so important to think of it as a separate skill, as we've all been saying, but that it is our responsibility to make sure we are teaching that skill.

Jack O'Brien: Phenomenal. Well, Daubs if we look to land this plane, there's probably a couple of types of clinic owners here. Can you speak briefly to, number one, the clinic owner who's embarking upon this journey for the first time and establishing a leadership team, and then also to the clinic owner who's in the midst of maybe some leadership tension and needs to make change? What would you say to those two groups?

Andrew Daubney: don't think you can start early enough thinking about this sort of thing. If your intention is to grow a business, it's to reduce the business reliance on you. Um, thinking about this, not, not necessarily actioning it, but, but understanding what are the roles that I might need in the future to be able to facilitate the type of business that I want to have and the type of role that I want to have in my business. I don't think you can start early enough with that. Um, we spoke about recruitment, right? So, um, if you don't feel like you have the team members in the business right now, to move into these sort of leadership roles, how might you look at the ideal avatar of a team member or of a leader in terms of trying to point out or pick out who is the sort of person that I need to be able to move into this role in the future? And then Yeah, like tension will exist, right? I don't think the goal here is to like completely create a situation where that doesn't exist, but always take into the perspective of what does the business need? Like, am I just trying to appease somebody or am I trying to actually do what the business needs to be able to drive it forward? And I feel like that's a bit of a light bulb moment for people sometimes. And it just takes the emotion and the personality differences out of it. And it's like, well, if you write down what is it actually you need and define what the outputs of this role actually are, then you can work out, well, is the person that I have in that role the best person to be doing that job?

Jack O'Brien: I really like that. We often say, if your business could talk, what would it say? What would it say that it needs? So that's really insightful. Thank you so much for sharing at the summit. Yeah, like I said, number one talk for mine. And thank you for unpacking it here. Also, Hannah, any final words of wisdom from you as we depart?

Hannah Dunn: Yeah, I think just don't go fast. Like that's probably what we see people rushing so much. And as Daub said, like we want to think about what the business needs. We talk about that, whether it's rewards, whether it's setting up organizational charts. And now with leadership, think about what the business needs, take the people out of it and just write down what you need. Then you can add the people into those positions.

Jack O'Brien: Well, listeners, we trust that's been useful. We've got two more Summit Talks to unpack. We have Michael Rizk joining us on the next episode, talking all things Pokémon and marketing and culture. And Peter Flynn will be back to talk about growing your clinic with ads and marketing. So make sure you stay tuned for those episodes coming down the pipes. But again, Andrea Daubny, Hannah Dunn, it's been a pleasure and maybe we'll invite Ben back. Maybe we will. Thanks. Thank you, guys. See you next time. See you later. Bye-bye.