Episode 105: Building a Better Business Through Core Values

Grace: Well, I think it’s two layers. There’s a variety of ways that you can use them as a leader, a manager and a business owner. There’s no play book for what’s the right decision to make here or not. Do we go after this opportunity or not? How do we make these decisions and solve these problems? So it can absolutely ground you. And I know they ground me when I’m encountering situations that I’ve never seen before and making good decisions that match up with what the company would want or what you would want, Paul, or what my other co-leaders would want. And that goes down from there. So at the team member level, maybe they’re making a smaller decision or solving only a piece of the larger problem, but it helps them to align with the purpose of the greater vision, the greater mission.

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to an episode of What the Hell Just Happened. Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss interesting HR issues and solve some of our listeners’ submitted questions. 

Paul: And occasionally I’ll go off topic to talk about whatever I want. Think barbecue, space exploration, growing your business. The things that interest all of us. 

Paul: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. In this episode, what the hell just happened is that your team doesn’t seem to be on track and there’s maybe some drama going on, some infighting. You know, there’s all sorts of things that really aren’t in service to the business. You’ve been trying to put these fires out one at a time and it’s not working. And so in this podcast, we’re going to talk about core values and beliefs. And I think I’m going to give you a tool that’s really going to help you out as you go forward. And it’s a, the best part about is it’s a long lasting tool. Okay. So we’re welcoming, Grace Godlasky is joining us today. Grace, introduce yourself.

Grace: Hi. Hi, everyone. Hi, Paul. I am CEDR’s Solution Center Manager. I’ve been with CEDR for over ten years. I love core values, so I’m so excited to be talking about this because it’s something I like to use on my team whenever I’m working with CEDR team members, but also every day with our CEDR members. One of my jobs is to run the team that directly services our members’ HR questions. So the folks on my team they, they answer all of the wild HR questions that, that are going on out there in your offices and core values are one of our secret weapons that we can deploy when we need to when more encountering a situation like you just described. 

Paul: Yeah. I mean, if i had to, like, script a question for this, it would be like, is your workplace experiencing, like, is it feeling like a soap opera? You know, is it not productive? Do you find yourself constantly putting out fires? Do the words apathy, lack of initiative or, you know, you’re getting a lot of unwanted behaviors? That would be the question. Is that going on in your practice? Grace, here’s a you know, as you said, you love this. I love this conversation, too. I’m really excited to talk about this by the way, for everybody who’s listening. The other thing that I want to say about Grace is that she’s on our executive team. You know, she really has helped us to create what our core values are at CEDR. And we’re going to talk about those values over at CEDR Grace, because I think it’s a good example, self serving, is it? Yeah, maybe a little bit. But I think it’s a great example if we can show the listeners how we apply those and how how you do what you just said. I think is a great way. So just heads up, everybody. We’re going to be kind of using our own core values to explain this to you. 

Grace: We genuinely actually use them, so

Paul: We do and we use them when we stray from them, right? Sometimes we use them to make hard decisions whereby we’re having a difficult time, maybe with whether or not a team member should stay with us or not. And sometimes we can just go to the core values and say, are they meeting all or most of our core values? And if they’re not, then that’s another kind of checkbox that you take off when you’re making hard decisions. I think it’s and we’ll get into it a little bit here in one of the sections. We will talk about using it as a management all. Grace, you’ve been with us for ten years. When you came to us, we did not have a set of core values.

Grace: No. 

Paul: Do you remember when we put core values in place? Do you remember that? 

Grace: I do. And I remember specifically we were growing the number of team members. When you have, you know, that amount of growth, people aren’t able to just pick up through osmosis because they see everybody all the time and they can get aligned with one another. And so we got to a certain size where we said, ‘All right, we need to get aligned across the board’. And we did that as part of greater strategic planning. We got our mission, our vision, purpose, core values all established so that we could all be aligned across the company, which is more and more difficult to do as you grow.

Paul: It is and as you get busy too. So we were actually getting busy and we were growing and like you said, you can’t they call it top down management or top down leadership. At some point that model breaks down when you have too many people you know, more than- I’m going to say it starts to break down at five, six and seven people. It doesn’t take long or you’re so busy that you can’t really, everybody can’t be in everybody else’s business as far as seeing the right way and the wrong way to do it. And the next thing you know, you have someone new on your team or someone apathetic on your team and they’re doing, they’re handling something in a way that that you don’t want it handled. And normally you would go out and say, ‘I overheard the way you ran that collection call with that patient. That’s not the way we do it. Here’s a better way to do it. Here’s a, you know, maybe a less aggressive way to do it’ or any other thing that you would overhear. And the reason why you don’t overhear it is because you’re busy and you’re in the back. If you’re listening, you’re either managing the practice or you’re in the back. Being a clinician and you you can’t be everywhere at any time. So you’re going to give people something to go by, write something out there to go by. Large companies use this for obvious reasons, because, you know, the culture, the culture, people who drive the culture can’t be everywhere all the time listening to every call or being part of every situation. Again, this is one of those things where I like to take something that big companies do and bring it back down and boil it down and make it something more simple and something applicable to the kinds of businesses we work with which are really the backbone of this country. That’s all the small businesses, medical practices and people that we work with. So I’d like to define core values as we get started. So I’m just going to start with this, Grace.

Grace: What are they? 

Paul: Well, what are they? I know. Well, what are core values? Core values and beliefs are the philosophical underpinnings of your business. They define who you are, what you stand for, and how you operate. Very, very simple.

Grace: Doesn’t that seem even more important for people who we work with, where the owner is literally the face of the business, it’s your name on the door. It’s your last name on the website. 

Paul: You know, you want it to really reflect who you are. And if you think about it, if you were interviewing, you would want to interview for people who in some way somehow in some fashion either already align with these principles or they can be asked to align with it. They’re who you are. I use this example all the time when people ask me because I work with all kinds of medical practices, ‘What’s the difference between, say, your clients who are in a dental practice and those who are in maybe a general medical practice?’ You’re general practitioner. My answer to that is kind of interesting and I hope I don’t upset my medical people out there, but the difference between and where core values can come into play between the two institutions is the differences is that dental practices are in competition with everybody. And frankly, when a patient walks out of your practice in a dental practice, they can probably pick up a softball and throw it as far as they can, and it will land on the door of the next dental practice in your community. 

Grace: Maybe a softball. 

Paul: Yeah, you know. Well, I mean, every you know, every eight blocks there’s a dental practice.

Grace: Yeah, right. 

Paul: And so patients of dental practices have choices and they can move around. And if they’re not treated well by your team, by your front desk person, and that’s who I leave when I leave a practice. I’m generally leaving the team. It’s rare that I leave because of the clinical providers. If your team member in a dental practice doesn’t treat someone well, doesn’t get something right and you lose that patient, it’s easy for them to go someplace else. 

Grace:  Yeah, the more easy it is. 

Paul: Yeah. But to get into my GP, my general practitioner, my medical provider, I have to wait six months. Heaven forbid I could even get in there in six months for some routine thing to go on. And they are so packed and so backed up that they have less of a concern about losing patients because there’s already not enough of them and they’re stacked up for days. Frankly, they probably would be happy if I left because it would be less of the workload because the guy looks like he’s working 16 hours a day. Nonetheless, I tend to find within the medical profession in some instances that I don’t see core values being exhibited at the front desk. And that’s not in all cases, I don’t want to be too blanketing in that, but… 

Grace: It’s a different game each of these businesses is playing. And when it’s, you know, when you’re competing really heavily for every person who’s coming through your door, you know, the stakes are higher to keep them. And that’s where having just a unified team is going to be the game changer. You’re so right. You leave the team. 

Paul: So, you know, the other thing that I want to point out here, Grace, is the this thing about core values and beliefs is part of a three pronged approach. The other two prongs to this approach, to this strategy is purpose and mission or it could, be some people know it as vision. I’m not going to spend much time on these because Grace we’re actually going to do podcasts on each one of these segments. Surprise, surprise. Spoiler alert. Purpose defined is the fundamental reason your business exists. It’s the void you’d leave if you shut down. Like what would happen if your business went missing? And then mission is kind of your big, hairy, audacious goal for the year. It’s got a specific timeframe. It’s something that you’re trying to accomplish. If you were a startup, it might be that part of what you’re trying to accomplish to get to a certain number of patients that you see that you’re probably growing your hygiene department. So you have some big goals there. And it’s not just one goal, it’s often three or four. But these are big things that you’re up to that you’re trying to accomplish. And you know, that’s a mission. So all of these should be, for the listener, all of these things should be inspirational and in some ways maybe leave little chill bumps on you. You should be able to articulate them easily. You bring them up for new hires, you expose them to all these things that you’re up to. A pediatric practice that accepts Medicaid. Your purpose isn’t ‘We see the kids, we fix the kids’ thing. The void that would be missing if you went away would be that those children who are on Medicaid, who your practice sees would no longer have access to service in their neighborhood, in their area. And because they’re on Medicaid, their parents probably don’t have the methods and the means to pay for the kind of care that you can give them. And or the time or the ability to go, you know, one city over, travel an hour and a half to take their child for dental care that they need or medical care. If you’re if you’re you know, if you’re a medical practice. So that’s a really easy example to give people to say, what kind of void would you leave? I know my dentist is amazing at doing reconstructive surgery and he’s just so good at it. It’s just his calling. And, you know, he does everything else. When his practice closes we’re going to miss that. That’s going to go missing. Now not as general dentistry skills because other people can do that, but his reconstructive skills are just amazing. So you know, just to kind of give a couple of examples 

Grace: And they all support each other, right? The three prongs are connected and each layer supports the layer above and below it. You know, when I think of core values, it’s personal. You know, it’s maybe what I would want to teach my kids at home, you know, my my view on the world. But that’s not really what we’re talking about with these core values they’re workplace values, and really outlined and defined as the workplace. And I think it’s interesting because sometimes the same words are used for each like we might use the word, I know you’ve got examples later, but respect. Respect as I might teach it in my family or as I might see it as a human, might be different from respect as we’re using it in the workplace. And I don’t know if you want to talk about that and and, you know, define that a little bit before getting into the next piece. 

Paul: There are differences between personal core values and work core values. Now, there can be alignment across the two. There’s no way you’re going to hire three, five, ten or 30 people and have all of their personal core values be aligned. I mean, that’s just not going to happen. Whether they even know they have them or not, there’s no way that everybody can be aligned. So with that being true in the world, I’ll give you an example of maybe a core value that a practice might have. So a practice, and I’ve seen it, it’s something to do with being on time, and that is the impetus for their definition, which is how they describe the need for people to actually be on time to work so that the person who is late doesn’t cause the entire practice to start to run behind. And then the patients who are showing up on time are not being seen on time. So it’s a, you know, typically this very broad spectrum kind of thing. And so I would say that if in your personal life you can’t be on time ever and you just don’t really care about being on time. I’ve heard, I’ve got, we’ve all met the person. I’m just like late, I’m late all the time. I just can’t be on time. I have a genetic problem. And it really in my mind as you can tell I’m being a little snarky. No, you’re choosing to be late. You don’t give a crap about me sitting around waiting for you. And when we say we’re all going to eat at five, you think we ment 530, and so you show up at 5:20 while we’re all sitting around waiting. Spoiler alert Grace, we don’t wait for anybody who’s late for dinner at my house. 

Grace: You’re going to eat when you eat. Yeah. 

Paul: Yeah. You’re going to eat leftovers is what you’re going to eat. Because if you showup at 5:45, we’re going to be cleaning dishes by then. 

Grace: I support that. I’m probably not going to wait for you either. 

Paul: But yeah, if your personal value, core value is that you can be late all the time and you think that that’s going to extend to work then those aren’t, that’s not going to work for us. Right? 

Grace: Right. 

Paul: So all of person’s personal core values don’t have to align with work values, but the work values should be such that just anybody who tries and is aware of them can adhere to them and use them as a guide. Grace, why? Why do core values matter? Why go through the effort of creating core values?

Grace: Well, I think it’s two layers. There’s a variety of ways that you can use them. As a leader, a manager, and a business owner there’s no playbook for what’s the right decision to make here or not. Do we go after this opportunity or not? How do we make these decisions and solve these problems so it can absolutely ground you? And I know they ground me when I’m encountering situations that I’ve never seen before and making good decisions that match up with what the company would want or what you would want, Paul, or what my own co-leaders would want. And that goes down from there. So if at the team member level, maybe they’re making a smaller decision or solving only a piece of the larger problem, but it helps them to align with the purpose of the greater vision, the greater mission and what their manager would want or what their team members would want them to do in that situation. And it allows everybody to function, I think, more efficiently because you’re not having to micromanage, ‘This is what you do, oh we got to run and ask Grace what to do?’ 

Paul: What if Grace isn’t available?

Grace: What if I’m not here, what if it’s an on the spot thing? Then let’s think. Were you acting with respect? Were you acting with integrity? Was it an on time appointment? You know, that gives them a little bit of the ability to make those decisions when they need to as well. 

Paul: It’s late in the day. On a Thursday, patients are done. The front desk person is kind of running behind. She said she’s going to stay and close up. Everybody leaves. She’s only been with the practice for about six months. It’s late in the day and a phone call comes in from a patient. The patient is asking for her child to be seen. In the end, the the protocol, the SOP, typically for this and I’ll give a little background, the patient has not been paying. They’re way behind. They’ve gotten a lot of free services and yet this employee makes the decision, even being able to see that in the record, maybe not understanding to the full degree what the SOP is on it. She goes ahead and she schedules them for the first slot the next morning. This particular practice holds the first slot open for emergencies that come in from the day before that they can, you know, maybe put off for a few hours. nd in the end, she’s completely gone against their SOP,  which is you got to try to get you got to at least make them uncomfortable and say, you know, you know, you have these bills that are behind. But she went ahead and let them come in and she used their core values, which was empathy and whatever else the core values were, she was operating underneath her core values. 

Grace: Yeah. Supporting optimal patient health and well-being, a lot of the time. 

Paul: Yeah, we can’t be mad at her. We can’t be upset with her using her own autonomy, sitting there by herself with no one to check in with. She made an executive decision that which aligns perfectly with their core values. And so we see the patient and we start over. But that employee is not in any trouble at all. And she made a decision from something that we gave her, you know, something that we gave her to work with. I like that example. 

It’s a good example of-

Grace: It’s a great example, but absent absent that guideline, what would she or could she have done? If you didn’t have that as her guideline. She either would have frozen and not done anything and sometimes no decision as the worst kind of decision. 

Paul: ‘Call back in the morning when someone’s here who can help you’. Yeah, that’s not that’s not the right thing. 

Grace: Or, ‘Sorry, your kid’s in pain. We’re not going to be able to help.’, How’s that going to land with community and with that, with that patient giving that guideline just in the if you think about it, in the absence of it, what would they do? It’s often a much less desirable result. 

Paul: We’ve all been to that place. It’s almost always a restaurant. It’s almost always a chain where their core values are plastered to the wall. Or we can see them. And by the way, everybody, your core values don’t need to be shown to anybody. They are the way that you operate your business and who you want your team to be. They really don’t need to be on the wall. I’m not saying you can’t put them on the wall if you want to. Or that it’s a bad thing. I do want to point out that we go into business, as all of us do all the time, who have their core values put up on the wall and they’re not, nobody’s following it. The entire team’s pissed off. You can see the people waiting on you were upset. You can tell that somebody is not being treated right. Somebody is not meeting the core values. This is not what we’re talking about here. But I do want to tell you this, whether if you don’t have core values or your team’s not following your core values, that experience is exactly what your patients are getting from your team. On if not on a day to day basis, on a periodic basis. You know, one thing that really helped me about learning core values is I used to be that leader that led from the top and people will follow me. I’ve said this before on the podcast my entire life, people would follow me into a fire and at one point I had 65 employees spread out across three businesses, and this model just really broke down, that model of me leading by example because I couldn’t be there to be an example in every single instance for the three businesses. And ultimately, part of the reason two things happened, part of the reason why I closed and sold the businesses was because of the employees. And the second thing that happens, I said to myself, going forward, if I ever open another business, I will not have employees. And so where I ended up is the 40 employees again. And and, you know, through our members, another 46,000. 

Grace: You came full circle. 

Paul: I said what I wasn’t going to do and the universe is like, ‘Guess what you are going to do’ because you said you wouldn’t. But at one point out there had I had a good set of core values and spread that infected, infected my team with that, I think I would have gotten a lot better outcomes from them and I think they would have been happier too. Going back to me saying one day everybody’s great, the next day they’re not. That’s, this is part of the reason why they’re not is and they don’t have that, you know, that course set for them. 

Grace: It’s not said, and they’re not reminded of it. It’s not being used. 

Paul: You know, I told you guys we were going to share a few things about our core values, our personal core values. Grace, integrity, clarity and value. You want to talk about integrity? 

Grace: Yes. It’s one of my favorites because it can be used in so many different settings. We define that as doing what we say we’re going to do and taking accountability or re promising when we know that we can’t. You know, this is something that as a team member, you know, knowing that you’re being held to that standard, really motivates you to be able to say, ‘I got behind unexpectedly and here’s my plan for getting caught up and I’m going to get that to you tomorrow instead of this afternoon.’

Paul: Right. 

Grace: In the absence of that value and defining it in that way, some people, I’m not one of those people, but some people think, I’m just going to sweep this under the rug and I’m not going to own it or say anything about it. In the absence of that value enforcement, when you’re not seeing people do what they say they’re going to do or re promise, it can seem arbitrary or it can seem like you’re like applying a different standard to different people. And I know if you’re a manager out there, you’ve had people probably say, ‘Well, so-and-so did that and they didn’t get in trouble’, you know, and this having a value that’s defined like this makes those conversations less arbitrary. You’re saying, ‘No, this is what it is that we decided a long time ago. And here’s why it applies in this situation’. There’s just less room for wiggle room about when that matters or why it matters, or if it’s even a thing that they’re being held to when you’ve established it. So I love integrity and we use it all the time, especially Solution Center Advisors. We field many, many HR questions from our members every single day. And sometimes the thing that seemed like it was the top priority this morning, gets bumped down a couple priorities because you had somebody who had to get payroll out that day or who had someone drunk in the office right that minute, and they got bumped up the priority list a little bit. So we have to always be promising and  re promising and managing that with integrity every single day at CEDR.

Paul: And you know, the word integrity is so subjective, as are most of these words. Clarity, a subjective term. Value, a subjective term. But to make it objective, you have to give it a meaning that means something for your business. So that’s where the, that’s where the chill bumps come in. You know, that’s where you’re trying to take these very subjective words and make them objective. And in this case, you know, integrity most people think of it as some kind of a moral judgment or something like that, this person lacks integrity. I don’t know, you know, what that could mean. Contextually could mean a lot of different things, but we don’t mean it that way. It’s not a moral thing. And then the other thing that we want to recognize is that in business and in this busy time, you know, you just pointed out one thing, you promise one thing, but another thing prioritizes itself over, you know, what you thought you could do. It’s our role to reach out to the member or to a fellow, another employee or to a manager or whatever here and say, ‘I know I said I was going to get this to you by one, but now I’m going to re promise and I’m going to get it to you by one tomorrow or it’s going to be Thursday’ or whatever it is. So you’re re promising and resetting an expectation and not just hiding out. Now, the next one, clarity. I’m just going to jump on this one. 

Grace: Yes

Paul: This should make sense. Right? We want to ensure that our HR guidance is understandable and actionable. And this means something to us. Because if you go to, if you go to certain experts in the world, including attorneys, they are less likely to tell you what to do and more likely to give you many or as many options as they possibly can. It’s almost as if they’ve determined that their role is not to help you make the right decision. It is to give you these options and then sit back and let you make that option and then deal with whatever your decision is. And I’m not saying that we don’t do that to a certain degree because we do give multiple options, but we tend to want to be clear in what we’re saying. And by ensuring our, our guidance is understandable and actionable, we’re actually may possibly say, ‘Look, you can go this way or that way. I’d probably go that way because I believe that the outcomes you’re going to get are A, B, and C. And I think if you go this way, if you go the other direction, the potential for the following things open up for you. Which way would you like for us to go?’ And then amongst ourselves, we want, we want to have clear clarity because we are training one another on employment rules, laws looking things up. So we need to have a lot of clarity in our communications between ourselves. Always a challenge, and then value. 

Grace: So yeah, and that’s another one where using it in your day to day life may not be the way we’ve defined it. We’ve defined it as delivering our HR support in a way that truly benefits our members. You know, when we get a question from one of our members, and I really think this is what sets us apart from any other HR service out there, we are always going to say, ‘Did we actually answer the question that they asked?’ 

Paul: Yeah.

Grace: You know, we’re not going to just information dump and say there’s a law out there that says this. We’re actually going to say, ‘You asked the specific question and here is that specific answer and then some and we’re going to educate you on how to do it better next time, or we’re going to give you a resource where you can learn more about it.’ We really try to put ourselves in our members shoes and give them, you know, the type of service that we would want to receive if we were asking that same question or if we were in that same situation, which means supporting them through to the end. So, you know, whatever that end goal is and giving them that outcome that we would want to see, you know, that takes work. It takes constant checking of your own answer and your own outcomes to see, did we deliver that value that truly benefited them. 

Paul: The Solution Center team, that’s our experts. A new member of the Solution Center team rarely comes through the door as a new hire who can actually just start talking to members and deliver value. They really can’t, can they Grace?  Doesn’t matter if they have a law degree, experience, lack of law degree, how long they’ve been managing at a big company or any of those things, right? 

Grace: Long ramp up before we let somebody loose. We, we really put in a lot of legwork at the beginning. 

Paul: Yeah. So this value is for us internally, is that we must work very hard to monitor and train and raise new people here. We put a considerable investment in folks in order for them to be able to even begin to try to give you the value that, that we embody in this core value. 

Grace: Right. And that’s very different from other models. Other models everybody’s an independent contractor, and they can do their own thing. And there’s zero oversight or there’s no training. You just come through the door with what you get and you get. 

Paul: If you have a, if you have your SPHR certification, that’s good enough for them. And off you go. By the way, nothing wrong with that certification. It just doesn’t meet the the level of, of what we require people to work with us. 

Grace: Correct. Yeah. We have a pretty high bar and value helps us support that. And if we’re seeing somebody not meet it, it helps us say, okay, this is you know, this is what that ideal performance, that ideal answer, that ideal outcome for the member would have looked like. Let’s get there. 

Paul: Yeah. I’d like to talk about core values in leadership and management. How do we use these? How would a, how would a listener who’s a manager out there, how would a doctor owner use the core values part of their strategic HR  conversation to actually manage people? Let’s just jump in and talk about managing behavior and culture. What do core values encourage? Like, what do they enable for a leader? Because, I mean, I can tell you the first thing is everybody’s on fire, right? Every problem’s on fire. Every problem feels immediate. Feels like it needs your immediate attention. And we talked about it before we even have that problem where, you know, you’re constantly triaging and moving things around. That’s happening more and more every day for everybody. You never have enough people. You always have plenty of problems. So how is this, how do these values help a leader be proactive? 

Grace: It gives you a shared expectation to start off with, and I think that helps the fires from starting to begin with. But then when you build out from there, if you have someone who’s getting a little off course rather than letting it go totally off course and lighting on fire, I think gives you a shared language to get that person back on course. So if we did go to the, you know integrity example, if someone’s getting behind in their workload and you notice that, as a manager it allows you to say, ‘Hey, you know, I just noticed you were behind on that and you didn’t tell them in advance that they were going to get it a little bit late. Not in integrity. Next time. You need to be doing it this way.’ And it’s less arbitrary. It’s more productive. 

Paul: Yeah. ‘And by the way, I reached out to Dr. Smith on your behalf and told him that we realized that we were running a couple hours late and I gave you a new deadline of tomorrow, and Dr. Smith is okay with that.’

Grace: Yup. And it, it takes away the ‘what about’ conversation. ‘Well what about last week when…?’ it’s this is an objective standard and it helps you address things that aren’t so objective and come in and use the language that is going to really land for that team member. So as a manager, it’s so, so valuable. No one loves a corrective coaching conversation, myself included. That’s not, you don’t wake up as a manager hoping you have to correct someone’s performance or behavior. But when you do, this is sort of a north star. You can start there and build your coaching conversation out from there and it makes your coaching conversations so much easier. I will own, in the past I’ve definitely been a little bit of a chicken with coaching, you know. 

Paul: I was about to say. I was about to tell everybody ‘cluck cluck’. 

Grace: I was, I was definitely more of a people pleaser. That’s why I like the Solution Center, I like helping. I’m not as confrontational of a personality, but core values has really helped me just get right down to business with somebody when I’m seeing somebody be a little off course and get on top of it. And it has had such positive results since making that shift. And I hope, you know, if you’re listening that you would try it and have that same positive outcome in your own coaching conversations. 

Paul: Well, how powerful is it to not have to pull some definition of integrity out of your, you know what, and just make it up and tell somebody they did something wrong or they aren’t doing it right. And in a roundabout way and be able to just pull up your core values and say, ‘Look, this is one of the things that is important to us and you’re not doing that’. That is way more powerful because they already know, they expect it. They’re aware of that core value. You’re not bringing something new to them. 

Grace: Exactly. 

Paul: And it doesn’t have to be accusatory or anything else. It’s just like, hey, this is the reason why this darn thing exists. Because if we don’t adhere to it the way things are falling apart in front of us right now, today, in this particular instance with this patient, that is because we didn’t follow the core value of whatever, you know, whatever that was. So can you give us an example, like with our Solution Center team members of a core value that we have that our coaching has to follow, where we recognize that people come to us with different levels of- let’s, you know, you get where I’m going, right?

Grace: I do. So we do have sort of an internal concept of we’re meeting people where they’re at, and that is a core value of respect. That’s the word that we use to define that. I might be on the phone and often am on the phone with somebody who just bought a practice. They’ve never been a boss before. They have never, ever had to do any of the difficult conversations, applying policies, learning, you know, simple employment law concepts. We really do coach to the level of understanding and never make anybody feel less than or condescended or like it’s too simple of a thing to even have to explain the word you should be saying to your team or your employee. So the core value there is, is respect. And really it just means meeting people where they’re at, suspending judgment, dropping in beside people. That is how we coach the different managers that we are working with. That can be applied internally too, you know, if we have somebody who’s new to our team at CEDR, we’re not going to drop in on them and expect they have some wild level of experience. So we’re going to drop in beside them and treat them with respect.

Paul: And, you know, it’s really easy to talk to the new guy or the new gal who owns practice because they don’t know anything. And pretty quickly we can kind of show that we know what we’re talking about when it comes to HR and leadership. But then we’ve got the other end of that spectrum where we have a manager has been managing for 20 years and she knows what she’s doing. She does a lot of HR knowledge. She’s nots, she’s not, you know, she’s where she is because of, you know, her experience and everything, and yet she’s getting something wrong. Our job is to coach to that very experienced person. We’re not condescending. We’re not trying to overpower them. We need to recognize her expertise, even some of the emotional stuff that she may have attached to it, and find a way to help her get through that and deliver the information that she needs so that she can accept it the way she accepts it. You know, so she gets it. So, you know, this is a super important principle we have. And I’ll just share one more thing and then we’ll move on to the last one. I know another part of our respect is, is we define it this way. We get a lot of crazy calls. We get, like we said, varying degrees of understanding of an employment law. And sometimes we get off the phone with one call and we’re just shaking her head like, ‘Wow, what they thought that they could do, there’s crazy’. But, you know, they call up and say, ‘Look, I’d like my, I’d like to not pay my employees for overtime. I want a policy and I want to put a policy in place that just says doesn’t matter if you work overtime. If you do, I’m not going to pay you for it and I’d like to put that in the handbook.’ and we’re shaking our head because that’s like, well, that’s like just give a judge in some states a way to charge you with, with a misdemeanor and deliver a bunch of fines. That’s not how that, you know, that’s how you solve that problem. Actually, I understand the sentiment. They’re frustrated. They don’t work overtime. Their accountant’s like ‘Wow, you paid a lot of overtime last year. You going to hold on to that money if you would, you know, not let people do it.’ But what we are not allowed to do is step out into the proverbial hallway here and make fun of you for that. 

Grace: Right. 

Paul: That is not okay. It’s just like it wouldn’t be okay for someone to go to leave a patient and make fun of whatever’s going on with that patient, you know, whether or not it’s a dentist or it’s someone else. And kind of make fun of the patient, That’s not the kind of culture that, that’s not going to serve. If maybe empathy is part of one of your core values, that’s not going to serve that very well. So- 

Grace: Right. We have our standards of professionalism. And again, it’s just kind of what sets us apart. And I know it’s not that different than what’s expected in a lot of the businesses that we work with. 

Paul: So, Grace, I’m just going to ask the listener’s, listeners do you have core values? Are they being used in your business? Are they alive and active or are they just words? I’m just asking that question. We’ll come back to it, just think about it. If you don’t have them, keep listening because we’re going to talk more about how you create core values. If you have them and they’re not working, you’re probably going to need to revisit your core values. You may need to revisit them with your current team because maybe you created them five years ago and it’s almost an entirely different team that you have now. If they’re just words on the wall and that’s what they are, then that is something that goes to leadership, that has nothing to do with your employees. And it’s so easy to lose sight of these things. It’s an extra activity that you have to do to reincorporate the sort of planning in your small business. And then probably if you’re like me, it seems like there’s never enough time. Grace, I want to talk about core values in action. Like, let’s give them a couple of real, maybe a real world example. 

Grace: Yeah, just I think the best examples are the soft skills or personality conflicts where this is just your secret weapon to addressing it. Maybe there are two employees who used to be really close. Maybe they were friends a little bit outside of work, went to lunch together, but they are now at odds.

Paul: I think this example is really good because you have two people who were once two peas in a pod and as close as they were as friends, they are now that far apart as enemies. Lucky you listener. They’re working for you and your patients get to be front and center stage watching what goes on between these two when they decide to flare up.

Grace: Right. And it could be so tempting to just go in and coach and say, ‘Enough, be adults, get over this, let’s go’. But that is just not as effective as coming in with some core values. If you can frame up the individual conversations with folks that are behaviors so bad, okay, it’s impacting a patient. Maybe they both sit at the front desk, a patient’s trying to check out one of them, their system goes down. They ask the other one, ‘Hey, can you get them? Nope, that’s not my job’. You know, patient standing there awkwardly. Sounds like an extreme example, but I mean, we see that kind of thing happen where, ‘Nope, I’m not going to go ahead and help you. Nope, I’m not doing that for you’. That’s getting delayed. It’s creating awkward moments. You can use that to have individual conversations with each of them. To say that specific example was out of alignment with our core values. And maybe one of the core values is patient experience, or if it’s an on time practice and it caused a delay in the next patient being able to get checked in and seated. So you can say you’re out of line with two of our, two of our core values. Let’s remind you, everyone’s expected to meet these standards. And here’s what I need you to do to get your behavior in alignment next time. So that’s kind of the classic coaching conversation. But when you weave the core values in, it is much more likely to land better or I think people are less defensive. ‘Well, she did it first’, you know, especially with the personality conflict. 

Paul: Oh yeah. 

Grace: ‘Last week you didn’t even see that so and so, she did that’ and, you know, finger pointing. What about when you come in with the objective standard saying, ‘That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about this specific situation, not in alignment with the core values we’ll address the rest of that separately. But here’s what we need you to do going forward’. 

Paul: ‘And remember, when we set that goal that we wanted X number of referrals per quarter, how did what you just participated in get us towards that goal? Because the patient just asked me, Mary, if you and Pat are in a fight with each other. And basically rolled her eyes and was, you know, making it clear that it was pretty uncomfortable out here. And that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you, Mary, I’m going to go get Pat in a second. But how does what you just participated in, regardless of what’s going on, serve that goal that we set, that mission that we’re on? I just want you to look back at our purpose, which is to take care of these patients and whatever your purpose is, continue to be in a rolling battle with one another, making all the rest of us uncomfortable. And the patients, serve this practice. Which leads me to the, you know, my ultimate ultimatum, which is I can’t make you to get along and be professional, but I can choose who I work with. And I am very shortly going to choose not to work with two people who can’t get along with one another’. And then I always love to drop this one, ‘Which is you two are inextricably tied to one another. So the next time something like this flares up in this way and you can’t keep it outside of work, both of you are fired. I’m not going to pick one or the other to play games with, here. You are going to stop doing this’. These are how you use your core values to have really kind of rough conversations with people. You know, when you have these things they, they create an engine. 

Grace: Yeah, they really help you keep a lid on a situation and give you so much more to work with, with your coaching conversations and help the employee zoom out. Because your average front desk employee is not. They’re clocking in and clocking out as much as we as leaders of a company that we don’t want people, we want them to have a bigger perspective, but they don’t.  Your frontline workers need to be reminded of it. This is the bigger picture, and this is one way that you can do that consistently across all levels of your company. I can tell you that when your entire team, if they are ever aligned around your core values and your principles and your mission and your purpose, it’s very powerful once they’re aligned around it.

Paul: And I think a big part of this for you listening, if you’re thinking, ‘Well, this is something I’ve got to do’. The other thing you do, that you don’t do is create these things in a vacuum. So I pointed to that before Grace, and we have that happen here. Our core are approximately eight or nine years old now, seven years old. And so it’s easy to look up one day and realize that not everybody is involved with those. And as much as we try to onboard them with it and bring it up to them, it’s really important that we use it in our conversation, our coaching conversations, and also embody it and when we set our goals and stuff. This year for the first time in four years, we attached we did it, we just did our strategic planning. Grace came and everybody on the executive team and a couple of others got in a room and we spent three days talking about where we want to be. This includes listeners, if you’re a member of CEDR, ways that we can do more for you. Includes a bunch of stuff about our software and just a lot of realignment that we’re doing here. We tied to every single one of our big rocks, here can only be four, get more than four you’re not going to accomplish them. We tied one or more of our core values, and sometimes cross tied them, to every single one of the big rocks to make sure that that would help us as leaders infuse that conversation in with our team again. And also helps our team to hold us accountable, to hold their leadership accountable. And that’s not a small thing. I mean, you got to walk the walk. You can’t like we said just put the poster on the wall and then have your place fall apart every day for five days in a row. That’s not your core values at work. I want to bring core values to life even a little bit more before we close out today. I want to say something about words. They shape reality and just like saying ‘I’m going to be a doctor’ leads to becoming one core values shape your business when they’re lived. The words, all you really have in this world are your words. Your word, and you can speak things into existence and we do it all the time. I spoke into existence that I was going to start playing drums. I spoke into existence, much to my parent’s chagrin, that I was going to spend a lot of time in my young adulthood playing drums professionally. I’ve spoken to existence that I’m going to ride my mountain bike from home to all the way to work 15 miles across town and back home.

Grace: I remember that oh my gosh, I remember that one. Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. I’ve just given some examples. I spoke into existence that I was going to give back to my community, and now for the last 14 years in two different communities, now adding a third community, I am feeding people who are unsheltered. I’m using some old chef skills that I had. I’m also using, you know, frankly, some of the income that I have in order to fund these places. And so the words everybody who’s listening, you know, your words speak into existence, things. That’s what core values do for, for work. They really do. They, they help move you forward. 

Grace: I have similar stuff this year. I chose my little focus word of the year as we’re trying to do a little more self-care, caring for others in the community and don’t you know, I’m the bad patient that won’t go to my doctors appointments all the time. I’m not good about it, right? I’m just like ‘Oh,  just do that later. I’m too busy’, but this year I’m really going to those appointments because I’ve all 

Paul: Oh, they’re for you? Yeah. You’ve got kids. You can’t. That’s something else I’d like to say to everybody. You can’t take care of other people unless you’re taking care of you. And as a either a manager or a leader or an owner-manager leader, core values really can help you take care of yourself because it does give your team some autonomy. It gives them something to operate on.

Grace: You gotta delegate like, ‘I’m not going to make that decision I’m going to get out of that decision, but you’re going to follow this set of rules for making that decision in my absence’, can really help you care for yourself. So I love that words shape reality. That’s so powerful. 

Paul: Telling someone that you’re going to meet them at 12, or words that imply that you’re going to meet them at 12 for lunch. You’re speaking into reality where we’re going, why we’re meeting, and what time we’re going to be there. Words are very, very powerful. And words that clean up that situation, calling them in 11, ‘Saying, I have a flat tire or I’m running late, can we meet at 12:15? I know you only have 45 minutes for lunch. Do you want to reschedule this?’ Understanding the impact on other people words is very, very powerful. So the other thing we’re going to jump into real quick here is and I promised we would talk about this, how to create and maintain core values. Now I think I want to do an instructional one on this. It’s maybe not a podcast. I think it’s something that probably put in our learning management system. I think we can do it in a high level. We can kind of talk about if you all want to start thinking about this out there, there’s a few do’s and don’ts. The first one, Grace, I said it before, it’s engage your team to help you create the core values. 

Grace: Yeah, what is important to them. What do they think of when they think of your service, your business, their role in it?

Paul: Explain to them that it’s both internal and external so that they’re thinking about it in broader terms. Use all the words that you need to use, right? And that’s what happens the first round. Don’t expect it to get it immediately the way we accomplished this was we came up with some, the kind of leadership team, we came up with some knowing that they didn’t have to be the end goal. I mean, some of them I think we were attached to, we made sure we held on to, but we put a bunch of those big white sticky notes up in one of our rooms and we just put the core values on it. And we told everybody for the next week, the pens, the markers are in there, they’re on the wall. When you’re thinking about this, just write it down and write a few words about it, and then we’ll ask you to give us more words. You know, the way you do this is you put the word integrity and then you define the word what integrity means to you. And you may need to take a couple of paragraphs to do it. And ultimately you want to boil it down, and it took us three years to boil it down. You know, we started using them immediately, but they were like, ‘Wow, these are really long.’ The problem with that is nobody can remember them, right? And they can’t remember the two paragraphs. So you had to get it down to a paragraph and you just work on that and it’s a spoiler alert, it’s a way to get the team to revisit it, to say, ‘Hey, we need to boil this down and get it shorter’, so you could do that the following year. And now they’re reengaged with your core values. They come to you and go, ‘That’s not what it should mean. Now that I’ve worked here this is what it should be.’ And so you’re always working on them and coming back to them, then you get to use them, you get to integrate them. 

Grace: We did not talk about, we talked a lot about how you can use them in performance conversations. Thus far, we have not talked about how you can use them in hiring, training and sort of the more fun side of HR. You can even build this into your interview questions, into your job ad where you can ask questions that really show does this person demonstrate an on time mindset? Get a behavioral interview question where ‘Give me an example of a time that you knew you were going to be late on a deadline. How did you handle it? What did you do?’ just to kind of get a feel. Are they going to be in the same realm of reality that you are or are they way, way off ,and then teach that as people are coming through the door. And when you’re able to define what this specifically looks like, what this particular value looks like for their role and for their position, and get your managers to be doing that as well. One of the ones, for example, that we give as a sample to our members is commitment. You know, we’re committed to providing exceptional patient care and attentiveness to patient needs. That’s just one example. That’s not a CEDR example, just kind of an industry specific example, getting somebody to focus on ‘How do you contribute to that commitment? How do you contribute to that exceptional patient care and attentiveness? This is what that looks like for your role’, is a really great way to integrate those into your business. 

Paul: Yeah, I was at an review recently where we were talking to candidates for a very specific position here and the question was ‘Tell me a time’, it was behavioral interview question, ‘Tell me a time when you missed a deadline, you knew you were going to miss the deadline’, same thing you just pointed out Grace, ‘and what you did’. And the person answered, ‘I don’t miss deadlines’ and we just knew that was it. And I don’t mean that was it we were going to give them a job, that wasn’t an answer that we would not be able to overcome, because that can’t be true.

Grace: A red alert. Yeah, that’s a red alert. That can’t be true. 

Paul: Yeah, that can’t be true. And so I don’t that, that candidate did not get to advance. But it’s an example of how we use our core values to ask those, those kinds of questions. And then I’ve said it over and over, you got to go back and revisit them. You got to put the poster on the wall, you got to use them, you got to live them, you got to breathe them a little bit. And it’s okay if you depart from I don’t mean depart from them, don’t follow them. It’s okay if you’re not living, eating and breathing and singing Kumbaya and building campfires around them day in and day out, and you kind of move away from them. But you need to find ways, once you put this in place, to live and embody them and bring yourself and the team back to those things every now and then. 

Grace: Yeah, we can do some don’ts. We’ve done a few do’s when creating. I do think I’ve seen some folks go wrong because they’re trying to do too much. They want an exhaustive list of everything that might be remotely applicable. And like you mentioned just before, Paul, people aren’t going to remember it if it’s too much if it’s too broad and you really do want to distill it to your priorities and everything can’t be a priority. The other thing and we haven’t talked about this to this point, is hidden legal risks in your core values. You really do want to run this language through an expert who can spot for legal issues. There are some landmines. I’ll give you two short, short examples. I’ve had people say we are an energetic team or we bring energy, big energy, something like that. And we’ve had litigation over that, that that is can violate the ADA, the age discrimination in employment. It just usually takes a little tweak. Not that you can’t say, hey, we’re high energy or we’re bringing attention to our patients, but you have to say it the right way so that it’s not exclusive of a protected group in this case, age or older, older working members of your workforce. The other example is positivity that can violate the National Labor Relations Act. If you’re requiring everybody to be positive all the time about everything you know, then that doesn’t give them their lawful avenue to address any workplace gripes. And that’s a whole other podcast you can find the NLRA episode, click back through, do a search on on the platform. But those are things you would not think would be a problem. But they can be a problem if you’re not going about it in the right way. So work with an expert on creating your core values, and that’s what we do here at CEDR as we can help you stay the course. And then the last kind of don’t is just don’t say words and not define them. I think we covered that a lot earlier, but really getting specific to what does this mean for your workplace will help you all use that shared vernacular and then it’ll be less of an issue going forward if you need to use them. 

Paul: And I’m just going to say this and it’ll be a little cringe-y, but honestly, use all the words you need to to write about this. Work with your team, to write this being this one particular core value. Don’t be afraid to use the number of words you need to to get started. This is a really good use of artificial intelligence and things like Gemini ChatGPT, is you can then take your complete run on sentences and your big thought and say, ‘Can you boil this down for me and show it to me in a more concise way in three different ways?’  And you may come, you may get something back that would surprise you. But then again, no matter what, this has to come from you. You can’t go to ChatGPT. Well, you can, I can tell you that. And it could generate you these nine things or five things or whatever, but you will not have owned them. You will not have included your team in producing them.You will, ChatGPT is not you. It is not you, it does not have your experience. And there’s something about doing this and then having to redo it because you didn’t get it quite right and then revisiting and then honing it down and sometimes it taking, you know, just a couple of months to get the first version up, but having to revisit it and change it and add and take away over three or four years really embodies what it really takes to be a leader. That’s what it takes to be a leader. You keep trying, you keep making mistakes. You keep hopefully repeating your successes and learning from what you’re doing. Well writing core values is that in and of itself. If I give any takeaways here, I’m going to say core values are kind of the foundation of your overall purpose mission. You know that conversation. I think that there’s a foundation that everything sits on. I don’t know how we would have gotten through. I mean, everybody I don’t share this very often. It was 2020. It was in the middle of the pandemic. We had gone through all of this. It was well in place, this being the strategic planning, we had plans for the year and we had our core values and everything set up. And I went down, I had cancer and I had to go in unexpectedly, I had to go for a very serious operation. And, and for four months I went missing and the entire executive team in the company just kept going. And had I been leading from the top down and had they not, everybody not known where we were headed, what we were trying to do, what our values were, I don’t know that we would have been able to provide the kind of care that we were able to provide to the community at large out there at that time. And you know, my executive assistant who had been with us for maybe two years and had been through the executive, had been through this planning twice. She actually kind of Grace, she kind of ended up being the default executive kind of running the company because she knew everything. She was able to go, ‘No, this is what he meant’ or ‘This is what we meant’ or ‘This is what we were talking about’. I just got to tell you, they kind of saved us and they are the north star for this company, for for CEDR. We have continued to get better, grow, innovate, innovates one of our core values. We continue to all of these things because we’ve done this planning and a lot of it sits on the shoulders of the managers and the folks that work here and the core values are what they can stand on.

Grace: That’s right. You’re exactly right that in the absence of, you know, Paul or leadership being able to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to go ahead and do that because I know this has to get done and I’m going to do it this way because that’s what’s going to serve our goals’ is essential. It’s not just a CEDR thing. It’s something you can do in your business. It’s very empowering for you as a leader and for all of your team members. So if you don’t already have core values, you know, I would think you really want to think about setting some time aside to work through some. If you have them and you’re not using them set aside some time to think through them and bring them back to life, breathe new life into them, see how you can tweak them a little bit to get them to work for you and your business, where it’s at today. 

Paul: And there’s a ton of books out there on how to do this and courses. We’re going to create some instructional stuff for it over 2024. We’re going to try and move into pretty quick.

Grace: 2025. 

Paul: 2025. Sorry. Thank you. Thank you, Grace. 

Grace: I do that too. 

Paul: I wrote an article about this so in the, in the notes. In the show notes. You can find a link to the article, to the blog that I’ve written about it, and that we’ve got more episodes in general about, you know, what the hell just happened. If you, if you need any help defining what your core values are and you are a CEDR member and you’ve taken a shot at it, don’t hesitate to reach out. You might even say, ‘Hey, I heard Grace and Paul say that they would look over my core values. I’m sending them in. Can you have somebody take a look at them?’ We’d be happy to take a look at them with you. Grace, this is a little personal because you’re on the executive team and you’ve seen us grow into this. It was really nice to be able to do this kind of interview and talk to you about this and share this with everybody. 

Grace:Thanks for having me. It’s one of my favorite tools. And if anybody listening has success stories with core values, thoughts, experience with their own core values and wants to share them, we’d encourage you to do that through comments or reaching out on one of our platforms as well.

Paul: All right everybody, thanks. This has been What the Hell Just Happened. And I’m Paul Edwards and Grace, you’re Grace Godlasky. And we’re out of here. 

Britt: All right. This week’s community question is ‘We have been trying to hire a team member role for over four months now, and we can’t seem to get a good candidate in the interview. What are we doing wrong, or is this just really, unfortunately normal?’ 

Paul: This is a a good question and it’s a very common question. Okay. First of all, I’m going to answer this as if I’m answering for a nonclinical position, because if we were looking for clinical people, the answers can be quite different. You know, really four, four months is a little long for most positions. But honestly, we’ve been polling our members and some people are answering that it’s taking 4 to 6 months to fill positions, but most of the time that’s clinical or a highly specialized position within their practice and they’re just holding out for the right person. So without knowing exactly, you know, what they are or they’re not doing, I’ll just give some thoughts. First, let’s just kind of talk about your initial push to find someone. Remember, one thing you can do is offer your existing employees like a $500 bonus if they bring you a good candidate, you know, refer someone in and, you know, of course, you don’t just give them the $500 bonus they’ve got to get people and you interview them. If you hire one of their referrals, then at six months you pay out the first 250 to your existing employee who referred them and then when that candidate stays for a full year, you give them the other 250. So when putting out ads and letting people know you have a position, I just want you to make sure that you’re including your entire market. What I mean by this, what this does is create an equal chance for like all walks of life in your town to be made aware that there is a job available and it can often result in ensuring that you get a wider range of candidates. I mean, I guess my point being that is if by only advertising on something like LinkedIn or Indeed or only doing kind of the referral, internal referral thing where you try to get your employees to find another employee, you might be missing some candidates that don’t normally use or wouldn’t be exposed to any of those avenues. In other words, if they don’t know, they don’t know your employees, then they’re never going to know that there’s a job available. So I know everybody’s pushing stuff out on Indeed, and I think that’s a great idea. And there’s nothing wrong with using LinkedIn, particularly in a more rural areas where where it’s taking more than four months, you might consider that you’ve got to try to broaden your reach. And that could mean, you know, again, reaching out, unconventional things, you know, posting it in your Facebook group, maybe, you know, talking to your accountant and asking if they know anybody. I mean, you just really got to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. And I know most of you who are having trouble hiring or getting good candidates are probably doing some of these things. But I just want to throw it out there. The other thing I want to point out is and it’s harder to do when you’re smaller team, but it’s an always be hiring mindset. You know, you’re just always need to be looking at people around you, in situations around you for where you can hire someone. I think that’s is part of supporting that. You want to make sure that on your own website you have a great web page that describes your culture and the reasons why people may want to come work for you. But more importantly, and I’m going to develop this more as I answer the question, sorry, this will be kind of a long question. More importantly, why they may want to switch jobs and come work for you. For non-clinical jobs you, you might find your best candidates are working in other industries. And so you want to make sure also, if I want to add this to you, want to also make sure that you’re publishing a pay band within your ad, you know, saying this is the starting salary and this is the, you know, the top of the range for it at this time. The people with the skills that you’re looking for need to see that if, you know, maybe you’re offering more money, that that would be one reason why they would want to switch from where they’re at and come work for you. Also, when you when you publish pay bands, you eliminate wasting your time in there. So that’s another reason for using pay bands. And then in some states they actually require you to put that in there. You should make sure that your pay and benefits meet and or exceed the market. So that’s another big thing. I’ll oftentimes, not all the time, but oftentimes what we see in a in a situation where saying, you know, four months or longer, it has something to do with the pay. Another thing I would add is highlight the things that, some of the things you might be taking for granted. So, for instance, if you’re only open four days a week or you’re never open on the weekends, you may just see that as normal. But there’s a lot of people out there who have to work split shifts and work on the weekends or, you know, would love to have a three day weekend all the time as the norm. If you don’t tell them about these things, then they don’t know. And again, that may draw someone out of another industry over to you because of the, you know, the benefit of that. I mean, I think that’s a really kind of, you know, great thing about working in medical and dental sometimes, although I know a lot of a lot of you who are listening, you’re open five days a week. But again, no weekend work might be a big deal. Obviously, if you’re doing things like flexible schedules and stuff like that, you want to include all of it. Again, I want to say this. I want you to shop for skills first in not so much industry. So you’re not looking for someone who has been a financial person in dentistry or in medical. You’re looking for a financial person. It doesn’t matter as long as they have the skills, they can come work for you. Another thing I would suggest you do, the first thing I say is make sure you change your ad up so if you’re not getting good results in the first month, change your ad up regardless. Start switching it around, maybe trying some little different techniques to highlight things because if you leave the same add up all the time, then people just see it and glaze over it and they don’t really give it consideration. Focus on your benefits as part of your culture. If you do paid vacation and sick time, make sure it’s there. If you do education reimbursement, 401k matching, you know, if you do bonuses for the team when whenever you guys accomplish goals and this is the time to use that as part of your little honeypot to draw in good candidates. Yeah, the last thing I’ll put in here is you might want consider seeking out the like recent graduates and then training them up. I admit that it’s a lot of work and it may not be practical for everybody who’s listening, but sometimes the best solution to a bigger problem is to start small and then train from within and then promote people when they show that they’re, you know, a right fit for your company. And so, you know, you always want to think about that. What might be good is to bring people in at a different entry level and kind of train them up and then be paying attention and go, ‘Wow, this person would be really good for this other job’, you know, work towards that. So you’re kind of bringing them into the easier positions, although I don’t think most of our listeners have an easy position. Answering your phones and dealing with your patients is as hard as any other position in the practice. But anyway, those are some of my ideas for doing a better job. 

Paul: Okay, now for the segment we have finally landed on, which is Man Shakes Fist at Cloud. This one has to do with data and knowledge, and I don’t understand how we got to where we are today. It was fully predictable that we would not have enough health care providers and primary care providers in the year 2025, and that was fully predictable, how many we would need or approximately how many we would need. And we knew this 20 years ago because the data was showing us who is aging out where and when. The data was showing us what our birth rates were. I mean, everything was there for us to take a look at. And we did nothing. We did absolutely nothing as a country. Our government did nothing with leadership in this area. They focused on anything but these important problems. So man shakes fisted cloud is that there is a really, there are a lot of really good purposes for government. And one of those is to look at problems like this and to begin to solve for them. And there’s all kinds of things that we could have done to encourage people to get into med school, to support them when they’re doing it, to reward them when they get out. Things that we could do with tax breaks, with paying for their education because it would be good for the rest of the country. So man shakes the cloud because we had the data, we had the information, and as a society we chose to focus on something else.

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