The Key to Calling Out Real Issues

Episode #410 with Jenni Poulos

Don't just band-aid your problems — get to the root of it! And to help you identify and solve the problems in your practice, Kirk Behrendt brings back Jenni Poulos, one of ACT’s lead coaches, to reveal the steps to calling out real issues together with your team. Be proactive in resolving problems so they don't become a crisis! To learn how, listen to Episode 410 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Step back and take a holistic view.

Pause and ask what the real issues are.

Identify the problem behind the problem.  

Get good at asking, “And, what else?”

Prioritize your most important issues.

Fixing the real issues will save time.

Quotes:

“It’s so devastating for doctors and team members to band-aid and patch, and band-aid and patch, and talk about the same things over, and over, and over again. It kills momentum. It kills meetings. It can kill trust too.” (0:56—1:14)

“There's no greater fatigue than mental fatigue. And if you diagnose the mental fatigue, what you're going to find is we’ve got to get to the real issue. And when you get to the real issue and you can diagnose it and do something about it, your life will actually change. It'll change over and over again.” (1:47—2:04)

“Our minds tend to go to all of the obstacles, to all of the reasons that something won't work. And then, we get into this putting-out-fires mode and dealing with one little thing here, and one little thing there, and one little thing here, and we just don't look holistically at things so we can pause, change our thought process, and think about, ‘Okay, what's really affecting this? What is this really going to affect? How do I need to think about change on a whole?’ We just don't step back to look at things in a way that can help us really understand what's going on.” (2:45—3:31)

“The first thing, really, is just to pause. What is the real issue? We talk in circles. Are we run, run, run, run, run about something that we’re frustrated with? And sometimes, just asking a team member, pausing during a team meeting and saying, ‘Okay, let's just take a second here. In one sentence, can we say what is the real issue? Let's try to bring it in a little bit and identify what is the issue, not talk about what are all of the effects that I'm seeing. What are all the things that are circling around here? Let's bring it in. What's the real issue?’ Because it’s easier to work with one thing versus a million things that are going around.” (5:06—5:59)

“Here’s a question that'll add to the real issue. Is this person a good core values fit for your practice? And if the answer is no, there's nothing you're going to say, there's no formula, there's no wisdom, there's no motivation that will ultimately fix this. We just don't care about the same things, and eventually it’s going to fall apart. So, you have to identify the real issue. Because people that fit your core values on your team, they’ll be willing to listen. They understand, and at least they’ll be open to the conversation.” (6:12—6:40)

“The problem is rarely the first thing that is stated. There's always something behind that that's causing it. We’re looking at the symptom. We want to know what's the actual cause. A great and very simple example, I was working with a team and they're like, ‘The data’s wrong! The data’s wrong. We don't know this. We don't know that. We can't figure it out.’ The root cause is they had no idea how to actually use the software. So, the problem wasn't that the data was incorrect. The problem was that they didn't have the training to understand how to use it. So, rather than spending all this time analyzing the data and where it’s wrong, it actually was an inability to use a software. So, a very simple explanation. But so...