The strength of the team is impacted by its weakest link. You lose the respect of the best people you have working with you when you don’t deal properly with the worst. We have so many great examples of this. We have a business that, in Kentucky, had been in existence for 25 years. The front office person that had worked there, that runs the whole administrative team, had been there for 23 years. And she was an integral part of the business. She also happened to be the person who was the most negative. But the business owner abdicated the responsibilities of running the daily operations to this office person.

Well, after struggling for many years to be able to move the business forward, even though the business owner was trying to implement much change, the bottom line was this, the front office person was the one that was resisting everything. It was also the front office person who was the most influential person in the organization because she was there every day. With the patients, the other employees, everyone, including the business owner, she didn’t like what the business owner wanted to attain because it caused– cause and effect– her to change what she was doing. So, ultimately, until the business, which was about a million-dollar business, found out in one month it was going to lose 50% of its revenue because of a change of reimbursement, that then the business owner had to get serious about what they wanted to do. Well, one of the things that happened is we had to radically change how the business was performed.

The front office individual did not want to change with that radical change, so the business owner had to remove her, as painful as that was, a lot of pain. What happened when he removed that individual is his business lost 50% of its revenue in a two-month period. And, yet, the following 12 months the business grew by 20%. The rest of the team stepped up and realized the business owner was serious about what he wanted to accomplish.

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