Joey Coleman: Never Lose An Employee Again, and more
GYC Podcast E268
[TRANSCRIPT]
00:13 Ben Lynch
Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. My name is Ben Lynch. In this episode, we speak with Joey Coleman. Joey helps companies keep their customers and employees. As an award-winning speaker, he shares his first 100-days methodology for improving customer and employee retention with organizations around the world, including Whirlpool, Volkswagen Australia and Zappos. His Wall Street Journal number two best-selling book, Never Lose a Customer Again, shows how to turn any sale into a lifelong customer. And in his upcoming book, Never Lose an Employee Again, he details a framework for companies around the world so that they can reduce turnover and increase employee engagement. Joey is a return guest on the podcast. We first spoke with him when he launched his book, Never Lose a Customer Again, and it was so informative and transformative for us at Clinic Mastery and for the clinics that we work with, inspiring things like the Zero to 100, the first 100 days of a new team member's journey. And in this episode, Joey covers eight phases of the journey of a new team member and how we can create remarkable experiences from the interview process and recruitment, all the way through to creating an advocate of our clinic. Let's pick up the conversation where I share with Joey this big hook that he had at the opening of his book that really captured my attention. So last time we spoke, it was episode 30 of this podcast and we're talking about Never Lose a Customer Again, creating remarkable client experiences with your first 100-day methodology, which is transformational in its own right. Now we're talking about Never Lose an Employee Again using a similar framework and methodology. And I for one am very grateful that you've turned your sights onto team members and your genius for creating remarkable experiences is now impacting the teams that take care of the clients and the customers. What sort of reaction have you had since publishing the book?
02:29 Joey Coleman
You know, the reaction, Ben, has been wonderful and I'm so thankful for that. We were able to hit number five on the Wall Street Journal when the book came out, which is always a nice mark that people are interested in the topic and there's a hunger for a topic. But I'd say the thing that has been the most fulfilling for me is whenever, you know, it's funny I see the picture in the background here of the clouds and the dirt, right? And I really try to adopt Gary Vaynerchuk's philosophy whenever I'm thinking about books. I want a book that helps people to think at a high strategic level. But if it's not tactical and applicable, I don't feel like I've earned your investment of time to read the book, to listen to the book, to buy the book. And the feedback we've gotten already at the time we're recording this, the book's been out about five weeks and the feedback has already been remarkable with people saying, hey, Joey, I read this case study. I immediately implemented the idea of my business and I'm seeing a shift in my team members already. Or, hey, Joey, we had a bunch of interviews coming up. We applied your methodology and we really feel like we found a great candidate who's going to be an awesome member of our team going forward. The fact that people are already applying the ideas to the book, from the book to their businesses is really wonderful. The other thing I'll say briefly is with my first book, it was really interesting. The book came out. We sold a lot of copies, which I was very thankful for. But then it didn't seem like people read the book that they just purchased until about two or three or even four months later. I don't know about you, Ben, but I'm kind of like that. At first I was like, what's going on? And then I thought of my own behavior. When I buy a new book, it doesn't go to the top of the stack on the nightstand. It may make it to the nightstand, but it's behind some books that have already been there. What's fascinating with this book is it seems like within hours of purchasing the book, people are reading it or listening to it. And I know this because there's a great thing we put together called Experience the Book where you can sign up. And as I have seen the sales go through very quickly, people have been signing up. The book had been out for less than two hours before the first person signed up to Experience the Book, a listener in Sweden. And they were right into it. And I thought, OK, this seems to be a harder, more acute, more right now we're trying to solve this problem issue for the readers that are diving into the book. So that's greatly gratifying and fulfilling as an author.
05:05 Ben Lynch
I think, you know, off the back of COVID and what it did to disrupt teams around the world, it is such a hot topic at the moment. And I will say that in the opening pages, you had me hooked because you spoke about this narrative that we often have as business owners. And, you know, often it's internal, but sometimes we say it out loud. That is, you know, I wish my employees, my team cared as much about my business as I do. Boy, is he listening to my thoughts?
05:40 Joey Coleman
Well, then it was only because I was channeling my own when I was writing it. You know, I've said that I've felt that I've thought that in the multiple businesses I've been involved with over the years. And then I kind of had this stark realization. And that realization is your employee wished you cared as much about them, as you care about the business, please don't mishear me. Anybody that's joining in, listening or watching us. But what I am saying is that we think about the experiences we're creating for our employees. That needs to be at the forefront of our business strategies and our business goals, as opposed to an afterthought that is allowing us to achieve our goals.
06:30 Ben Lynch
It's such a great point because whenever we start a business, we are so close to the customer experience, the client experience, and you often build a reputation after doing that so well. You get to a point where you're recruiting team members and bringing them on. But that sort of habitual thinking of I've got to absolutely impact the client experience often means the team are second best as you start to grow. They're put on the back burner. You talk about the first 100 days and how that can really set you and your team up for success. Can you explain what are the key factors that employers need to focus on to get that first 100 days right?
07:17 Joey Coleman
Well, I think Ben, even just starting with this idea that you want to pay attention to 100 days is a mindset shift for most employers. And I say this respectfully because it's really difficult to be an employer. It's always been difficult to be an employer. And in 2023 and beyond, I think it's more difficult than ever. But it's not enough just to think about how do we recruit. It's not enough just to think about, well, what's our interviewing and hiring process look like? It's not enough to think about what's the first day on the job look like. We need to string every step, every phase of the employee journey together and be thinking strategically about each step in that journey and thinking at this point in the relationship, what does this other person need from me? What do they need when they're a prospective candidate? What do they need when they're a candidate? What do they need when they're an offer? What do they need once they've accepted the offer and they become an employee? What do they need after they show up for the first day on the job and they've officially become an employee? What do they need a month into the job? Two months, three months at each of these steps in the process, an employee needs different things mentally, physically, emotionally. If we're not thinking strategically and tactically about delivering all those things, we can't hope to have a consistent, unified experience.
08:38 Ben Lynch
What I love at the core of this is there's empathy for the other person, and that is truly care. We're speaking to a community here of healthcare professionals. And whenever I ask them, you know, why do you do what you do? It's some version of, because I love helping people. I love caring for people. And what you've got here is a really distinct framework for how do you do that intentionally? How do you do that purposefully and consistently time and time again? So you've got eight phases that the book outlines as to how you can break this journey down. Can you share a brief rundown of the eight phases?
09:20 Joey Coleman
Sure. What I'll do is I'll give a brief overview of the phases, Ben, and then we can dive into whichever ones you'd like. So for everybody watching or listening in, basically, when we think about the eight phases, there are eight phases to the employee journey and they all start with the letter A. And that's not because I'm trying to confuse folks. It's because I want them to think about each of these as separate criteria by which your employees might give you a grade. And if they're giving you straight A's, it's like you're getting the best marks in school. We'll walk back. Exactly. We're going to the head of the class. So the first phase is the assess phase. This is when a prospective employee, a candidate, if you will, is trying to decide whether or not they want to work at your organization. They're checking out your job listing or your classified ad. They're looking at your careers page on your website or the About Us page. They might be going to your social media profile, trying to learn a bit about your business. They might be seeing who they know that works at, you know, at your organization, that they're connected via LinkedIn. They're trying to figure out what's it going to be like if I become an employee. They're also going through your interview and hiring process, whether that's submitting an application or a resume, going through remote interviews, in-person interviews, any testing that you have, anything that's going to lead up until that point where we move to phase two, which is the accept phase. In the accept phase, we as the employer identify our desired candidate and we extend them an offer. And if we're lucky, that candidate accepts our offer. They formally transition from being a prospective employee to being an actual employee. We then go into phase three. Now, Ben, this one, I'm guessing many of the folks listening in are familiar with the phrase buyer's remorse. When someone who makes a purchase begins to doubt the decision they just made, I'd like to potentially introduce you to a new concept, new hires remorse. It's the same thing as buyer's remorse, but it is experienced by a newly hired employee as opposed to a brand new customer. They begin to doubt the decision they made to accept your offer. Now, they do this for any number of reasons, not the least of which could be, oh, I should have negotiated for a better salary or a better package. Or more importantly, I was interviewing for several jobs and I got an offer and I accepted this one. But, you know, I hadn't heard back from these other two companies. What if the offer would have been better? Maybe I should have waited and tried to get them to bid against each other. These feelings of fear and doubt and uncertainty, if not addressed directly by the employer, leave this new employee in an emotional deficit before they've even shown up for their first day of work. This is a huge problem that very few businesses are paying any attention to. We then come to the first day on the job, phase four, the activate phase. This is when they show up for that first day. Now, what's interesting is most employers, when they think about the first hundred days, that's day one. No, friends, day one is when they saw your job listing and they and you got and they went through your interview process and they got hired. OK, there's all this time leading up. So when you get to that first official day of work or the first official day on the job, the question we want to ask ourselves is, are we creating such a remarkable experience? Their first day at work that they have to tell everyone they know about it. We then come to phase five. Phase five is the acclimate phase. This phase starts on day two on the job, the day after their first day on the job and extends for weeks, maybe even months as this new employee gets used to your way of doing business, they acclimate to their surroundings. This includes learning their role, their responsibilities, the requirements for their job, details and tasks, the relationships they're going to have within your organization and outside of your organization. It's a big lift. And what happens is most employers push a new employee into the deep end of the swimming pool and say, well, we did two days of training. Just figure it out as you go instead of holding their hand as they navigate those weeks and months ahead. We then come to phase six, the accomplished phase. This is when the newly hired employee achieves the goal they had when they originally decided to accept your offer. Every employee has a vision of what it will be like to work for you. And it's not just to get a paycheck, although that's important. They have a vision of a new title, new responsibilities, new skills, new experiences, new interactions, new feelings. If we're not tracking those desires and measuring the new employees progress towards those milestones, we're not going to be able to celebrate with them when they achieve those milestones. And if we don't celebrate those with and for the employee, the likelihood of them celebrating them themselves is much, much lower. We then come to phase seven, the adopt phase. This is when an employee becomes loyal to us and only us. They aren't going to answer those calls from a headhunter or recruiter. They are committed. They are bought in. They have really become the embodiment of our culture. And if and only if we get them through those seven phases, do we have the right, the privilege to invite them into the eighth phase, the advocate phase where they become a raving fan for us, singing our praises far and wide. They're writing reviews on Glassdoor. And any time we have a new position opening opening in our organization, they are actively recruiting their friends, their colleagues, the best people they've ever met to come and join the team and work with them. One of the tests I use for the for this advocate phase, Ben, is I'll ask leaders, you know, well, do you have advocates in your team? And they say, oh, yeah, everybody's an advocate. I say, great. Think of the most recent opening you had in your organization. What percentage of the people you interviewed were direct referrals from existing or former employees? Because, by the way, advocates can be people who used to work for you, who still love you and still refer people your way. And when I see that sheepish look on their face, Ben, where they realize, well, not that many. You don't really have an advocate. You might have an adopter. You have someone who's loyal, but they're not advocating on behalf of your business. So these are the eight phases. And if we do it right, we can navigate a new hire all the way through from the first moment they hear about us until they become a raving fan.
16:12 Ben Lynch
That's such a great framework to think about the journey. And day one doesn't start on day one of them showing up to the business, but even earlier to think what do they need and what are they thinking about at each one of these stages so that we could design more personalized human and remarkable experiences. The key metric there as well at the end of the advocate, I think that's a really great one for people to track for new job openings. How many of those applicants have been referred the word of mouth referral? So often health clinics are tracking word of mouth referrals of patients or clients. But also, what about team members? It's such a brilliant one. If we go to earlier on in the stages, the interview stage, you know, so much of the interview stage is about getting to know the person and what they bring to the company. One of the more sort of unconventional practices that you suggest in the book is providing the candidates with the interview questions in advance. Why do you suggest we consider doing that?
17:18 Joey Coleman
Well, Ben, this was definitely something that as I was writing it in the book, I knew I might ruffle some feathers because folks are like, wait a second, Joey, we're going to tell them what we're going to ask them exactly. And here's why. If this person does become an employee and you've sent them out to meet with your most valuable client, would you send them into that meeting with no context for the conversation, the past relationship, what they should be listening for, what they should be looking for, the type of things they should be promising and not promising and trying to get across in that conversation with the client? Of course you would do that. You would do those things. You would provide all of that. So why not share the questions you're going to ask? Now, do you have to share all of them? No, but the benefit of sharing the questions is multifaceted. Number one, we reduce the stress of the conversation. I don't know about you, Ben, but I've been on both sides of the interview table. I've been the interviewee and the interviewer, and it is stressful for both parties. It's a fiction. We're trying to get together in this limited amount of time and often in less than an hour, decide whether we should spend several years together. This is insane. We wouldn't even do this in dating, let alone in work. And we spend more time with our coworkers at work than we usually do with our personal life partner. So what might we want to do to make that conversation less stressful? Well, let's have an agenda. Let's make it clear what types of questions we're going to be asking, what types of things we're interested in exploring, give the prospective employee some guidance as to the type of examples we're looking for or the type of answers we're looking for. We don't have to tell them, hey, if you answer this way, you get hired. But we might say we're going to be asking for three specific examples from your past work history where you had to do a lot with very little resources. Maybe that's one of our core values. Do more with less or where you had to go above and beyond with your creativity and flexibility to deliver for a client. This allows the candidate to actually thoughtfully consider their work history. So we're not testing their ability to be a mental Rolodex in the moment, but rather their ability to point to clear specific examples from their career as being evidentiary of what they might be able to do on our team. This makes for much deeper conversations, much better conversations for all parties involved.
20:01 Ben Lynch
I think that's really great shift in the current paradigm because so often we can think of an interview process. If we are interviewing somebody that it's really an improvisation game and we're saying, how quickly can you think on your feet? I want to see how dynamic. And there aren't too many people that have that sort of skill set. And we think, oh, they didn't really resonate or they didn't really appeal to me in the interview process. You do speak about though, the element of surprise. And if we're able to give them that preparation, what are some questions that we could ask that are a bit off the cuff to tell us a little bit more about the personality of the candidate?
20:42 Joey Coleman
Well, Ben, I like to ask questions that go beyond clearly identifiable work related traits and skills. So for example, a question that I came across in my research, which I absolutely love is if we were to go look at your computer at home and look at all your open browsers, how many open tabs do you have and what kind of pages are you on? Based on their answer, you will immediately learn some things about how they think as a human. There might be some candidates that say, oh my gosh, I always have like 300 browser windows open. OK, I'm not saying that's a reason to hire or not hire someone, but it just gave you some insight into how their brain works and how they think about structure. They might say, well, my home page automatically is this. It's not Google. It's not Yahoo. I have it set to an inspirational quote for the day. Or I have it set to auto populate with my calendar or I have it set to auto populate with Instagram or whatever it may be. Again, you will learn about how they think and how they behave based on their habitual behaviors with what they have on their screen. And what I often find is when you ask a candidate an unexpected question. Now, I get that this cuts against my give them all. I didn't say necessarily give them all the questions. I just said give them most of the questions. When you ask them to think a little bit differently, you're also going to get some insight into how do they answer when it's an unexpected scenario or an unexpected question. Again, I think a lot of this, Ben, comes to what type of position are we hiring for? If I'm hiring for someone who is going to be a call center rep who is asked to read a script and deliver a specific standard operating procedure every time, I don't want someone who's an improvisationalist. I don't want someone who's going to come up with a different way of doing it every time. I want someone who's going to follow the checklist. Now, conversely, if I'm looking to hire a salesperson who's going to be targeting new and emerging markets, who's going to have to kind of create the marketplace and bring our product or service into it. Well, you bet. I want the improvisationalist. I want the creative person. I want the person who's used to rejection, has a high level of resiliency, is ready to go off script at a moment's notice to bring the conversation back to where it needs to be. So thinking strategically about the way we interview as it relates to the type of position we're trying to fill is also something we should be giving thought to.
23:25 Ben Lynch
It's a great distinction in a sort of a provocative way to connect the point here of something in the book that stood out for me as well was every employee has coworkers. This is what you wrote. Every employee has coworkers, but not every employee has colleagues. Speaking about improvisation on the spot, that really got me thinking as a reader of the book and I wanted to ask, what is the distinction between a coworker and a colleague?
23:59 Joey Coleman
Well, to me, Ben, I think a lot of businesses use those phrases interchangeably and I understand why they do. But the distinction I'd like to encourage folks to adopt is as follows. A coworker is someone who works for the same employer, is paid by the same legal entity, right, is part of the team. A colleague is a friend. A colleague is someone who knows when you come into work on Monday and they say, how was they don't say, how was your weekend? They say, how was the soccer game? How was the birthday party? What did you know? They know what's going on in your life outside of work and they're a friend. The research on having a friend at work is absolutely incredible. This cuts across industries and what it is found is that people experience a higher level of engagement, a higher level of fulfillment, a higher level of joy and maybe most importantly, a higher level of retention. If they answer the question, do you have a best friend at work in the affirmative? If they say, yes, I have a best friend at work, they over index in all of those categories. The way I like to think of it is it's really easy to quit a place with coworkers. It's really difficult to quit a job where you have colleagues.
25:26 Ben Lynch
That is such a sound bite of wisdom. I think that having that colleague culture is just so valuable. I think to the people on our team and the teams that we get to see, it's really quite evident those that are connected and embrace this colleague relationship have a far richer culture.
25:50 Joey Coleman
They also have richer lives, Ben, if I may. I was having a conversation with a group of mid-twentysomethings this weekend and we were all together there for an event. I found myself at a table with about a half dozen of them and they were asking me what I do. When we got on the subject of work and I was fascinated because I felt I had a little laboratory here of 25 to 28 year olds who were working in a variety of different industries. And we started talking about relationships, i.e. personal dating relationships as it relates to the workplace. And what I shared with them is historically, at least here in the United States, and I think this plays out in most countries around the world, the place where you met your spouse, your life partner was either school, a place of worship or work. Historically, that's where you met people. Let's look at life today. The number of people that identify with a place of worship globally is declining in almost every country on the planet. The number of people who are attending school in person is declining almost every year as more of higher education becomes remote. The number of people who are meeting at work is declining every year as more businesses operate remotely. The question, Ben, is going to be where are we going to meet our life partners if we're not going to the places we used to go to meet them, if we're not creating this transition from coworker to colleague, if we're not creating this opportunity to have a culture of personal and emotional connection with the people who report to the same employer, work for the same organization, we start to run into societal challenges that I'm not saying couldn't also be addressed in the school and the places of worships and some of the other communities we have. But as we start to chip away at in-person activities at work, we're going to start to chip away at those personal connections, too.
27:59 Ben Lynch
The remote side of things has become huge, especially through the wake of COVID. What are some of the things in your research that you've seen from brands, from companies to create a culture in a remote driven world?
28:14 Joey Coleman
Two, I'll give you two examples, one that's in the book and one that I've learned about since the book came out, because one of the great things about writing a book, Ben, is people then will write in and they'll read the book and say, hey, Joey, at our company, we did this. And you might be interested to know. So I'll share one that's in the book and one that's kind of come up since then. So one that's in the book comes from a company called Boudai Media. Boudai Media has about 30 plus employees, 30 to 35 employees in 17 time zones around the world. They're an entirely remote team that is literally spread around the globe. And they do something to create connection with their people that I found fascinating when a new employee is hired. They're sent a package in the mail and that package says, do not open until you're on your first team call with us. So this arrives before their first day at work, their first day on the job. They come to the first day on the job and there's a Zoom meeting where everybody's there and they say, OK, go ahead and open the package. And when they open up the package inside is a mug. And instead of having the Boudai Media logo on the mug, it has the photos of all of their coworkers, plus the photo of the new employee on the mug. And as the person opens it and looks at it, everybody else on the call raises a glass in toast and they all have the same mug. What they've done is they've created a physical artifact of connection in an organization that operates primarily digitally. They have an analog memento, an artifact of the relationship they have together. And I had the chance to talk to the CEO. We met up in person not too long ago and talked about the fact that going forward is they hire new employees. They create new mugs and they send them out to people so that they continue to build and foster the community. So that was one way. And I think if you're not into the mug idea, the takeaway here for you is how can you create analog connection if you have a predominantly digital organization? What are the physical markers of belonging? Which takes us to the second example. There's a company that has a number of their teams that operate remotely. And what they do is when they hire for a new position, they hire someone, they find the great candidate and let's say they find that candidate and that candidate is based in Melbourne, for example, next time they have an open position for any role, the first place where they do job listings is Melbourne because they want to create many pods around the world of employees. They don't have to be in the same department or same division or even same level, but they want to be able to have a scenario where they can come to those team members and say, Hey, we'd love everybody in Melbourne to get together for lunch sometime in the next two weeks. You all decide when that's going to be. Go to lunch and expense it to the company. We'll cover the cost. And here's the only requirement. No talking about work during the lunch. There's no agenda. There's no, just get to know each other. Just hang out. This creates again, those analog interactions and they're starting to build regional communities of remote workers who have connection to each other because they are colleagues, because they work for the same organization.
31:56 Ben Lynch
Really great examples. And like you said, if it doesn't fit exactly to the listener, take some of the principles behind it, like the analog in the digital world, we're speaking about the elements that make a meaningful role and meaningful workplace. When it comes to the recruitment side and then the retention side, so often we'll have clinic owners ask us about the benefits and the perks, how to kind of one seal the deal perhaps with the package, but then also retain people because they've got some wonderful things on offer for their team members. So what are some of the more unique employee benefits that you've come across in your research?
32:41 Joey Coleman
Oh Ben, there's been a number of them, but there's one company that immediately jumps to the top of mind when you ask this question and it's a company called Giftology, it's run by my good friend, John Rulin, who is an expert at strategic appreciation. How do you show the love to the people who matter most to you? And he does a lot of gifting programs for corporate clients and your top prospects and your top folks. How do you gift them on a regular basis? So it's no surprise that he would also be thinking from this, show them the love, send them love bombs philosophy with his own people. He has two amazing benefits, which his teammates love. Now John has about a dozen employees, somewhere between a dozen and 20. And the majority of his employees are women. And the majority of his employees are actually moms. So John has two unique things. Number one, everyone who works for John gets unlimited house cleaning. Now I want to be clear. I am not making a judgment on who should do the house cleaning in a house. Right. But often the research shows this falls more on the shoulders of the mom in the relationship than if there's a dad in the relationship. Okay. So what he does is he says free house cleaning, but here's how it works. The employee picks the house cleaner. The employee picks the frequency. They pay for it. And then they get reimbursed. Now early on I asked John, well, John, why don't you just, you make a deal with a house cleaner and send them every other week to your people and, you know, cover it that way. He said, Joey, here's the thing. They weren't responding well to that. They each had their own vision of who they wanted to hire, the things that were important to them in a cleaner. They had a vision of how often they wanted their house cleaned. And what we found is if we just gave them the money, they didn't spend it on the house cleaners. They spent it on their kids. They spent it on their spouse. They spent it on paying bills. They didn't spend it with the intention and the purpose that we add of trying to reduce their home life stress by having them come home to a clean house. He then rolled out the next offer or the next employee benefit, if you will, which is unlimited babysitting. Same model. You pick the sitter, you pick the frequency, you pay the sitter, and then you submit for reimbursement. No questions asked. You get reimbursed. Again, he wanted his people to be investing in their relationship with their partner or their spouse in a way that would make their home life smooth so that coming to work didn't have kind of the challenges of home spilling into the office. So he was willing to pay for that frequency of connection, date nights, doing unique things to make that happen. I'm not saying you should offer your people house cleaning. I'm not saying you should offer your people babysitting. What I am saying is you should look at your employee base, identify the things that if they had these things would make their life better and go beyond just more money, go beyond a better title, go beyond flexible hours. Although you want to think about all of those things, go to the things that will like them up. A date with their spouse, a clean house, some, you know, a subscription to a concert series when you know they love the orchestra, a regular gift card for books, you know, fifty dollars a month stipend to buy books when you know they're an avid reader. Every employee has things that matter to them. And the more you can target benefits to the things that matter to your people, the more connected they're going to be to your organization.
36:41 Ben Lynch
Speaking of connection in the book, you spoke about a buddy or mentee program from I think it was Sun Microsystems. Yes. And it comes back to that colleague connection relationship. Can you share about what you learned in your research of this type of buddy, mentee, mentor program?
37:03 Joey Coleman
So there are a number of organizations around the world that have buddy programs or mentor programs or mentee programs. One of the interesting things about Sun is the research that they did on how this would impact the overall experience of the new employee. And what they found was a couple of things. Number one, it made the new employee, the new hire feel connected faster. It also helped to answer questions and get them up to speed technically faster because they were maybe embarrassed to ask a question in a group setting. But in a one on one with an assigned buddy or mentee, it felt a lot safer. They then looked at productivity and retention. And what they found is employees who had a veteran buddy were more productive and stayed longer. They also found that they were promoted more frequently and faster. But where it gets really interesting, Ben, is when they applied these same metrics to the existing employees who were serving as mentors and they found that their productivity went up, their retention went up, their promotions went up. When we feel that we have a connection at work, this goes back to our coworkers versus colleagues conversation. When we feel that there is someone at work who personally cares about us, who personally is invested in our success, we do better. We feel happier. We're more productive. We're more engaged. We stay longer. It doesn't require tons of money. It doesn't require a complicated program. It just requires some thoughtfulness and making sure that new employees don't flounder. And if you were to ask your existing employees who might be willing to serve as a mentor for this new hire. I think you'll be astounded at the number of volunteers you'll get because most humans like this idea of showing someone the ropes. They don't like as much the idea of being assigned a ride along buddy. But if given the opportunity to opt into that role, you will find some really talented people rising to the top and raising their hands and opting in to participate in these types of programs.
39:32 Ben Lynch
It's a great distinction of the opt-in, really getting people who are motivated to be part of it because I so often hear from business owners, clinic owners. I say, this sounds great, but I feel like I'm already working 60, 70 hours a week. How can I accommodate this? These changes, I get the benefits of doing it. And so what I love about what you've shared through this conversation is a way actually that they can be low cost, easy to implement and often are more about the existing team supporting one another rather than this bottleneck of the small business owner that says, all right, this is another thing on the to do list. It's not to say that you're.
40:18 Joey Coleman
Yeah, yeah, you're spot on. And here's the thing. If you're a clinic owner listening to this, I'm not saying you should be the mentor. In fact, you shouldn't be someone else should be the mentor on your team. And it gets really interesting when we start to play with who is the person being mentored by. I will tell you that in my experiences in the health care system, if I was a new doctor in a clinic scenario, I would want to be mentored by the nurse practitioner or the member of the nursing staff who had been there the longest. If I was given my choice, that's who I'd pick. And the reason I picked that Ben is all too often I have been in health care scenarios where the person who actually knew how to get things done, the person who actually knew what was going on, the person who knew all the secrets, all the names, all the hours, all the details was not the person who had the grandiose title or the biggest office. It was often the member of the nursing team who had some seniority, had been around the block a little bit and knew how to navigate the system. If you give that person the opportunity to be a mentor, not only do you dramatically increase the knowledge transfer from your existing top performers to your new future top performers, but you start to play around a little bit with the organizational hierarchies that often are a curse for an enterprise. This idea that while my title is up here, therefore I'm better than everyone who has a title below me. When we play around with mentorships and buddy programs and committees and kind of mix and mingle, we break down some of those stratifications that can cause us cultural problems.
42:10 Ben Lynch
Great distinction. I think that's part of scaling up a team is to get everyone on the team engaged. So there are so many wonderful ideas and principles, which I love because the principles is almost like the, I'll teach you how to fish and then you give explicit examples of like, here's the fish as well. If someone's thinking, wow, there's so much here. I've just read the book or I've listened to this podcast and I wanted to start doing something today or tomorrow. Where should they start?
42:42 Joey Coleman
So I'd like to answer this question, Ben, in two ways, if I might, you know, where should they start in the eight phases? And then more of a in the dirt question of where should you start with something you can do when this podcast ends? So strategically, where should you start? Well, what I like to do is say, where are you in terms of your hiring position right now, are you actively looking to feel, fill several roles? If so, start thinking about the journey from that assess phase, because let's stop the bleeding. Let's start bringing in new people using this more strategic tactical combination thought process that we've outlined here. If you already have your employees in place and you're not really hiring for anyone right now, I would jump further into the stream. I'd go to that acclimate, accomplish, adopt phase we talked about. And you can even jump just to write to those chapters in the book to dive into. If you didn't make the first hundred days remarkable because you're already past day 100, what can you do to rekindle the passion? What can you do to reenergize your people and reengage and connect them to your work and your purpose? So that's what I would do in terms of which phase. Now, here's a thing you can do when we're done listening to this episode and make sure you listen to the whole thing, right? So that, you know, Ben feels like he got the whole story. Pull out your phone. And what I want you to do is take your phone, open the camera, click over to video and flip it to selfie mode. And I want you to shoot a selfie video and the selfie video goes like this. Let's pretend that I'm the employer and Ben is my employee. I'm going to hold up the camera and I'm going to say as follows. Hey, Ben, just wanted to make you a quick video. I was listening to this podcast and they had this goofy American on there that was talking about the importance of employees. And he challenged us to think of our most valuable, important team member, the person for which with our clinic would not exist. The person that contributes day in and day out and just is the heartbeat of our organization. And I immediately thought of you. You bring so much to the table, your excitement, your enthusiasm, your knowledge, your expertise, your wisdom, your perspective. I know I tried to make sure to tell you regularly how much you're valued, but I couldn't let the sun set today without telling you in this video, you mean the world to our team. You're so incredible. We couldn't do it without you. Thank you. Thank you for everything you do to make this a really fun place to work. And then hit send. Don't watch the video. Text the video straight to the person. Now here's the thing Ben smiling, right? Cause Ben's like, Oh, I know what's going to happen. You're going to watch the video and you're going to go, Oh, I don't like the way I sounded like my shirt. The lighting was off and I'll just reshoot it. I'll reach it. And then you won't actually reshoot it and send it, or you'll try two or three reshoots and you'll get frustrated. And then you'll be like, this was a ridiculous idea. Just send it. What this will do is have an incredible impact on the recipient. They will have digital proof that they matter in this day and age. As human beings, we are dying for proof that we matter, that people value our contributions, that they see our contributions, that they hear our contributions, that they appreciate the role that we play. Not only will you have given them digital proof, but you'll give it. You'll have given them an asset that they can play again in the future. If they're having a bad day or they're doubting what you think about them, they can come back to this again and again. And as the person who sent it, you will feel more connection, not only to this employee, but to the things you said in the video, and obviously personalize the video to say things about them and things you value about them, but we have a tendency to not express our gratitude and our thanks as often as we could. And what I love about this idea and why I so wholeheartedly recommend it is it's almost free. It takes less than five minutes to create and the impact will last for weeks, if not months, if not years, if you just make the time to do it.
47:16 Ben Lynch
It's a wonderfully simple and highly impactful thing to do. I love that idea. Literally someone could do that right now. But wait until we finish this episode. Joey, we often challenge ourselves to think about mastery. It's in our name and it's in what we do. And for us, we think about it's not whether I'm doing this, you know, this system, this process, but rather it's about like, how well am I doing it? To what degree am I doing this with a level of excellence? I'm interested to know you get to speak to some of the best companies. You're a high performer. You're an author. What does mastery mean to Joey Coleman?
48:04 Joey Coleman
I'll tell a quick little story, if I may, Ben. I found myself about a year ago in a conversation and I'm going to set the scene without trying to be judgmental, but I think the details I'm about to share are useful for the characterization. I was paired up to have dinner with someone at an event and this person was in their early twenties. Now for context, I'm on the moving past 50 stage. Okay. So this person's about half my age and I asked the person to tell me a little bit about themselves and they didn't come up for air for 45 minutes. They talked straight for 45 minutes about the 17 businesses they were running, all their accomplishments, the place they had been, the awards they had due to do. And I just did my best to listen and to your point, show some empathy and embrace the conversation and lean into it. And then on a whim, I said to the person, well, out of curiosity, is there anything in your life that isn't going well? Because you just described all these amazing things. Is there anything you're feeling maybe a little deficient in? And I kid you not, Ben, the person said, well, I haven't mastered international taxation law and I haven't mastered funnel conversions from mobile when they're coming from Android, from Africa to our call center in Europe, and I haven't mastered XYZ and he kind of goes and he goes, what about you, Joey? What have you mastered? And I said, Oh, I can answer that really easily. Nothing. Nothing. And he's like, what do you mean? You're really nothing? And I said, no, no. I said, there's some things that I think I'm pretty good at, but to me, when you say you're a master, you prove to me that you're not because a master always knows there's more to learn. A master knows there are always edges to polish. There are always refinements to make. And those refinements may be millimeters in scale, but a master knows that a millimeter change now extrapolated and compounded over a decade can be the result of millions of impact, either in dollars, in people, in connections, whatever it may be. So when I think about mastery, Ben, I think about being on a journey of continuing to refine, continuing to improve, moving in a direction where you're taking pleasure in finding the edges and the nuance, instead of checking a box that I've learned the rest was it things to call myself a master.
50:47 Ben Lynch
Beautifully, beautifully said. I think that is something that speaks to us a lot is always finding how we can be better than we were yesterday. Joey, it's such a pleasure to talk with you. You have this great ability to share big ideas into a set of easy-to-understand principles. The actions are tangible. They're simple enough to implement today. You know, we love helping health professionals to deliver remarkable experiences for patients, for their clients. And that has to happen with a remarkable team as well. And so taking care of them is the premise of this book. And it just comes at such a timely moment, I think, in history after COVID. And it's such a wonderful framework for business owners to use. So thank you so much for sharing your work with the world.
51:37 Joey Coleman
Oh, Ben, thank you so much. And thanks to everybody who listened in today. I hope you got an idea or two that you can give a try with your team, because as you so well put, Ben, we can't expect to create remarkable experiences for our patients if we don't have remarkable team members. And we've got to create remarkable experiences for them. So they have a context and an example and a fuel on which to build the remarkable experiences for our patients that we're trying to create. So I wish everybody the best is they go out and try to create those enhanced experiences for their employees, their team members, as well as the patients they serve.
52:19 Ben Lynch
Well, all of the show notes, the link to the book will be at clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast. Joey, thanks again and look forward to the next book that you publish.
52:32 Joey Coleman
Thanks so much. And thanks to everybody for listening in today. I loved the conversation. I appreciate it, Ben.
52:39
Thanks for tuning in to the Grow Your Clinic podcast. To find out more about past episodes or how we can help you head to www.clinicmastery.com forward slash podcast. And please remember to rate and review us on your podcast player of choice. See you on the next episode.
