The Guiding Principle of a Successful Practice Is _________

Kiera shares with listeners how to run quarterly meetings to get clarity, alignment, and accountability. She touches on the creation of 90-day plans, creating a definition of done, and why instilling a traction cadence is so helpful and practical. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:02) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and welcome to the podcast today. I hope you're having an amazing day. I hope today's a great day for you. And today we're going to dig into quarterly meetings, ⁓ traction style. So this is based on the framework by Gina Wickman in traction. I've talked about them before. I used to talk about them a lot more and I feel like it's been a hot minute since we brought this up. There's tons of episodes on quarterly meetings. Quarterly meetings are one of my favorite things in the annual planning. and how to do this because practices who run like this, who operate like this, they truly do so great. Like honest to goodness, so great. And I'm so excited for you to learn how to do these quarterly meetings. ⁓ To me, they're like the guiding principles of a freaking successful practice. So I hope you're excited about it. ⁓ A lot of practices skip these or they run them very loosely. And I want to help you learn how to run these. very effectively, very efficiently, what they should look like, what you can have. I've been running these for, gosh, I don't know, seven years plus. I've learned a lot through the ways. I have somebody who helps coach our meetings, because I used to self-implement myself, and it's been so beneficial to have somebody help and how much my perspective has changed by having somebody help run them who knows how to do them so well. I love doing this. Yes, we've been trained by traction. We are not traction ourselves. We do portions of it, but we do Dental A Team's version of it. ⁓ And what I've heard from offices that work with us on them ⁓ is they love that we have the dental background too. So we're able to help solve a lot of their issues, a lot of their problems, but to give the clarity, to give the confidence in these. So I'm excited. We're going to kind of go through how to run a quarterly meeting to get clarity, alignment, and accountability. And that's what it's ultimately for. And two, I feel like give simplicity too. Because once you know like what you're supposed to work on for the quarter, ⁓ Everybody's now aligned, everybody's rowing together. So for that, ⁓ I just want you guys to, I'll kind of walk you through a whole journey of how to do this. So number one, I want you just to go back on last quarter and how did last quarter go for you? What worked, what didn't work, what got done? I think right now you don't even know what happened. Well, it might be time for you to start looking into adding quarterly meetings to your plate. If you do know, rock on, how did you know that? Does your whole team know how you did? Does the whole leadership team behind it? And then what is like, what are you working on this quarter? Do you know, is there a focus? Is there a plan? ⁓ And so what we're supposed to do is, and I do this with lots of offices and honestly, offices that get this, the leadership team gets more ⁓ honest conversations, more accountability, more peer to peer accountability, more ownership, and the whole organization goes. So the way I break it down is your annual goal is like a mountain. So it's this huge mountain that we're trying to climb and each quarter are the big boulders. to build up that mountain, so the rocks, and then we have little pebbles and to-dos of the day in, day out. And so every quarter we need to dedicate a full day, yes, a full day, where we actually break away, the leadership team does, and then the leadership team builds what they feel the next quarter needs to be, and then they take it and break it down per departments. So that's kind of like my favorite way to do this. So what we do is we have our mountain, our annual goals, where we're going, we know where we're headed, and then from there we're gonna break it down and build those smaller rocks. When we're going into a quarterly, we look at where we are based on where we want to be for the year. How did last quarter go? What were the wins? What were the losses? We started having people grade the quarter in the leadership team and that's been real fun. And that's just to see if everybody's aligned. So how do we do on an ABCD? Did we accomplish the things that we set out to do? Are we on track for the year of where we wanted to be? What are we seeing from all that? And what lessons did we learn that we should either do again or not do? I think that's so paramount when I'm going into leadership departments and working on them with these quarterlies is to see like, what did we do really well and what did we not do and what should ...