No matter what your goals are, the only way to achieve them is to take action. You can set KPIs and put systems and processes in place, but they’ll only work if you and your team work. That’s why one of the first things I ask new clients and Inner Circle members to do is set up an accountability process.
Everyone in your office needs to be held accountable for doing the tasks assigned to them. Otherwise, you’ll never reach your full potential. Here are three steps to staying accountable as you work toward achieving your vision for your practice.
1. Identify what you need to be held accountable for.
As obvious as it sounds, everyone needs to know exactly what tasks they need to be held accountable for. This is important for anything you want to achieve, business and personal. What KPIs are you responsible for? What KPIs are each of your team members responsible for? What tasks do they need to do to hit their KPIs? Be as specific as you can.
One thing I’ve been wanting to work on lately is my fitness. Just saying I wanted better fitness would be vague. It’s hard to measure. Instead, I decided I wanted to be held accountable for exercising at least three times a week.
People think doctors know everything in their practice. They think we can accomplish anything we want. The truth is we all need help with something. We struggle just as much as anyone else. That’s how I am with my fitness.
Get your team members together to talk about the power of accountability. Then ask everyone in your office to choose tasks with which they need accountability help. For example, a team member might be responsible for asking patients if they want to have multiple procedures done in one visit. This helps patients avoid having to come in for multiple visits. It also helps you increase profits by performing multiple procedures at once.
What tasks might that person need accountability for? One might be checking the next day’s charts and noting who needs more than one procedure. Another might be asking the patients if they want to save time by getting everything done at once.
Asking your team to list the tasks they need help with gets you one step closer to achieving your practice goals.
2. Choose an accountability partner.
I ask every doctor who joins my Inner Circle mastermind to find an accountability partner. Accountability partners help you stay on track and give you someone to go to when you need help or encouragement.
With teams, it’s natural to think the group will hold each other accountable. While public accountability helps, you risk things falling through the cracks. Often times, people think someone else is holding a person accountable. If everyone thinks that about someone, nobody will help that person.
It’s critical that everyone finds an accountability partner, too. I do that with everything I need to be accountable for. For example, I reached out to my Inner Circle mastermind members for a volunteer to hold me accountable to exercise. The next day, I got a Vox from Dr. Thu Nguyen. She’s been exercising for six years and was happy to help! I agreed and am grateful to have her as my accountability partner. The next day, she checked in to see if I had exercised. I had.
3. Create an accountability process.
After choosing an accountability partner, you need to choose an accountability process that works for each of you. With my fitness, Dr. Nguyen and I started using Vox for my fitness checkins. While that worked well, I decided to move the accountability into my Inner Circle mastermind Facebook group.
We even created an event called Delivering WOW Get Fit and invited others to join us. We challenged people to post workout pictures, too. People who posted workout images three times per week would earn a prize at the end of the month.
This process works for me. I get help from Dr. Nguyen and public accountability in the Facebook group. I do well when I put my goals out there in a public setting.
The process even helped push other people forward with their fitness goals. Everyone’s getting inspired and posting fitness images.
Once your team chooses accountability partners, either create or ask them to create a process to help.
Are you keeping yourself and your team accountable?
If you or your team members struggle to achieve individual or team goals, these three steps can help. Identify what each person is accountable for. Choose accountability partners. Create a process. Everyone becomes more productive when they have real help staying accountable for the tasks they need to perform.
If you want help growing, running, and marketing your practice, sign up for your 14-day trial to Delivering WOW U, where you will find my best training, systems, and strategies for building, growing, and marketing a dental practice.
You can also join my free Dental Marketing and Profits Facebook group, where thousands of dentists and I help each other build better practices. Finally, if you want even more personalized help, sign up for the next business bootcamp session, where I work with you and a small group of other dentists to implement these and more strategies into your practice.
This article originally appeared on DeliveringWow.com.