There is a famous saying: “All great buildings begin with a strong foundation.” When it comes to creating a stellar practice, there are many parts to making the strong foundation for lasting success. The most important part could be said to be a strong, energetic, aligned team.
While it is true that you could practice all by yourself with no staff to support you, you will never grow to any size and may eventually just wear yourself out. No foundation to support you as the main provider!
How do you create this strong foundational team?
Keys to a Strong Team Foundation:
- Hire energetic team players. You may already have them working for you but if there is no game or stated goal visible, their team skills may not be revved up and visible.
- As the team leader or coach, you must be a strong, inspirational leader and put a lot of care into your team members. Being interested in them and what they are all about brings them to life. Validating them for things they do right is extremely key.
- Realize that a great team is a group that needs a common purpose … just like with a sports team. This means you need to develop a vision statement in order to get all your team members aligned and focused and going in the same direction.
- There needs to be incentives for achieving milestones.
Vision Statement
This is the heart of your practice. For starters, as the owner of the practice, you must analyze your desired ideal scene. For some inspiration and ideas, go online and look for vision statements … there are some very exciting ones that will come up. You want it to be inspirational, clear, memorable and concise. It can be as simple as a single sentence or be a short paragraph. You do not need to finalize it, just set the direction.
Then hold a team meeting and present your ideas. Then get the team to tweak it and endorse it.
Work Out the Alignment
Once you’ve got the vision statement developed and finalized, then have each of the team members outline how their individual functions forward the accomplishment of the vision statement. Next, have each person present this to the other team members. In this way, everyone knows what everyone else is doing and how they align in order to forward the general purpose. Like in a professional sports team, the common goal shared by all members of the team is usually to win. On a really good team, every player knows what each position is supposed to do, and how they’re doing it to accomplish their goal … to win.
Games, Prizes, Rewards, Fun
Additionally, you can then evaluate their performance based on how well they do their functions. And you can correct against the vision statement, i.e. did the person’s performance help or hinder the achievement of the vision statement. There always needs to be an element of fun and games for reaching the milestones, and bonuses and other rewards are going to be very appreciated.
Remember … YOU (the leader) need your team to be the strong foundation that elevates the practice up to the heights of perfection and success you want to achieve!
