Wise Leadership Is Welcome
The Effective Action Approach
The feedback loop mentality also freed us from the false Teacher/Learner dichotomy. As owners, we’re always tasked with a learning project: learning what our patients need and want. In the traditional training paradigm, we try to do that separately from the team, infer what they should do differently, and then tell them to do it.
This works when it works, but it is nowhere near universally applicable. This is why outside training sources exist: not everyone has the time or ability to coach a team, and not everyone has a predictable model of what a team should do to be successful.
The truth is, training initiatives are only successful if they are practicable and do what they claim to. In the false Teacher/Learner dichotomy, owners and managers often feel a stake in defending their training materials and initiatives due to the time, money or effort invested in their purchase or creation. They are staked in getting compliance from the team, and can resist confused or questioning feedback from the Team, even though this feedback means that compliance will not result in successful training.
When this dichotomy is removed, the outcomes are all that matter. The Team and Owners can work together to make them happen with no conflict of interest.
Collaboration Allows Leaders to Lead and Teams to Follow
In the EA method, Team feedback about needing clearer directives or a different focus is shared constructively, in good faith, with no penalty in either direction. The Team can focus on learning, not following directions for the mere sake of compliance, which is one of the most burnout-inducing things a team can go through, and something that can irreparably damage the credibility of practice leadership.
As for us on the ownership side, it removed the pressure for us to try to know 100% the correct thing to say or make perfect predictions and freed us up to be honest about the need to learn without losing face or control.
Instead, we could focus on leading an experimental, collaborative culture of ongoing learning for the sake of having satisfied customers, a steady, growing business, and a better place to work. Owners and the Team shared the same motivation and worked toward a shared goal.
This is valuable and worth investing in. Compliance in possibly flawed directives is not. Teams prefer to be lead if it means their day goes smoothly and they are more successful. True leadership brings value to the team. With this approach in place, you can lead in a way that is welcomed and effective.
When leaders are leading an ongoing experimental effort, they have less pressure on perfect execution because the outcomes they want will constantly, steadily begin to happen more predictably as the Team engages in their part of the process.
Likewise, Teams are free from the expectation to blindly follow, which leads too often to resistance. Instead, they are engaged and challenged to participate in the ongoing effort of learning what patients want, and how to most efficiently deliver it.