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Quick Start Guide

The Effective Action Approach

EA Quickstart Guide

Although the downstream benefits of the EA approach are powerful and culture-shifting, positive change is easy to get going.

First, identify one task or outcome you want your team to focus on.
Second, supply booklets, have them use their phones, or the GC app to tally their count and make notes.
Then go over this information, following up with individuals or teams to clarify your interpretation of their notes or to inform your perspective. Creating a system of trusted feedback collection is the end of excuses and complaining.
Now you can report the findings the the team, serving as mediator and interpreter of feedback. Offer any direction you have, and assign another EA, or the same one, and repeat the process.
Continue this process. It’s not about spot-training to solve a particular issue. It’s about engaging the whole Team in being mindful of the smaller tasks that comprise the performance of their role, and how what they do impacts their Teammates and their customers.

For all the detail and rationale you can get into, using EffectiveActions is very simple to start with. It couldn’t be simpler.

Think about the number one thing you wish the people you manage would do.

This is an Effective Action. It’s the Effective Action you should assign for your full team.

Assign this team to pay attention to performing this one task. Have the team tally each time they accomplish it, and set the stage, using conversations, paper, or the GrowthCard app, to collect the tallies and their comments.

With this simple system you can perform an analysis of the team’s activity in your business and gather all the information you need to get the bottom of any constrictions or issues that prevent the things your customers want and need from happening.

Starting is easy, and when it’s used on an ongoing basis, it’s a system that improves your understanding of how team performance affects customer and business outcomes.

As you think about it further, maybe you have one thing for each role, or even each person. If you go further, you may realize that the tasks you think of tend to drive a smaller list of customer outcomes. This is a good way to organize Effective Actions.

In dentistry, we organized patient outcomes into 4 categories for each role. We call them the 4Blocks, as in the 4 fundamental building blocks of the role. The actions that reliably drive these outcomes are the quintessential Effective Actions (EAs).

For example:

Hygienists need to focus on providing a warm personal connection (which we shorthand by calling Face-to-Face or F2F), Comfort, Treatment, and Diagnosis.

F2F, Comfort, Treatment, and Diagnosis are the 4Blocks for Hygienists.

Using sharp tools is an EA under Comfort. Taking plenty of intraoral pictures is an EA under Diagnosis.

We came to our list of quintessential EAs after many years of paying attention to what drove patient satisfaction and applying the Effective Action approach, using that detailed performance feedback to refine our interpretation of daily, weekly, EOM, and EOY numbers.

But there was an equally important benefit to gathering feedback on an ongoing basis: our culture shifted as the Team embraced a growth mentality. By having an ongoing reason to think and talk about performing their job in a detailed, objective way, it became less and less taboo or punitive for the Team to talk about the issues they ran into. We had initially worried that a chance to explain themselves would merely be a chance to make excuses, but we found that because our Team was so motivated to do the best they could for patients as a point of pride, they seized on the the chance to coordinate and communicate with each other so they could improve. They loved having a voice and a system to help rectify constrictions and issues as they arose.