Transforming Your Organization to Achieve Success for Your Practice and Staff

Whether they have already lost employees or just want to focus on retention, the specter of “The Great Resignation” has many practices reassessing their entire operation and culture. Can practice owners and leaders really set the course for a fulfilling workplace and a successful practice? Corporate trainer Joey Klein, says they can and do. Mr. Klein is the founder and CEO of Inner Matrix Systems, a personal mastery training system for high achievers, and author of The Inner Matrix: Leveraging the Art & Science of Personal Mastery to Create Real Life Results. He spoke with Modern Aesthetics® magazine about how practice leaders can both directly and indirectly influence the success of their organization and those who work in it.

How do our emotions and thoughts tie into attaining our goals and ultimately building a successful business or practice?

Joey Klein: Every human being has their unique inner matrix, which is essentially a person’s unique emotions and how those tie to their thought strategies. Ultimately, that influences every choice, decision, and action that person takes. If we look at a person’s emotions and thoughts, we can see why they produce the results and the outcomes that they had in their life. If they want to create new outcomes and results, it really is about rewiring those core emotions and thought strategies to align with the new result they want.

A typical experience that a lot of people have, especially in a business reality, is that they are faced with anxiety and oftentimes frustration. If we don’t know how to manage anxiety and frustration, we may ultimately allow the mind to start thinking things about the business or co-workers from that place of anxiety and anger or agitation. As a result, the themes that appear in thoughts are, “I can’t rely on anybody,” and “It’s hopeless,” or “Why am I working so hard and I’m just not getting ahead?”

Take the exact same business, the exact same staff, the exact same co-worker, and an experience of inspiration or hopefulness or a sense of feeling empowered. All of a sudden, what goes on in the mind radically changes. We have thoughts like, “I can trust these individuals,” and “I’ve made it this far. I’m starting to figure this next challenge out. It’s only a matter of time before I get the results,” and so on.

From a strategic reality, then, the emotion that I feel defines the lens I look through from a thought strategy perspective. It literally can drive me toward success or failure. Success and failure really begins there. If we don’t have the capacity to notice when we’re feeling anxious or we’re frustrated and we don’t have the ability to note that we’re there and change that positioning, then our future is determined for us and success becomes very unlikely.

You mentioned the frustration of working hard and not getting ahead. Why is it that just spending more time or energy on a problem alone won’t fix it?

Mr. Klein: Strategies like working late or over weekends or just continuing to apply the same strategy more intensely tend to be not only ineffective, but they will often exacerbate the very challenge that we’re looking to overcome; we get lost in whatever we’re focused on as being the challenge. So if we perceive our challenges—I can’t find good employees or I’m concerned I’m not going to be able to cover my cashflow gap, as examples—we just continue to get more and more anxious, more and more paranoid, more and more fearful about the current circumstances. Essentially, we get lost inside those current circumstances by focusing on the thing that’s happening, as opposed to realigning with what we want to have occur.

A simple adjustment we can make that ultimately ends up being very significant is, rather than focus on the current challenge or struggle, to remind ourselves of the outcome that we’re looking for. Focusing on the result that we want to attain presents a very different perspective. That gives us the ability to get a bit creative and start to look at our current circumstances or situation through the lens of what we want to achieve, as opposed to getting lost in the current results that are happening.

How does the mindset of physician owners or managers within an organization or a practice trickle down through the organization and affect staff that are working with them?

Mr. Klein: At the end of the day, from a leadership perspective, however the leader shows up in an organization, small or large, is going to define the tone and the culture and the experience for everybody else. In The Inner Matrix, as an example, we really break down how to train, align, and rewire emotions about strategies and the nervous system. That’s important because, as discussed, if I show up and I feel fearful or I feel overwhelmed, that’s the emotion that I simply exist with as I go to the office. Through mirror neurons in the brain, that emotional experience gets conveyed. Whether I say anything or not, whether I speak positively or not, I convey fear and anxiety into the environment around me and to my co-workers, or my staff, or my business partners, without them even knowing why.

The mirror neurons in the brain, basically, are responsible for empathy. We can use empathy to our benefit or our detriment. I can propagate, as an example, fear and insecurity simply by what I feel as I walk through the office before I say anything. If I’m feeling that way, though, I’m much more likely to obviously say things and do things that are going to create a stressful environment or culture for other people who are around me. They’re going to not only take that on, but also pass it down the line, because the primary way we learn is through examples.

On the other side of the spectrum, if I show up and I’m hopeful or I feel inspired or confident, that emotional information gets conveyed to my staff and my coworkers, my business partners. They now have a sense of reassurance. They feel confident. They feel hopeful because now, again, the mirror neurons that are transferring this information from me to them is a sense of reassurance without ever having to say a word.

Of course, we’re more likely to communicate hopeful messages or messages or gratitude to the staff when we’re feeling that way. Then they’re likely to take that on and pass it down the chain, because again, we’re going to learn by way of example. Having eight to 10 hours a day with somebody is a huge training opportunity that often gets missed, because we’re simply not mindful of who we are being as an example to those that we’re around.

If a practice owner or manager is sensing a lot of anxiety and stress from their staff, is it fair to say they may need to look to themselves to see if they are conveying negative attitudes?

Mr. Klein: Absolutely. At the end of the day, if you own a business or you’re managing a team and you see that there’s anxiety within the team, or there’s fear in the team, or there’s distress in the team, that is a result of someone’s leadership. The first step to really coming up with a solution is to assess yourself first. Ask “Who am I being? How am I managing? What is the culture that I’m driving? What systems have I set up that are essentially causing this outcome?”

There can be a reflex where we blame employees, the economy, the “Great Resignation,” or anything else for why our circumstances are the way they are. We really disempower ourselves and keep ourselves from the solution that we’re seeking.

The first step to solving culture challenges is really understanding that the buck stops with me if I’m the owner or the manager of the team. What am I doing to cause this reality, but more important, what’s the culture that I want to create? How do I want people to feel? What’s the environment I want to generate and how can I go about generating those outcomes?

In the same way we can blame the employees, we can blame culture, we can blame environment. It’s also not great to blame ourself for what’s going on. Ownership is just accepting that we are the cause of it so that we can get focused again, back to the vision or the outcome I want to create for the team.

Then we can usually come up with some great solutions on how to produce that vibrant culture that we want to create. If we’re focused on the result we want to attain, oftentimes, we can even come together with the team and ask, “Hey, what’s the culture you guys want to create? The culture I would love to have here is X. And what do you guys think we can do to create that culture?”

Often, if you ask your team for a bit of support and ideas on how you might be able to create that culture, in a genuine and thoughtful way, and you listen to them, it reassures them and they feel like you care. It fosters trust. Even if you don’t take all of their thoughts, ideas, and recommendations, just implementing some of them and asking for the input is going to go a long way.

In what ways can the culture impact customers and ultimately business success?

Mr. Klein: No matter what the business is, even though we’re offering health care to somebody, there’s still a business reality there. You still have a customer/client. They could come to you or they could go to somebody else. How can you serve those clients in the best way possible and ensure that they feel valued, cared for, respected? What can you do to essentially create a raving fan and raving customer that is served by your clinic and has such a great experience that they’re going to leave and share that experience with other people?

Oftentimes that can happen in subtle things that often go overlooked. For example, when somebody enters the establishment, are they greeted with a smile and asked, “How are you today?” Is somebody genuinely there, present with them, who cares about them? When they call on the phone, are they accessing somebody who’s overwhelmed, so they feel like a burden, or are they embraced in a way that they feel like they’re important and they’re acknowledged in a way that they feel like they matter? If you just ask the question, through each step of the process that a client or a patient goes through, “How can we make them feel cared for and valued?” you’re going to come up with those ideas.

What are the fundamentals to affecting change to achieve goals?

Mr. Klein: When it comes to training inside of inner matrix systems or the inner matrix, the three-step process to the results that we want to attain, really comes down to:

1. Focus on vision: The outcome you want to attain in a specific way is possible.

2. Align your emotion in a way that you’re most likely to come up with great ideas to fulfill that empowerment, inspiration, hopefulness, etc.

3. Name the actions that you can take to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to go, making sure that vision is always the context; don’t get lost in the challenges that are happening.

The more specific we are about the outcome that we want to fulfill, the more likely we’re going to achieve and create it. If I’m looking at culture, as opposed to just saying, “I want to create a vibrant culture” as the outcome, consider, “I want people to be happy when they’re at work and I want people to get along and I want them to work efficiently and feel proud as it pertains to what they do.” The more specific and granular you get about the outcome you want to establish, the more information you give the brain and the unconscious self in terms of what it seeks to produce on your behalf.