In this episode, Cameron is joined by Steve Anderson, author, entrepreneur, and public speaker, and they discuss the importance of having mentors and copying genius, as well as the definition of culture as the combination of beliefs, values, and processes. Steve shares a personal experience of relocating his company to improve efficiency and save time. He also emphasizes the need to codify the culture of an organization and hire and train based on that culture.

Cameron and Steve talk about the importance of building a strong culture in organizations. They include examples of leaders who go above and beyond to create a positive work environment, such as a manager who shovels his team members’ driveways on snowy days. Steve emphasizes that culture is not a soft skill, but rather a hard skill that requires discipline and effort to implement. They also highlight the significance of the “who” in an organization, stating that the right people and culture can lead to success regardless of the specific vision or strategy.

Transcript:

This is Medical Millionaire, the podcast helping your metspot increase in status, visibility, and profitability. Join your host as he dispels miss shares trends, and gives you actionable steps today that will take your medical practice to the next level. Here’s your host, expert marketer and founder of Growth ninety nine, Cameron Hemphill. Hey, what’s up everybody.

Cameron Hemphill here your host for Medical Millionaire. Hey, guys, thank you so much for taking the time to tune into the podcast. Our goal is to give incredible value and insight for practice owners. So if you’re thinking about becoming a practice owner, or you have been in the industry and owned a practice for several years, podcasts are one.

Hundred percent designed for you. And in this episode particularly, I happen to have a guest. I have a gentleman that’s with me, Steve Anderson. Guys, he has been a speaker for thirty years.

He’s a top notch presenter. I’ve actually had the opportunity to be at one of his events, the Crown Counsel, which they had in Austin, Texas last year, and I was blown away. I’m super excited to have him on here. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s an author, he’s published several books, and he’s also a philanthropist.

So, Steve, thank you so much. Welcome to the show, Ma Man, thank you. Cameron. Great to be here, absolutely so today I want to jump right into it.

I know you’re super busy. I want to talk about culture and I want to talk about the strategies for creating a culture of success for you and ultimately your practice. So can you talk to us a little bit about that? You bet so one of my mentors, Cameron, And let me pause right there because I think I know you’re a huge advocate for mentors. That’s what this podcast is all about.

We in our organization, we call it copying genius. That it’s a lot easier to copy genius than it is to create mediocrity. Right, So, find find people who have done successfully what you want to do and figure out how they did it. Make that part of your success formulas.

So I’ve spent my career collecting mentors. It’s a hobby of mine. I love to find it’s I love to find organizations and people who do things exceptionally well and then dissect what they do, how they do it. And then make that available to other people, right, And that’s what we do in our training that we do a total patient service, which is our coaching and education company that we do primarily our focus is in healthcare and dentistry.

So one of my one of my early mentors was the late Clayton Christiansen, and you may recognize that doctor Christensen was a Harvard Business School professor. He passed away just a couple of years ago, and his real contribution to business and really thought leader direction was all about innovation. He wrote just a landmark book called The Innovator’s Dilemma, and he had this whole philosophy about innovation. So if you know, knowing the topic and the focus of this podcast, we’ve never read that book.

It is a landmark piece of work on innovation and how that actually transpires in business. He had a definition of culture that I love. I embraced it early on. And basically what he said is culture is the combination of beliefs, values, and processes and how an organization and the people in it act on them daily.

So let me just summarize that again. So culture is the combination of priorities which you believe in the most what’s important to you and processes, right like the systems the you in place, and then how an organization and the people in it act on them daily. That’s your culture. In other words, that’s the intangible that we talk about of the work environment is really very, very tangible.

It comes down to those two ingredients, which is what do you believe in the most, what’s the most importance to you? And then how do you operationalize it in terms of systems and processes, and then how do you get your people to act on them. So when you have those three things, your beliefs, your systems, and then the action that goes behind it, that’s really what makes up your culture. So let me share just a quick personal experience about this that might give some contexts make get more reality based. So our organization for several decades was based outside of San Antonio, Texas, out in the Texas Hill Country.

Now, if you’ve never been to the Texas Hill Country, it is some of the most beautiful landscape in America, green rolling hills, absolutely gorgeous. And we were based we had a training center just outside of Kerrville, Texas. In a little bitty town called Hunt, Hunt, Texas. Right along the doors of the Guadalupee River overlook the Guadalipe River Valley.

And as a result of that, because of the nature of our business, we travel a lot. We’re all over the country, and because San Antonio is kind of a secondary tertiary market, to get anywhere from San Antonio you pretty much have to go through a hub. You have to go through Dallas Atlanta Hub. And we’re out on the road nearly every week.

And late one Friday night, I was sitting at the Dallas for Worth International Airport coming back from a presentation, and I was waiting for the connecting flight to San Antonio, like I did most Friday nights, and I started doing the math of how much time I was spending each week commuting from my home in the Texa Hill Country to San Antonio and then to Dallas to then be able to connect to other parts of the country. And I did the math, and it was taking me. It was costing me one full month a year of time just to commute to get around the country. And I thought, you know, if you multiply that out over several decades, that.

May not be the best use of time. And then I looked around at the Dallas Airport, and I said, you know, if I lived here, I’d be home right now. So that kind of was the initial thought behind what eventually became in a relatively short period of time, we relocated. So we located the entire.

Company from our base outside of San Antonio to. Dallas for worth our office. We got office space right next door to the DFW Airport, very centrally he’s located and for the last twenty years it’s saved me at least a month a year of. Travel times.

So most of our team came with us. We added some additional team members as we were expanding built out our new office. And anybody that’s been through an office expansion a relocation knows that it’s an exciting time. It’s kind of a renewal.

It gives you an opportunity to kind of rethink and look at what you’re doing and do it at a higher level. So we were prepping for our weekly team. Meeting, and we had at the time, we had a weekly team meeting Monday morning, seven forty five. We’d all get together for a weekly team meeting.

Which is a whole other topic we can talk about in a minute in terms of its impact on culture. But so meetings starts seven forty five, and so I was there early, prepped everything, and some forty five came and went there wasn’t anybody there. Uh seven fifty. A couple of people straggled in and we got started a little bit after eight o’clock when everybody finally got there, and I got smoke blown out my ears.

Figured it was I’m ticked because the meeting was supposed to start seven forty five, so I was ready just to go off, And right before the words came out of my mouth, it dawned on me that there may be a reason that everybody showed up when they did, and that reason was the leader that I had this unspoken expectation about timeliness my personal value, but I had never clearly explained it. To my team. My fault, right, And I’ll just put a little footnote on this is that anytime I work with a medical professional that complains to me about the team, about their behavior, about anything that has to do with the people that surround them, my first recommendation is to go look in the mirror, because if you don’t like what’s around you, well guess who attracted those people? Who hired them, you did, and people tend to attract what they are. So we had the meeting.

It’s all good. At the end of that meeting, I left, I left the. Office and I went and I did an exercise. And that exercise was I wrote down.

The most important beliefs and behavioral norms that for me were important in terms of the workplace where I wanted to work. I wrote them all down, codified them in writing, and then I went back and several days later we had another team meeting, and I explained to the team what I had done, and I said, I’m going to read over these with you, because this is the kind of workplace I want. This is this is where I want to come to work, and the beliefs and the behaviors that are attached to that. And we went over that and they added some things, said, well, you know, here’s some other things we might want to consider, and then we came up with this final document.

I call it a culture guide that codifies the kind of culture, the kind of work environment that you want to have. And so one of those things I’ll give you just an example of one of the items in that culture guide had to do a timeliness, no surprise, And basically what it says is said, when you’re early, year on time. And then the descriptor of it was everybody wants to work in an orderganization where. They can depend on each other.

And it starts first thing every day by honoring the time commitments that we may do each other. So when we have a meeting together, the expectation is that when you’re early, you’re on time. When you’re on time, you’re late, and when you’re late you’re lost. Right, So if we have a meeting at seven forty five, the expectation is that you’ll be there as seven forty or seven thirty five, and you’ll be prepped and you’ll be ready to go.

That you’re not wandering in two or three minutes late, but you’re there early. And so that became once we all agreed on that, that became the belief in the cultural expectation that whether it’s with each other or with a. Client or with anybody, when you’re early, you’re on time. So now did it happen overnight, No, I mean it took time for everybody to embrace that habits needed to change, but eventually that became the cultural norm to the point that then it became customary that the team now today starts assembling ten fifteen minutes before the meeting, and we have kind of nice social interchange and everybody catching up with each other, so that right at seven forty five, man, we’re it’s out of the gate.

We’re starting, and we’re often going totally different culture than waiting around for everybody to show up ten fifteen minutes past the start time. So a little thing, but a huge, huge thing in terms of the underlying belief that the most important thing you can honor with other people, one of the most important things is their time. Time is the most one of the most valuable assets we have today. And so when you when you do that you show up early, you’re basically sending a message to your teammates, to your clients that you honor them because you’re honoring their time.

That’s part of in this example, is part of the core belief system of the organization. So that was a long story to a very short question. Cameron, Yeah, no, I appreciate it. Well, I’m glad that I showed up early too.

So that’s just just an example of you know, when we talk about culture, most organizations. Every organization has a culture. Every it doesn’t. I don’t care what.

I don’t care whether it’s a marriage, a family, a medical office, or a government. Every organization has a culture. I was at the DMV the other day with one of my kids getting your driver’s license. The DMV has a culture.

Every organization has a culture, either by design or by default. Now most organizations have a culture by default. It just kind of happens, It just kind of evolves. I was in an office the other day, and this is an example of a culture by default.

I was in an office the other day and the doctor hadn’t arrived yet, and I was meeting with the team and kind of prepping him for the day, and. I was kind of trying to get him fired up, you. Know, and I said, what kind of day are we going to have today, you know, trying to get him excited. One of the lead team members.

She said, well, we’ll see, And I said, I said, I said, what do you mean we’ll see? I said, you determine your attitude, You choose what kind of day you’re going to ask you. Well, I said, we’re going to see what and she goes, well, we’ll see. When he gets here, he indicates with the doctor. So they start their morning meeting and he walks in five minutes late the leader.

And there was a. Short interaction when he walked in the room and she turned to me. Caron, this same woman turned. To me, she goes, well, it’s going to be one of those kind of days today.

And so the entire culture of this office. Was being driven by whatever the emotional mood of the doctor was in this case when he walks through the door. Now that’s that is what I call an emotionally unstable, unpredictable environment. And there’s a lot of medical practices that are like that.

They’re taking the cue from the doctor and whatever, you know, whatever the doctor’s doing, whatever kind of mood the doctor’s in. I was with another team and I said, how do you guys know when you’re winning as a team, how do you know when you’re winning? And one of them said, well, by the mood of the doctor. You know, if she’s happy, we must be doing good. And if she’s not, I guess we need to work harders.

Like really, that’s theclaion. So this goes back here’s the challenge. In one of the big takeaways from from our discussion today. My challenge to every organization is codify your culture.

Don’t don’t leave it a mystery. Don’t have a culture by default, have one by design, and start by putting it in writing. So you go through, what are your beliefs, what are the behaviors that you want in the place where you work. I have, Cameron, I have never met a medical team member or a doctor who didn’t want a great work environment.

I mean, I’ve never met a team member who said, you know, just pay me well and abuse me. I don’t know. Everyone wants a great work environment even more than they want great pay. Nobody wants to go to an emotionally.

Toxic work environment. Yet I have met very few team members who have worked in a work environment where they have been taught and trained what a great work environment looks like, feels like, and what’s required of them to make it a great work environment. So imagine that you go in before you’re hired into a medical office, that you’re presented with that office is culture guide. Okay, So here’s.

The guidelines of the beliefs and behaviors that we strive for in our organization. Doesn’t mean we’re perfect, it just means this is what we strive for. So if you are the candidate Cameron, I’d say so Kevin, if we choose to invite you onto our team, this is the expectation, this is what we’re striving for. This is what we’re going to invite you to live up to as a member of this team.

And you read through that and you get to make a decision up front. Is this the kind of place where I want to work, where I want to step up and make these behaviors, in these beliefs part of who I am, or maybe out to go somewhere else. It kind of takes the guesswork out of it. Again.

Now doesn’t mean you’re perfect, But would you rather go to go to work for an organization where that’s clearly defined, where the expectations and the aspirations are clearly defined, Versus one where it’s like, well, we’ll see, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see, you know, because usually you go into a workplace and you don’t find out for. Three six months what it’s really like. It’s you know, it’s like you’re stepping very carefully see where our the landmines are versus where it’s clearly defined and you know, up front, here’s the expectations, and this is the kind of work environment. The kind of culture that they’re striving for.

Makes sense. So this is such a simple, simple concept. Rarely have I gone into an organization the first time where they’ve codified their culture, written it down and they talk about it on a regular basis, They hire with it, they train with it, they review it on a regular basis, they measure against it. So they actually have team member evaluations based on their defined culture.

So a lot of different ways that you can apply this, but it starts with a commitment to having a culture by design. You put the time, effort, and energy in to define it, to write it down and decide you get to decide what it is. Yeah, simple concept. No, I love it.

And I think like it goes back to the hiring component. You know, like there’s so there’s there’s the providers out there that are seeking more providers or front desk staff, administrative staff, whatever it is. And you know, I think that they’ll interview to interview and not asking the right questions. And even the person that’s looking for the opportunity to go work somewhere, you need to know where you’re going right, and if you don’t know, like, you’re immediately set up for uh, I mean tremendous potential failure, like it could work out, right, it could work out and be great, I guess.

But having intention behind it, I think on the hiring processes is super critical. And I don’t know very many practices if probably none of them that are that are going through that exercise in the hiring process, so they know what they’re getting into, what team they’re joining you, right, and. So yeah, setups for success from the onset. So it goes both ways.

I mean it’s yeah, you’re looking for good people. And you grow good people. Right. You got to hire nice right, You hire nice people, that’s what you want to serve you And you have to train it because without doing what we’ve talked about doing, people are going to bring the habits from their old workplace into your place if you haven’t, if you haven’t defined it right.

So define it, be real clear about it, train for it, give feedback for it, and do it by design. One of the reasons this is so critical. This goes beyond just you know, a great work environment for your team. That’s where it starts.

But the extension of this is that the most powerful form of marketing in medicine is word of mouth. True, right, it can even in the age of the Internet and social media and the whole deal. It’s actually more true today than it’s ever been in because most people even when they get a recommendation of a friend or a family member. So when most medical disciplines, when you survey patients, they say they would prefer to choose their provider based on the recommendation of a friend or family member.

And then even when they do, I guarantee you, Cameron, if you came to me and said, hey, who’s a good dentist, who’s a good dermatologist, who’s a good whatever, I guarantee you. If I gave you a name, the first thing you’re going to do is. Look them up on the Internet and read their online reviews, which is another form of word of mouth. Correct.

All right, So does anybody does any patient really know how skilled and good a practitioner is? They got no clue. No, I mean they can look at there before and afters in like you know, on their Instagram or whatever social outlets they have. I say, Okay, that result looks great. There’s no comparison.

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Back to the show. The data shows from our end too that if it’s word of mouth refer a whip by the way, that’s the leading that’s the leading component of marketing, and people love to go places where there’s a recommendation. But now with the Internet you have the reviews, you can see the result. I don’t even think that they take the time to read the bio on the website though.

Nope. Yeah, so it’s all again, it’s all word of mouth based on other’s people experience. Eighty percent of that experience is not so much heavily weighted on the clinical expertise. Yes, the clinical outcome has got to be good, but patients are not very good judges of clinical standard of care.

They just know one or two things, did it hurt or not? And did I get the result? Do I look? The way I want to look is that if it’s an aesthetic, or did I get the result? I want all the rest of it’s based on human interaction and how they felt in the environment with the people they had interacted with. I mean, can you imagine, can you if I were to recommend uh, let’s say a dentist to you camera, for example, how logical would it be for me to say, Cameron, you got to go to my dentist. You know, she’s amazing. You know, the shade matching on her Veneers is like unparalleled in the industry, and her margins on her crowns are like microscopts.

She is an amazing clinician. She’s a jerk you, I mean, she is just a flat out jerk er. You want to like her, but her works amazing. Right, It’s not going to happen every once in a while, but very rarely.

It just all people knows, like they’re so nice over there. They just they can feel the love. So the bottom line is this, This goes way beyond just having a great work environment. It has everything to do with marketing, has everything to do with case acceptance, and it has everything to do with word of mouth.

You create the culture. It’s an inside out proposition. So start on the inside, define exactly what you want to be and then and then you’ve got to be it. One of my one of my other mentors, Peter Drucker, who was one of the greatest management minds of the last century, and one of the things that he said that I just love is he said, the culture of an organization starts at the top.

He said, if the if the spirit of an organization is great is because the spirit of its top people is great. And if it rots, if the culture rots, it rots from the top. If it’s decays, it’s going to start. It’s a it’s a trickle down the So again, if you are the owner the leader of your practice, if you don’t like the place where you work, go look in the mirror.

Because it happened on your watch. Everybody’s watching you. And you probably have a culture by default, not by one by design. And if you do have one by design, go back and reevaluate to what degree you’re living up to the expectations you’ve set for other people.

So here’s here’s a leadership issue, common sense but not always commonly practiced. And this has everything to do with culture. So my dad, Cameron, ran the largest ad agency in the Western United States is who CAREW. So he was an advertising guy, and so we had dinner table conversations about marketing and advertising and sales and all kinds of stuff.

I was raised on this and there were some moments. I think we all have moments growing up. You have moments where this amazing learning experience took place. You may not have you may not have realized it when it was happening, but in retrospect, when you look back, it was like a pivotal moment that was just seered into your brain and your heart, and I had one of those moments when it has to do with leadership starts at the top, and this was this was actually when I was in college and I grew up like you did, Cameron, in Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City has amazing you know, they take care of the roads, they have great snow removal systems.

This particular year, they had an unseasonably early snowstorm and it snowed eighteen inches overnight in early October, which was early, and they didn’t have the snow equipment prepped. There were no blades on the dumb trucks, there was no salt and sand ready, so it shut the city down. It was the only time in my growing up years in Salt Lake City that they ever shut the schools now. You know, they shut the schools everywhere if there’s a flake of snow, but back then they just wouldn’t shut it down for anything.

Only time I remember everything got shut down, all the schools, University of Utah got shut down. Everything was shut down for the day. At six point thirty that morning, after having spent an hour and a half with my dad shoveling walks and driveways, eighteen inches of snow that morning at the protest against the protest of my mother, who is standing on the porch at six thirty in the morning, snow is still coming down. My dad in his three piece suit getting in his Chrysler New Yorker, his blue Chrysler New Yorker, backing out of the driveway, and she goes, Arthur, why are you going to work? No one should be driving in this weather.

And he remember he’s the leader of the organ is, and he said, if I don’t show up, how can I expect anyone to show up? He led by example and simple, I mean, we all know that principle. I never forgot that example. I don’t know if anybody showed up to work that day, I don’t know that it would have mattered. But you know what, I’m sure everyone did know.

Everyone knew the CEO showed up for work on the worst weather day of the year. Now, I’ll take that one step further, Cameron, this is an amazing example of a dentist client of ours in North Dakota. And to this guy’s credit, this takes my dad’s example to a whole other level. This guy has been known on really bad snow days to get up really really early.

He makes the rounds to all of his team members’ homes and he shovels their driveway. He’s got a pickup truck. He puts a blade on his pickup truck and he makes it around to each of his team members’ homes. He shovels their driveways so they can get out.

To get to work. The guy’s a rock star. That’s like going above and beyond, right. I mean, they got to love the guy.

Right, so I know that. You know, sometimes things like this, I don’t know who labeled it this way, Cameron, but you know they talk about his soft skills. Well, there’s nothing soft about him. They’re hard.

They are hard to implement. They take discipline, time, effort, energy to make work. They’re not soft. They are some of the most important things.

There’s a lot of people in the management consulting area that will say that culture Trump’s strategy any day. Culture is more important than strategy every day. And here’s why. You know, if you look at all of Jim Collins, you know, the good to great guy, all of his research and one of his principles is about, you know, getting the right people on the bus, and then once you get him on the bus, put him in the right seats.

But one of the things he talks about is the who is more important than the where. That who you choose and the kind of culture you create in your organization is more important than where you’re going and what your vision is and what you’re going to do, Because he says, if you got the right who and you got the right culture, you’ll figure out something to do together. I mean, you’ll figure out the vision, you’ll figure out the direction, you’ll pivot, You’ll you’ll adjust, you go. You got to figure out the culture and the and the who pies.

So I along those lines, and I know everybody, everybody I’ve met relates to this. I’ve just put a label on it. So I have what I call the parking lot barometer. Okay, so anybody in medicine and healthcare, you can relate to this.

So what’s the parking lot barometer? And so what it is is when I pull up to the office first thing in the morning, and I see the cars that are parked in the parking lot, and you know who those cars belong. To, that’s right. And if you identify those cars and who they belong to. If you start to get this sick filling in your stomach, like, oh, I got to deal with this.

Again today, you got a culture problem. Versus if you. Pull in the parking lot, and hopefully if you’re the leader, you’re one of the first ones there. But figuratively speaking, if you pull in the parking lot and you look at the cars that are already there and you get fired up, it’s like, man, this is going to be an awesome day because of who I get to work with.

You know that your culture is on the right track. Now, I know that’s not a very sophisticated way to measure it, but we all act out of emotion. We make decisions emotionally. We justify with logic, and as much as we’d like to think we’re very logical human beings, we’re all acting out of emotion.

And so if the emotion’s off, if you don’t have the right emotional culture in your practice, then things are behaviorally, things are going to just come unwound. So that it starts with that. Now here’s another piece. I’ll give you just two other interesting data points around this and examples.

Part of what creates. A great culture is the environment you know, what kind of environment have you created in which your team works. And it doesn’t have to be an expensive build out the whole deal, but just look what is the work environment like. One of my favorite examples of this cameraon is from Winston Churchill, and everybody knows the history of Winston Churchill considered one of the just the iconic leaders of World War two.

Saved you know, saved England, saved Europe with the help of the Allies. But one of the remarkable things he did was during World War two, Parliament, the Parliament building in London got bombed, almost destroyed, and at the end of the war, when they were talking about rebuilding, he went into Parliament in the rubble and the destruction, and one of the few things that was remaining was the archway, the stone archway that led into the House of Commons chamber, and it was burnt, it was broken. The archway was still intact, but the stones that made it up were charred. And cracked and broken.

It was pretty unsightly. And so Churchill mandated that they rebuild Parliament, but they they leave the entryway untouched. And what he said, and i’ll paraphrase, he said, let this be a sign, a symbol and a reminder to future generations of the price we paid for freedom. So ever, since then, when after they got that rebuilt, is that from that day forward, every member of the House of Commons has to walk through that archway every time they go into session.

They have to walk through that archway, and that they do have a bronze statue of Winston Churchill standing there as well, and they walk through this charred, broken, decrepit archway and for generations, as he said, it has reminded them of the price they prayed for freedom. That you can’t tell me that doesn’t have a huge impact on the culture of that organization. And so that’s kind of one of the other pieces of this is the things that you choose to place in your environment can have an impact on your culture. One of those things, for example, I love round tables, So I love to meet with teams around a round table because it puts everybody on equal footing versus a rectangular table that then signifies authority and pecking order.

Somebody’s at the head at the table. I love round tables. Round Tables impact culture, It impacts the discussion. It makes a huge, huge difference so that’s that’s one piece.

Another piece, you know, define your culture, look at your environment. What do you place in your environment that impacts behavior? And then I mentioned at the very beginning, you know, Cameron, how beginnings matter. Beginnings impact culture. And one of the things I’m a huge, huge advocate with the healthcare teams we work with of a morning meeting not a new concept, but it is one of done right.

It’s one of the most impactful, culturally impactful things you can do if it’s done right. Now, I’ve worked with teams that like they’ve signed off the morning meeting a long time. They won’t do it because it turned into the morning complaint session. There’s another word for that I won’t use.

It’s just like it’s a miserable experience because it’s just a recounting of everything that went bad the day before. And so, in fact, I was with the dentist not too long ago and I said, tell me about your morning meeting and it was, oh, we don’t do that anymore. I said, really goes yeah, just kind of away from bad to. Worsh and so we just don’t do that.

And I said, well what do you do? And he goes, well, now, we have morning quiet time. I laughed. He didn’t laugh. He goes, no, no, no, that’s what we did.

We just kind of goes off their own corner and if we have anything we need to communicate, we’ll. Just instant message each other. And anyway, we got that corrected. Okay.

So I have a tip for your morning meeting. There’s a whole protocol for this that we teach a total patient service. But I’ll give you. I’ll give you the starting point that you can incorporate tomorrow in your morning meeting.

All right, So Cameron, what do you This is the socially acceptable thing when you walk in the office in the morning and you see a fellow teammate, what’s the first thing you say? I mean, I say hi, how are you? Exactly all right, that’s first thing you say? Hey, how are you? Good morning? How are you? How are you? How are you? All the way through? Okay, So I’ll say you do another mentor mine. So I live in Dallas, Texas, And if you ever fly into DFW from the north, I live right on Lake Grapevine, which is the lake just north of DFW. You fly over my lake, my lake on the other side of the lake, is another one of my mentors. His name is Lannie Basham.

Lannie is the first Olympic gold medal athlete that I ever met. I never met one before, and we were introduced by a mutual friend. Lannie is the most unlikely looking Olympian you’ve ever met. He’s about five seven.

He packs maybe at the time I think when I met him, he was probably he was probably packing one eighty five maybe two hundred ball big thick coke bottle glasses. There is nothing Olympic gold medal about this guy. I mean, if you put him in a lineup, he’s like the last person he would think of it. He was voted informally voted the least athletic guy in his sixth grade class.

People made fun of him, and he made a decision because of the ridicule he guy that he was going to go to the Olympics. He made a decision he was going to be an Olympian and he didn’t know how he was going to do it. He tried out for every sport he knew he was in trouble, and he made it as the third string right field alternate in baseball, I. Mean, not the athletic thing.

Was not in his wheelhouse. There you are. So one day when he was twelve, one of his friends invited him to go to the local gun club with his dad to go target shooting. So he goes kind of likes it.

He’s got a little bit of an act for it. He went back a couple more times, he started taking lessons, and by the time he turned sixteen, he was the USA Junior riflery Champion case. So at sixteen he becomes best in the country at riflery, ends up going to the Olympics several years later, ranked number one in the world. And what he said about rifleries you don’t have to be higher, swifter, or stronger.

You just have to sit really still, aim very straight. And he learned how to do that better than anybody in the world. And so first day Olympic competition, you know, they load the bus to the Olympic village, they’re on the way over to the shooting venue, and one of his teammates, just in an idle conversation, turned to him and said, Cameron, what you say what we all say to each other every day of the o man, how you doing? You know, how’s it feel knowing rank number one in the world, you’re going to perform today in front of a billion people on worldwide television. And he never thought of it like that before, and it was like, holy, a billion people.

And so the only thing he thought was don’t mess this up, don’t embarrass yourself, don’t don’t miss Yeah, well you know where this is going. So end of day one, you know, he went in rank number one. End of day one he was ranked like fifty four. You know.

It was a train wreck of a day. He managed to scratch his way back to number two. So he got a silver medal in those Olympic Games, which is an amazing accomplishment unless you were slated to take all the gold. So he spent the next two years doing something remarkable.

He went around and interviewed over five hundred Olympic gold medal athletes to understand how winners think. Because he knew he didn’t have a skill problem, he had a mental game problem. He wanted to know how they think. And as you would suspect, they were all doing very similar things.

They didn’t know they were doing similar things, but he did the collection on the data. They were doing very very smailar things. And so he put together a whole methodology he calls it mental management, and went back four years later and not only took all the gold in those Olympic Games, but set four world records and has been teaching other professionals athletes to do the same use that same methodology now for decades. So one of the things that came out of his research was that they made a change on the US Olympic riflery team that they were not allowed to ask each other the most common question we all ask each other every day.

They were not allowed to ask each other how you doing. That was against the team culture. They had a culture number on. This, and he said the reason was because if you leave it too wide open, just like his experience, you give the mind an opportunity to turn right or left, it’s going to go left.

We just have this tendency to go left. And he said, so, he said, I figured out in all of my research that you cannot focus on the opposite of an idea. You can’t think about not losing. You can’t think about not missing, because then all you think about is missing.

Right, You can’t if I were to say to you, don’t think of the statue of liberty. Well, what’s the first thing that came to your mind? Yeah, I’m thinking. So he said, you can’t focus on the opposite idea of the brain doesn’t work that way. So he said, all of our our communication in our culture is tailored around and centered on focusing on what we want, not on what we don’t want.

So you said, the only acceptable question at the beginning of the day became, what is the best thing that happened yesterday? What’s the best thing that happened in practice yesterday? What’s the best thing that happened in the competition you just got back from in Denmark? What’s the best thing that happened? You said, Because and then that forces the conversation to center around more of what you want. Yeah. Right. And so his recommendation, which we’ve adopted and trained in practices all over the world, is you start your morning meeting with that question, what is the best thing that happened yesterday? In patient care? What was the best thing that happened? I get it, Cameron, some days you have to dig deep.

You know, you had the best thing yesterday was the doctor showed up less late than ever before. I mean, whatever you got to come up with something. But you identified two or three things that happened from the day before in terms of patient care that were positives. Because then the team can learn from that, they can replicate that, they can do it again.

Yes, you’ll have time to deal with things that maybe didn’t go so well, but start with the positive. What’s the best thing to happen? And I’m going to challenge you to do it at home. Do the same thing. I mean, I don’t know if you’re like me, but I’m guilty of going home sometimes and walk through the door and going you won’t believe what happened to me today.

And then I unload the worst things that happen. It’s like, that’s not a great way to start the evening. So start at home. What’s the best thing that happened as well? So let me just quickly summarize.

Here’s the challenges Cameron. One, have a culture by design, write it down, codify it, define it. What do you want? What are the beliefs and the behaviors that you want in the place that you’re building that you’re put it in writing. Number two, lead by example.

So once you’ve defined it, you got to live it. Doesn’t mean, you’re perfect, but that’s your standard. If you’re going to lead the organization you’re going to build it, then you have to be an example of what you want your team because they’re looking at you every minute and they’re going to leave more what they see than what they hear. So lead by example.

Then look at your environment. What cues do you have in your environment of things that add to or detract from your culture? Right, Winston Churchill said, is just a punctuation mark of that whole archway idea into the House of Commons. He said in summary, he said, you know, we build our buildings. Thereafter our buildings build us.

Your environment has an impact. And then finally start your day off with that key question, what’s the best thing that happened? And have a discussion about that with your team at the beginning of your day. What’s the best thing that happen? So those are just four simple ideas of many that you can use to build your culture. So here’s the last recommendation.

This is entitled the Culture of Success. Ten natural laws for creating the place where everyone wants to work. So we consider this the textbook Cameron for simple ways to build your culture. There’s ten simple ideas.

I’ve shared a couple of them with you today by how you can have a culture by design, by default, but do this as a strategic way to build a very very successful practice. You can get copies of this at in our bookstore, the Yespress dot com, Yespress dot com, or you can go to my website Stephenjanerson dot com, Stephen with a v so Stephenjanderson dot com. It’s all linked up there. It’s an easy read, simple minds right, simple books with simple implementation to really build that core for.

A culture of success in whatever the environment is. In your home, your marriage, your your office. H every organization has a culture. So thanks for letting me share today.

Care absolutely, I mean, Steve, this is a this is amazing. I really appreciate it. I mean I feel like I just went through a coaching session myself, which is I appreciate you laying all that out. I know that you know there’s more meat to creating the culture within the book, So thank you so much for sharing that the website.

I mean, all you guys have to do is just just google Stephen J. Anderson, like he’s all over the internet. He’s done some incredible things In fact, there’s a really cool video on your site that I took the time to watch, and so now I appreciate it. This is this is huge value.

One of the takeaways too, is back to your point, you know, of of hey, how are you doing it? The immediate response, you know, is good, And then that’s kind of it. Right. I was reading a book recently. I’m a dad, I have two daughters, and I was noticing myself saying how is school today? How is your day today? And it’s so vague and I wasn’t getting the answers, and so to your point, I was changed my question big time.

What was fun like? So ask them two questions usually what was one of the most exciting things that happened in class today? There you go, So now I have to. Think, right, they have to think, they have to go deep. And the answers I get are amazing. And the other thing too, that that this book taught me was ask them another one on what was one of the things that also.

Challenged you today? Oh? I love that, Yeah, And then that was the answers to that was was really interesting as well, and it just creates a wonderful conversation. One hundred percent agree with you on the round table. That’s something that we have in our home. Huge really like it changes the entire atmosphere, change the whole dynamic.

Of the conversation. All right, So I’ve got one to ask at the dinner’s table tonight at. Dinner You ready, Yes, I’m ready to go for it. What did you do today to serve someone else? Oh? I like that and you may be surprised at the answers that come back.

Questions are powerful because they lead to action. Yeah, when you when you ask the right questions, it’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time. I know your thanks, Cameron, this was fun.

Thanks for letting me share and go build a great culture for uh. If you’re listening, it’s one of the basic fundamentals off and overlooked but makes a huge, huge different Cameron. I’ll add this one last thing. If you want to have some fun, I have some fun on my Instagram account.

So it’s the Stephen J. Anderson on Instagram, and twice a week we do what we call Steve’s peeves and they are sometimes they’re humorous, sometimes not. But it’s just little things that sometimes we don’t think about the mess up your culture. A lot of them are customer service oriented, a lot of them are teamworker, but just little things that end up having a huge, huge impact.

So the Stephen Jay Anderson you can have some fun with. And if you have a Peve you want to share with me, bring it. On because I’m always I love it. All right, awesome man, Thank you so much.

There you guys having we get Steve Anderson here. You guys know exactly where to go find him, and I really appreciate the time and we’ll connect to you soon. Thanks Cameron. All right, guess we’ll see it.