What if you train them... and they leave?

Hi lovely ones. Today’s episode touches a nerve that so many of us feel as practice owners: that sting when you’ve trained someone, invested your time, heart and energy, and then… they leave. Ouch.

It’s one of the most vulnerable parts of leading a team. And it’s also where we often freeze up, unsure of whether to keep backing our people or retreating to protect ourselves. But here’s the thing: not training your team comes with its own big risks too.

So in this episode, I’m getting honest about the fear behind training (and re-training), why I built a long-game training culture at Health Nest, and how that recently led to us winning a very special award (trophy and all!). But I’m also sharing the behind-the-scenes missteps, false starts, and very human reality of building something like this in a busy allied health practice.

In this episode, I talk about:

• The old-but-golden quote that changed how I think about training
• The real cost of not training your team (and no one warns you about it)
• What we actually do at Health Nest – our 12-month onboarding, daily planning, mentoring, and values time
• Why we ditched the word “supervision” in favour of “mentoring”
• Building a culture of grace (because learning doesn’t happen overnight)
• The messiness behind the systems – and why that’s totally normal
• How to start small if you’re not there yet
• Why supporting your team, even if they leave, is still a legacy

Some takeaways from this chat:

• Training is more than teaching skills – it’s living your practice values.
• Yes, people might leave… but they might also stay, flourish, and become your leaders.
• It’s okay if your systems aren’t perfect. It’s okay if you have to cancel mentoring for the third week in a row. You’re not doing it wrong... you’re doing it real.
• You don’t need a 10-module program to start. A checklist and one honest conversation can go a long way.
• Building a training culture is iterative. It grows just like your team does – one awkward, wonderful step at a time.

Thanks for being here with me.

Whether you’re in the early days of figuring this out, or you've already built something you're proud of.. I see you. And I hope this episode helps you feel less alone in the mess and magic of it all.

If it landed for you, feel free to share it with a friend or leave a review... it really helps other practice owners find the podcast. You can also learn more about our Allied Health community over at theconnectionco.com.au.

Until next time, keep building your good allied health practice.

Much love,

Amy

Foreign welcome to my Good Allied Health Practice, the podcast for allied health business owners who are looking to bring smart and heart together on their journey.

On the podcast, I'll cover things about being vulnerable and brave, pivoting failures, good wins, things that work, things that don't work, and I'll talk with other practice owners who are doing good in their journeys.

I'm Amy Geach, practice owner and mum, and I'm here because I believe in you.

So let's go forward on this journey together.

Hi there and welcome back to my good allied health program, Practice, the podcast where we chat about the messy, the meaningful and the very real journey of running an allied health business.

Now, I have a good one for you today, especially if you've ever poured your heart into training a team member only to have them leave.

Done.

Gone.

It stings.

It really hurts, doesn't it?

Today's episode is inspired by a quote that I heard many years ago now, which makes me feel a little bit old, but it.

It lodged itself in my brain and my heart and it has never left.

The quote is, what if you train them and they leave?

But what if you don't train them and they stay?

It's a good one, right?

I'm going to read it out again.

What if you train them and they leave?

But what if you don't train them and they stay?

I remember reading it and thinking, yes, that's it.

That is the dilemma.

We want to build amazing teams, but we also want to protect ourselves.

And in that tug of war, we end up doing nothing at all or doing the bare minimum.

But that's not what we're here for.

You and I, we are here to build good practices and that includes building strong people.

So in this episode, I'm going to walk you through how I built a training culture at my clinics.

Because we've all been there trying to train when the diary is bursting at the scene, or when someone leaves mid program, or when we promised PD in the job ad and now we're wondering if we even have the budget.

So if you've ever felt unsure about how much to invest in your team or how to do it without burning out or breaking the bank, I'm really hoping that you will get some pearls from this podcast episode.

And I was so honoured to be able to go and attend.

And I was even more excited when our name was called as the winner in the education and training award section.

It was the first award called out on the night.

I just had this feeling in me that it was going to be a lucky night.

And when I saw on the program we were up first, I grabbed my little glass of wine and I just quietly wandered up the front towards the stage because I needed to check out how to get onto that stage in case we were the winners.

I didn't want to be wandering around, how do I get up there?

And when my name was called out, I walked up with so much pride in myself and in the team that has been created at HealthNest and all the wonderful work that happens in our Health Nest clinic.

And it was a really special moment.

And not just because we bought home a trophy, although I admit that felt pretty good to hold on to, but because it recognized something that we've been quietly building for years as a team.

A culture of learning and a culture of grace really around that learning, that not everyone can start in a job and hit the ground running and not need nurturing and not need training and mentoring and support.

So we have been quietly building a place where people grow.

A workplace that doesn't just talk about training and support, but actually does it.

And once I hopped off the stage with my trophy at the awards, I almost trotted over to the photographer who was there taking photos of all the award recipients because I was just so chuffed to stand there with a big smile on my face holding that trophy because it represented so much work that has gone into where we are today.

So I'm going to talk to you about training staff and some of the things people don't say out loud about it and how I developed my clinic over time to be award winning.

So let's start off talking about the fear that can be behind the training.

Because if you've ever employed someone, especially in a small team or a growing practice, you've probably had this thought, is it worth it?

Is it worth putting this new team member on if I have to put training into them?

But there are other things that come up as well.

Is it worth pulling this new team member out of the clinic for lots of onboarding or extra onboarding or extra training?

Is it worth booking them into that seventeen hundred dollar course before they've proven themselves, haven't even passed probation yet?

Is it worth paying for training when they're not seeing a full caseload yet and they're not bringing in the income that you need?

All of these considerations come to mind and it's all around the fact that training costs you not just money, but your own time and your own energy.

Because let's be honest, when somebody leaves after you've poured your heart, soul and budget into training them, it bloody hurts.

You feel it burnt and you start to protect yourself the next time around.

Maybe you delay investing, maybe you stop offering as much and at the start you probably don't even notice it, just little tweaks.

But slowly, quietly, the instinct kicks in and that instinct is to protect yourself.

Now there is a risk though to not training.

And no one tells you about that.

When you're in that space of self protect and your instincts are kicking in and you're wanting to pull back.

The bigger risk isn't that they leave after you train them.

The bigger risk is that they stay untrained, unsupported, unsure.

And guess what, they then represent your business anyway.

I've seen what happens when team members stay but don't get the training they need.

Their confidence dips, their client outcomes suffer, they rely on others to fill the gaps and they start to withdraw or burn out, or worse, fake confidence and then create this inconsistency in the client experience in your practice.

And you know what, at the end of the day, yes, we want them to be motivated to learn as well.

But that's not all on them, right?

That's on us as leaders and what we have provided to them, what kind of learning environment we have provided for them.

Training isn't about just teaching skills.

It's about living your values and living the values of your practice.

It's about keeping your brand consistent.

It's about making sure your team can actually do the job they were hired to do in a way that aligns with your standards.

So I want to move on to talk about what we built in my Health Nest clinic and why we won.

So let's take you behind the scenes a little bit because I want to share this.

Not to show off, but to show what's possible and to maybe spark an idea or two in your own business.

So first up, when somebody joins our team and they are new to hand therapy and they haven't worked in that area before, but they've got an interest and they've got a passion, we give them a 12 month onboarding program.

Yep, 12 months.

We don't just onboard someone for a week and throw them in.

These are the types of things we offer over the 12 months.

And it's individualized.

Some people will develop a little bit more quickly than other people.

And that's where I was mentioning earlier about the grace that needs to come in.

Because we all learn different ways and at different times.

Things click at different times.

When we're learning something, some of us might have to hear things third, fourth, fifth time before we go, aha, I'm actually getting it now.

Other people might pick it up straight away the first time.

Sometimes in all the flurry of learning something and starting a new job, info goes in and it just falls out the back end.

And something that we might have been taught early on, we've forgotten already.

So it really needs to be onboarding longer than a week.

And so some of the things that we put in place that we individualize.

And when I say individualize, what I mean is somebody might have these for the full 12 months.

Somebody who's developing a little bit quicker might have them for six to nine months.

It really depends.

And we base it on how everybody's going.

But we have something in the diary called daily planning.

And this is in the morning and it is time for our, I don't like to use the word junior and senior therapists in my clinic.

So my junior therapists are called associates.

So our associates will have daily planning in their first 12 months with us with their mentor.

And that is to help them set up for the day they talk over who's in the diary, what their plan is in those particular therapy sessions.

The mentor has a chance to ask some questions about what are some of the things that might come up to help pre prepare them.

So they're going into those sessions as confident as possible.

The next one is we have developed a program that we run via online learning modules.

It's called our help program and it's 10 modules covering the fundamentals of hand therapy.

Now how did we do this?

Because that sounds like a hell of a lot of work and yes it is.

But once you've got it set up, it is complete gold in your practice.

And you can keep running it each time somebody comes along that is starting in your kind of niche.

The next thing we do is we want people to actually consume those modules.

And so we set aside three hours of protected learning time each week for people new to hand therapy.

And it's actually blocked out in the diary for them.

And then for those who have passed the modules and have gone through kind of that 12 month onboarding program, then move into what we call our quarterly learning projects, where they can choose a topic, dive really deep into it, and then present it back to the team.

And they get a certain amount of weeks to dive in and do their learning project and have time set aside in the diary to work towards that.

Now, we don't do any of that to be fancy.

We do it because over time we've learned that these things work really well.

Okay.

We also built in some clarity for our team.

So quite a while ago, we built in a career pathway.

And we have four associate levels for therapists.

When people come and they start off their hand therapy journey with us that they can progress through so they always know where they are and where they are headed.

And a tiered competency program that complements those levels so people know what is expected at each of those levels.

And then we can frame our training and learning around those.

We make sure every year we're checking in with our therapists, what are you feeling competent about?

Where is the confidence and where is the confidence lacking?

And then design our training around where the confidence might be lacking so we can always be making sure our team are feeling really great going into each day at work.

We make sure we have weekly and monthly mentoring, and that depends on the role that somebody might have in the clinic.

Now, I dropped the word supervision a very, very long time ago in my practice.

I know a lot of other people use it and I know it's used a lot with our association and AHPRA and all of that.

However, in my clinic, we really like to use the word mentoring because that really sets the focus for what those sessions are actually about.

It's about supporting that person to be the best, best version of themselves.

It's about supporting that person to dive in and problem solve and work on their clinical reasoning in a supported way.

It's about saying, look, I'm here with you side by side and let's tackle this together.

I dropped the supervision terminology because that wasn't what I wanted the feeling to be in my practice.

I didn't want the associate therapist to feel like they were being supervised and that they couldn't.

I just didn't want them to have this idea that, you know, they weren't there yet and they, there was that big gap between their supervisor and where they were at.

And I feel for me, in my clinic, the word mentoring and how we approach mentoring works really beautifully.

And then recently we have added in our quarterly growth check ins, which includes feedback, goal setting, and, you know, honest conversations.

About what's working for somebody and what might not be working, so we can tackle those.

So that's a little bit about what we offer in the clinic, but then there's our values, time.

And this one's a little bit different.

But each team member gets an hour per day to work into our clinic values.

And it's not prescriptive.

They can use it however they want.

It might be reflecting on a client case or checking in on a team member, or helping us improve a system, or having some space to just stop and have a reset and catch up on a bit of admin.

It's our way of saying we don't just talk about our values, we make space for you to live the values.

And if you're listening and thinking, well, that sounds great, but I'm not there yet, I want you to know that neither were we.

This was built over time, step by step.

One checklist, one mentoring session, one awkward but honest conversation at a time.

You don't need a 10 module program to start.

You just need to decide that learning matters and that you're willing to back your people no matter what stage they're at.

So if you're at the beginning, here's where you can start.

First of all, you can create a checklist for onboarding.

Doesn't have to be a 12 month checklist, right?

Just a checklist of what are the things you would like them to know after the first week, the second week, the third week, start there.

Block out mentoring time.

Choose one team value and find a way to bring it to life more in your clinic.

Ask your team what they need.

Make one promise about training and and keep that.

Now, I want to be really honest with you here.

As proud as I am of everything that we've built, it hasn't all been smooth sailing.

There have been plenty of false starts, missed moments, and quite a bit of messiness.

There have been times when I've planned learning time and then had to cancel it three weeks in a row because the diary was bursting at the seams.

There has been beautifully designed systems that made total sense on paper and then fell apart completely in the reality of a busy clinical week.

There has been times I've promised myself I would mentor somebody every Friday and then got pulled into a finance meeting.

Sick child at home or staff shortage got in the way.

And there have definitely been modules that we forgot to assign, checklists that got skipped and feedback that came way after the ship had already sailed.

And you know what?

That is all part of the learning too.

Building A training culture, it's really like building anything else.

It's iterative, it's never done, and that's okay.

It doesn't live in a perfectly color coded PDF or a training folder on your desktop.

And it lives in your team's experience in that messy and human and evolving workplace.

And underneath all of that, what matters is that we keep showing up.

What matters is that we notice when it's not working and we tweak.

And what matters is we take a breath and we say, okay, let's try that again.

So if your systems aren't perfect, if you feel like your mentoring gets derailed every second week, if your new team member hasn't finished learning activities, that's okay, you're not doing it wrong, you're doing it real.

I would want to encourage you to keep going.

I've had times before where I have been so organized and set company training days in the diary and then we leading up to, you know, maybe the fourth one for the year and I realized I have booked this in at a really awkward time for my team and it's just not going to work and I have to completely pivot and change things and that's okay.

So someone might leave after you've trained them.

That hurts.

They might also stay, they might flourish, they might become a mentor, they might be your future leader.

And if they do leave, they'll leave better than when they arrived.

And that's still a win, right?

Because we don't own people.

We get to walk alongside them for a season.

And sometimes that season is shorter than we had hoped.

But if during their time with us, they built confidence, learnt something new, found their voice or felt genuinely supported, and that's part of our legacy.

That is amazing.

Their next workplace, their next clients, their next team, they'll all benefit from the growth that started here or started there with you.

And it might not feel like a win on the surface, especially when you're re advertising, covering a full caseload, picking up extra clients, or wondering if you'll ever get a full team again.

Right.

I've been in those moments and they just feel shit, right?

When you're in the middle of that, it feels shit that you've trained this person up and they have left.

But underneath that, you've helped shape someone's professional journey.

You've been a stepping stone and not a revolving door.

So keep reminding yourself of that.

And when you can look back and say, I gave them a great experience, even if it wasn't forever, that is really great leadership.

That's the kind of business I want to run and I reckon that's the kind you're hoping to build too.

Thanks for being here with me today.

I hope this episode gave you something to think about or maybe a little nudge to start building that training culture you've been meaning to lean more into.

And if you've already smashing this area I want to give a big shout out to you as well.

If you'd like to reach out send us an email.

We always love hearing from our listeners or leave us a review about the podcast because it helps more people to know about it.

Until next time keep building your good allied health practice.

Much love.

Talk soon.

Thank you for being here.

I am incredibly grateful.

If you have a friend that would find this helpful please go ahead and share it with them too.

You can learn more about me and how to be part of my Allied health Connection community over@theconnectionco.com au.