[00:00:30] Erika: I once hired someone, or maybe more than one team member, because I saw the potential they had. You know how we've talked about falling in love with potential with our clients. Well, I think we can also do the same for clinicians. We can see what they may be capable of and hire them based on that.

[00:01:00] Jen: Yeah, I've definitely done that as well. I've also waited way too long to fire someone. I know we had an admin for two years that I waited on to fire, and for me, that was probably one of my biggest mistakes and one of my biggest regrets.

[00:01:26] Jen: You know what? It was so multilayered. I think it I was over-empathizing with her and her situation. I think I felt bad for her. I think I thought I was part of the problem, or maybe my leadership team was part of the problem, that we didn't train her properly. I also knew how hard it was to find and replace her, so I think I was holding onto her way too long for that reason as well.

[00:02:27] Colleen: That's not sustainable. So obviously, said clinicians did not enjoy that. We are not gonna pay Labor Day at the clinical rate. We're not gonna pay holidays at the clinical rate, nor are we gonna really like it. We're not gonna pay in that structure anymore. In a business where you are made sustainable by your revenue-generating activities, you can't incentivize your people to make more off of the time that they're off versus the time that they're with patients. It's very simple. So [00:03:00] I explained this is not sustainable. I understand this is the way it's probably been for a while. We're gonna have to change some things. And I know that you're probably not gonna be happy with it, but I will make it better. I'll make it better than it was before. And long story short, I reconfigured it.

[00:03:39] Colleen: The more patients you see, the higher that rate goes up. And I'll give you a little phantom equity in the company so that you've got some skin in the game, and you wanna start to see us do well and understand why the way that we were doing things before was not sustainable, and this particular person was not having it.

[00:04:20] Colleen: She's family. Like, just give her what she's had a hard year and she has, she's had a hard year. But I can't do that as a business. That's how I go upside down. So that's where, as a business owner, as a practice owner, even if you're not owning a group practice, anytime you employ someone and you're not looking at the sustainability of the policies, you're not incentivizing the people that you work for to do the thing that's revenue-generating.

[00:05:11] Colleen: Etsy Empire, right? You're gonna build a bunch of tools for other clinicians who are doing therapy, maybe, and you're out of that traditional mode, or you're leveraging your expertise on a YouTube channel. So that's part of what Off the Chair is meant for, is those people who wanna think creatively, but this other part is built along that.

[00:06:05] Colleen: How much do you have to be there day after day? For it to be profitable. Are you the only thoroughbred or high producer that's driving that revenue? And the moment that you get sick or wanna take a break, that profit plummets. And so off the chair you're also helping you figure out how you get yourself off of that a little bit, and your employees into building something that can last beyond you.

[00:06:56] Jen: But I was also doing payroll and more [00:07:00] administrative and billing and behind-the-scenes tasks and managing that, they were like, yeah, that's great. You have great profit, but yeah, you're still fully a part of the business, so that's, we're just not into it. Yeah. But I never had that revelation until I met with them.

[00:07:17] Colleen: Right. And when you're at the point that you are like, Alright, I'm selling this thing, usually you don't have the fuel left in the tank to then build those systems. So that's why they say, you know, always be selling, always be thinking about how you're structuring your practice to sell, even if it's 5, 10, 20 years from now.

[00:08:14] Colleen: That can get you into trouble where you're like, I'm crossing over into leadership. I'm not. I'm now a leader is this planet over here, and I'm now in some sort of weird therapy zone, therapizing my employees' needs and desires, and we're nowhere near what I needed to have this conversation for.

[00:08:52] Jen: But that's totally not leadership. And I know Kim Scott calls this ruinous empathy when you care so much about someone, but you don't challenge them directly, and the business really bleeds. You know, because of that. But I do think therapists in general, as practice owners, do this way more than we'd like to admit.

[00:09:33] Colleen: Let's see what they can do. But we're also challenging them directly, which I think some of that also mimics how you're supposed to be in the therapist role. You're not just supposed to put a warm blanket and a hot cup of tea around your patients and be like, That's not fair that they did that to you.

[00:10:11] Colleen: And do you hear a common denominator? So that's where I think we can pull in our therapist training to collaboratively confront

[00:10:22] Erika: I also think it comes from the other side, too. Like we are therapists by trade, leading therapists, and there can be a lot of projections and or expectations on us because folks think that our, you know, well of empathy is unending, and or that we're going to use our therapist skills with them when they're employees in our business.

[00:10:56] Colleen: So the four pieces there are the radical candor, which is the healthy one, the ruinous empathy, which is the one I just kind of did before, where we're just always empathetic, and we're not really challenging the person. You can have obnoxious aggression, which is just you're challenging the person directly.

[00:11:14] Jen: Yeah, with low care. Yeah.

[00:11:38] Colleen: You're pretending to agree with someone, but then undermining them later, it creates this toxicity, it erodes trust, and it leads to dysfunctional teams.

[00:11:48] Colleen: When you guys think about your, either those, that quadrant from that model or your therapist training, can you think of examples of times where you've had to [00:12:00] pull yourself out of that with a team member?

[00:12:25] Jen: Um, as soon as I did those things, all of a sudden, the notes were never an issue again.

[00:12:53] Colleen: How's everything with your mom? That can be so therapeutic for someone who feels completely isolated [00:13:00] in the world to hear that their therapist, who knows all their deepest, darkest secrets, was still thinking about them and still feels good about them and brings them into humanity, as he said. Right? So I loved, Rogers, so I do find.

[00:13:49] Colleen: That does not make sense for a business to pay you $65 an hour for Labor Day for eight days. You don't even see a patient a week, girl. Right? So now I've built that investment because I've deposited with unconditional positive regard, and so I can challenge that person at the same time. I think before I figured out the finesse of those two things, though, the goal was just to always have UPR with every employee. And if it wasn't happening. It was a failure of leadership, or I haven't spent enough time with this person. Maybe we need to go wine tasting. We need to go bowling more. You know, like there's some, there's a disconnect here when in reality, maybe that therapist was trying to create a healthy boundary.

[00:14:53] Colleen: Yeah. And I would see this [00:15:00] sort of people-pleasing thing that would happen for me for so long. And I think it happens with women, especially. We're socialized to be nice and to smile and to be kind and not to raise our voices. And when that gets confused with. Pleasing all of your employees, number one, it's exhausting.

[00:15:46] Colleen: Can kindness be the same way it is for our kids, right? So some of this stuff does work in our family relationship. It just doesn't always carry over in business. But onboarding an employee and spending an [00:16:00] hour learning about their family, sure, that's great, that's an investment in them. But giving them clear expectations from the beginning about how you do a good job here.

[00:16:27] Jen: What are your secrets to hiring well?

[00:16:52] Erika: If it, clear that the staff is lacking guidance in certain areas, then I will add more policy and procedure just to give more concrete firm boundaries for what my expectations are. because what I think people know is way different than what they actually know. So that's how I handle it, with regard to hiring you, you know, there is some aspect of.

[00:17:44] Colleen: You know what hit me in the book? No Rules, rules. Reed Hastings at Netflix, he flat-out said, We're not a family. We're a team of stunning colleagues who use the word stunning, and the phrase, their actual [00:18:00] phrase, if you look at their website in terms of their company culture. And they realize that when you call work a family, you confuse loyalty with performance.

[00:18:41] Colleen: In organizations, you have to, or otherwise, the whole team pays the price. If you're not holding someone accountable, your A-players will leave because they like being held accountable, because they know what they're doing. So then you're left with a bunch of B and C players.

[00:19:33] Erika: And, you know, I've grown to be able to see when someone's interacting with me based on perhaps a, you know, prototype from the past, a past leader or manager, and they just don't even recognize it for themselves. So, now, we can't really help with that except to encourage our people to get their own therapy, which, you know, I think most therapists should be doing anyway [00:20:00] if they're practicing in a healthy way.

[00:20:25] Colleen: Years ago, I hired someone to be our clinical director. It was not because she ever showed me she could be a natural leader, but I just really liked her. She was warm, she was kind, she was great with clients,

[00:20:38] Colleen: And she was young. She was, she had that fuel in her that I felt like. We need to career path for her, or she's gonna get burnt out just seeing clients.

[00:21:00] Colleen: And so I'd carve out time to meet with her because I noticed that while we were paying her the clinical director's salary, there wasn't a lot of like directing going on, and I was still getting these.

[00:21:47] Colleen: It was that old training where I was like, well, what do you think it is that makes it hard for you to confront our clinicians if they're not doing a good job? Or if they have a high churn rate and they're not retaining their [00:22:00] clinicians? What do you think that is? And I was like, What are you doing?

[00:22:26] Colleen: And we have about zero minutes of leadership training when we get into clinical practice.

[00:22:33] Colleen: Our training as therapists can be an albatross in business. Think about it. We're doing unconditional positive regard. It's a gift in the therapy room, but if you bring that into your org chart, suddenly you've got unconditional employment. You know, you've got people that are like, I've been with you for five years, so why shouldn't I be with you for five more years?

[00:23:03] Colleen: things for

[00:23:18] Colleen: treat this ike family.

[00:23:24] Jen: I think something that ethically happens in clinical supervision is that we're taught about gatekeeping. And I think what happens is,

[00:23:33] Jen: We're clinically

[00:23:47] Jen: I think you can get into rescuing them a little bit, and if they, you know, fail, you think you failed them. And I think that's not the case. I think sometimes letting [00:24:00] go is the most ethical thing we can do as business owners.

[00:24:20] Colleen: Like maybe we have just used up our bag of tricks, and we know another therapist that does EMDR that we think is gonna be the next best thing for them, and we have to terminate. It's not a one-session thing. Usually, it happens over the course of sessions, and we've been taught to be extremely careful and compliant when we're doing that because while this person is a client to us, to them.

[00:25:16] Colleen: 'cause I'm gonna hop off here, but like, we're not gonna work together anymore. Okay. Okay. Is that okay? And that's not, I don't even know if that's healthy. And that's where I don't know how you prevent that therapist bleed from coming in as a leader with your team members, other than to say that as long as you have.

[00:26:21] Colleen: They want those sick days, those paid holidays, they want that 401k. You're gonna be better supported in a large corporate structure that can absorb that. Versus a private practice like mine that relies on those revenue-generating activities.

[00:26:57] Colleen: They were upset. It was a [00:27:00] lot of arguing back and forth when the decision had already been made. It wasn't a really effective use of time. And so instead he would send them an email and say, You know, these are the things that we have tried to work on. This is no longer a fit with our team. We wish you the best.

[00:27:49] Colleen: You know, do we just want greater understanding for like what we could have done differently? Or is it that we just need to move [00:28:00] on? That's not something that. No matter what I tell this person at this point, it's not gonna change the fact of the matter that they don't feel I'm a good fit here.

[00:28:27] Colleen: The person is like, ready, you know, they understand that we gotta move on.

[00:28:53] Erika: And I, I truly treat that with respect. I accept, you know, [00:29:00] their resignation, but I also find it curious when they hang on and continue to behave as though they're an integral part of the organization. It's kind of a boundary issue, I think, like they have decided to move on. So. We are also moving on; I have other objectives to face and to contend with at that point.

[00:29:55] Erika: And if we communicate clearly with clients [00:30:00] and create a plan for transition, then that to me is my priority. 'cause that's why I started this business and this practice is to serve clients. So I have found that sometimes employees have difficulty. With those types of boundaries, like understanding that, hey, they're choosing to move on, so now the business has to operate and make decisions that are best for the business.

[00:30:37] Colleen: Okay, so as we wrap this into some takeaways for our listeners, I think some of the things that we share today that are just sort of our red flags for people that are listening is making sure we aren't hiring for niceness over competence, confusing friendship with fit, not setting clear [00:31:00] expectations from the outset.

[00:31:22] Colleen: A good clinician, a good admin. You write the role before you post the job, and then you ask the questions that test ownership. Accountability and resilience. Tell me about a time that your employer called you out and said, You are not doing what I hired you to do. How did you respond? And a lot can be learned from that question. Oh, well, they were having a bad week. They tended to take things out on me. Okay. So this person's got an external locus of control. They are not able to take accountability. It sounds like they're able to come up with a lot of rationalizations for why someone might be asking. This is from them, but they're not able to take control versus someone saying, yeah, they were right.

[00:32:28] Colleen: That's a green flag for me. Someone who tells me about that. Tell me about a time you made a mistake, how you fixed it, and what metrics held you accountable in your last job? I think all of those things. The fact that even a clinician wouldn't understand what a metric is, right? Because most of our practices, I know I certainly wasn't running a practice with metrics when I started.

[00:33:09] Colleen: And everybody gets on the bus. And you're not like, well, this is my mission. You're just like, you're a warm body, you gotta pulse, get on the bus. And then you got a bunch of people on the bus that you don't really know are gonna fit with your clients or even how you wanna work or be accountable. And so having these multiple touchpoints with people, and even having a template for yourself of how you do these touchpoints. And maybe in your calendar every Thursday you're like, my, these are my touch points, these are my meetings. And your EA then puts it in on Thursdays. You're still onboarding with Sylvia, who is in week six.

[00:34:30] Jen: Something else that I do in terms of hiring is similar to what you're mentioning. I love that. To find out, you know. For them to be authentic and honest, you give them scenarios of where they have failed. I think that's so important that they show, they can show their internal locus of control. But in addition, I like to get as much information up front about them as possible.

[00:35:12] Jen: Let's not waste my time. Um, think for me, and we also send out an email about our values before they come in for an interview, 'cause I just wanna make sure, like, you know, if those things all align, we'd love to have you in for an interview. So for me, it's just trying to gather as much about them before they even come in, but also share as much about us.

[00:35:37] Colleen: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:45] Erika: I definitely observe how, uh, applicants act throughout the interview process. You know, are they timely? Do they do what they say they're going to do? Do they show up? Do they let you know if they're running late? I think those are all possible signs of how they're going to behave in the workplace and or with clients.

[00:36:21]

[00:36:23] Colleen: I think red flags for me are the minute someone opens up with a bunch of excuses, Everything that keeps going wrong with that person. In the first couple of weeks, there's like this excuse, as psychologists, we're trained to see data in sets, and if I keep seeing this data set, then this is a person who is routinely failing to do the clear expectations that we've outlined for them.

[00:37:20] Colleen: My daughter is great at this. She'll spend more effort getting out of the original effort than it would've just taken to do the effort. I'm like, girl, you could have gone up there and thrown that load of laundry in, in five minutes. You have taken 27 minutes to tell me why you can't do laundry because it's this and it's a Tuesday, and some of the things are giving you skin allergies.

[00:38:06] Jen: And it's a huge pet peeve if someone is not accountable. I always. Like, like you know, you have to be accountable for your actions, not make excuses, own up to what you've done wrong. So I hear you on that one.

[00:38:47] Colleen: Clarity is kindness. Avoid the tickle, slap, tickle therapist sandwich that we always hear in grad school. Right? Like, you're doing really well, I think. You would be best served with a different [00:39:00] company, and I would enjoy hearing how you've thrived. You can't do that, you know? 'cause they do, they understand that the therapist sandwich and they don't enjoy.

[00:39:30] Colleen: Good A players, strong. People who enjoy being part of a team that have played sports before are familiar with being held accountable and like being held accountable because they're good at what they do. I.

[00:40:11] Erika: I do follow up with those choices and decisions, but you can't always explain to the entire team what happened there. So I think it's best to just convey very universal standards for what your expectations are and hold everyone to a similar standard.

[00:40:57] Colleen: It really helps others find us. And maybe, you know, a friend or colleague who could really use this today. So be sure to share it with them. Therapists think that if they fail, it means I failed them. In reality, keeping someone in the wrong seat is often more harmful.

[00:41:19] Erika: If you're drained by managing the wrong team, your patients and your businesses will suffer.

[00:41:30] Jen: You are not ending their career. You're freeing them and yourself to find a better fit.