The Psychology of Motivation: A Leader’s Guide to Getting More from Your Team

Gavin Rebello: When we’re talking about motivation, we’re talking about engagement, we’re talking about going the extra mile, digging deep when things are really difficult, that getting up on a gloomy, rainy, windy Monday morning and still being able to deliver your best. That’s what we want with motivation is this engagement, this sense of ownership.

Bethany Fishbein: Hi, I am Bethany Fishbein. I’m the CEO of The Power Practice and host of the Power Hour Optometry podcast. And I’ve been waiting to do today’s episode for kind of a long time, months maybe, of just scheduling and getting it together. So I’m really excited to be able to introduce my guest. This is Gavin Rebello. Gavin is an optometrist based in the UK. He’s a presenter and speaker around leadership and management. He speaks for optometrists, as well as hospitals and surgeons in the NHS. He is a partner in eight optometric practices and such an incredible, valuable resource to me and to so many of our Power Practice clients. He’s been a frequent speaker at our retreats. And I’m really excited for the conversation that we’re going to have today. So Gavin, thank you for putting up with all of the craziness to figure out when we were going to do this and for being here today.

Gavin Rebello: It’s an absolute pleasure, Bethany. I’ve been really looking forward to chatting, actually. Yeah, chatting and talking about what we’re going to talk about.

Bethany Fishbein: Yeah. So really, what we’re talking about is employee motivation and employee demotivation. And this was kind of inspired by a visit that you had made to the US, probably going back a year. And so you were here and we’re having dinner with some of the leaders in my practice. And it was during that time after COVID where people couldn’t find staff and there were people in the office that were underperforming and you couldn’t guarantee that you’d be able to replace them. And so I think a lot of us here in the US had a low period of just feeling like you had the wrong people and feeling a little bit powerless to do anything about it. Did you guys have that in the UK as well?

Gavin Rebello: 100%. COVID made people reflect, it gave them the space to reflect on what they really wanted. It brought people down as well. You know, people, the mood sort of changed, their enthusiasm for what they did change as well. A lot of people certainly here over in the UK decided just to retire. So recruitment became a really big issue. So, you know, when recruitment’s an issue, when supply and demand is a real issue, people start asking themselves whether they should be earning more. They start looking elsewhere. All sorts of promises are made and bigger questions are asked of leaders as well. So yeah, it was a really tough time and continues to be. Recruitment continues to be an issue in the UK as well. And I think, you know, certainly, you know, the demographics in the UK and the US are similar. Recruitment continues to be an issue in our profession for the foreseeable future, because the number of people retiring is going to be more than the number of people qualifying. There are significantly less 15 to 19 year olds than there are, say, 50, 55 year olds. So that’s going to become a little bit of an issue. So creating a workplace where people want to work is going to be really, really important.

Bethany Fishbein: Gavin, talk a little bit about your own evolution on motivation, because the key to what motivates people isn’t what you originally thought and isn’t what most people think it’s going to be.

Gavin Rebello: When I first became a partner in my businesses, I very quickly realized  I knew nothing about leadership, business, motivating the team, because there was nothing in my clinical training for that. And it was all about optometries, all about eyes. I made a lot of mistakes on the way. So everything I share with you today is really learnt the hard way, the coalface. And I suppose my motivation is really the joy of helping other health professional leaders not make all the mistakes that I made. So the first thing that comes to mind when people say, right, I need to motivate the team. They go, right, I need to think about money, but I can’t increase my labour costs, because that’s going to make the business a bit more vulnerable. So what can I do? Let’s throw some more money at them through a bonus scheme. So the question I started asking, you know, when I started putting bonus schemes in place and not really seeing the uplift I expected was, well, does money actually motivate? There are various bits of literature, books you can read around money, which say quite opposite things. There’s a book you discussed recently on one of your podcasts, The Great Game of Business, talks about bonus structures and how well that was motivating for the whole workforce. And then you’ll go to Dan Pink on his literature says actually money doesn’t really motivate. It does for certain jobs. If it’s a very straightforward mechanical process, then money will motivate in those circumstances. But as soon as you’ve got a task that’s quite cognitive, which ours is, then money doesn’t really motivate. That puzzled me.

You know, I thought as a newbie leader, if you set up money and they achieve targets like improved conversion, improved ADV, improved productivity, and they got rewarded for it, then why wouldn’t that motivate people? Because I was thinking, I suppose, more as a leader where I’ve got skin in the game in the business. And so, of course, if the practice does it better, I do significantly better, get the reward of a successful business, I get the security of all of that around that. So my conclusion was with money, does it motivate? We all want 10% more. That’s the thing. We all want 10% more. Sure. If we’re underpaying our team members, that definitely demotivates. There’s an expectation as an optometrist will earn a certain amount and the staff fitting, measuring, styling on the spectacle side of things will earn a certain amount. So if there’s a lack, it’ll demotivate. But if you give a pay rise, or if you suddenly give a bonus, it will give a little bit of an uplift in the short term. And then everything seems to sort of settle back down. And that puzzled me. And it came up with this notion, we all want 10% more.

You know, when I was a student, I had a house share, and it was a cheap house. And it wasn’t the best house, you know, it was damp, it was cold. I shared the house not only with five other people with a whole menagerie of insects, and that side of things. And my 10% more as a student was just to live in a nice, a nicer house with central heating that worked, and just people not insects. So that was my 10% more. And then I got that house share, you know, as a professional qualified, I stayed sharing with other professionals, it was a nicer house, we had more money on the rent. And then I wanted 10% more. I didn’t want to have to queue up in the morning for the bathroom. I just wanted to be able to go and have a shower, go and use the bathroom when I wanted to use it without having a queue. I just wanted 10% more. You know, and then I was lucky enough as a professional to go skiing in the winter, and I wanted 10% more I wanted to go, I wanted to go skiing in the, in the winter and have a summer holiday in the summer, we all want 10% more, we all want something bigger and better. And that’s why money to motivate somebody to improve performance doesn’t necessarily have a lasting effect. It just opens up doors to need more.

Bethany Fishbein: Just to go back to some of the examples you gave. I mean, I think even when you were talking, I can hear it in your language, even when you were talking about, you know, as practice owner, I had skin in the game. I mean, of course I wanted and you didn’t say profit, right? It’s of course I wanted the feeling of success, the, the security. So even there, you’re right. It’s not money and great game, although it’s based on profit, the benefits are, it’s really very much not a money system. It’s not a money scheme. It’s interesting.

Gavin Rebello: For sure. I mean, the money is there, but really what’s happening in the great game of business is there’s trust because the owner is sharing the numbers. The owner trusts the whole of the workforce with the numbers. There’s an education. There’s, I’m going to invest in you. I’m going to educate you and improve your business skills. So the team feel important. They feel valued. There’s ownership, which gives them purpose. Once you get to the great game of business and the equity side of things, they’ve got ownership, they’ve got skin in the game and they’ve got purpose to drive that business forward because they’re all going to see the success of the business. So they, they’ve got something to believe in as well, you know, and then there’s growth and there’s improvement as well.

Bethany Fishbein: And there’s the fun of the win. And I was speaking to somebody almost an hour before we started this conversation and she wanted to do something and you know, what, what should the prize be? And it’s not about the prize. The prize doesn’t matter. I mean, if the prize is money and it’s a lot of it, nobody complains about that, of course, but there’s winning. And that’s, for me, is motivating too.

Gavin Rebello: And that, that fun of it is the, the team working together, this sense of belonging. We’re all in this together. We’re all going to succeed. And it’s, it’s that spirit that you get in sports, you know, when your team is, is doing well and doing, and has the potential to win the championship or the big cup. It’s that community, that feel, that rush of anticipation that brings us together. So yeah, the reward in the great game of business is money. Of course, money will bring a smile to people’s faces, but in itself, it’s not the money that motivates. It’s all the things behind the journey that gets the team motivated. And I suppose the difference we’re talking here is the difference between compliance and engagement. You see, if you use money just to, if you use money in itself to motivate, it’s really just still part of the income package. It’s all dressed in the income package, which the tax man will take a slice. So, and the team will be compliant because they don’t want to, you know, they don’t want to lose their job. They’re still going to do the job. But when we’re talking about motivation, we’re talking about engagement, we’re talking about going the extra mile, digging deep when things are really difficult, that getting up and not so much depending on which part of the US you live, but certainly in the, in the depths of winter in the UK, you know, getting up on a gloomy, rainy, windy Monday morning and still being able to deliver your best. That’s what we want with motivation is this engagement, this sense of ownership.

Bethany Fishbein: Gavin, talk about the other side of the coin, the idea of demotivation, because I don’t know if I’m totally on the right track, but an interesting thing that I’ve seen about money not being a strong motivator, I agree with everything you’re saying, is that I’ve seen in some cases where we’re trying to incentivize a behavior with money leads to a total turnoff for the people that you’re trying to motivate and the places that I see it in clients here in the US is just as an example for associate optometrists, where they, a production bonus is fine, that’s kind of a reward for doing well. But a, I’m going to give you $50 for each procedure you do or each thing you recommend creates this aversion, like, I am a professional and I will not recommend something because I’m going to get $50. I don’t want to be somewhere where I would be motivated by money. And, and they want 10% more too, right? But it’s such a turnoff. Is that the demotivating side of it?

Gavin Rebello: It can be because we have to look at the reasons why people do things. So first of all, again, just emphasize money has to be in place. If it’s not there, it’s a demotivating because we are, we have our worth. We call it a hygiene factor. It’s something that’s just a given. Once it’s there, it’s there. It won’t motivate you any more by throwing, you know, $10, $20 at someone necessarily. Optometrists, for instance, will do the job. Very few will do it because of a salary associated with it. They’re intelligent, talented, accomplished people. If they were motivated solely by money, they probably wouldn’t be an optometrist. They’d probably go and work in finance or in the city and be a trader or something like that. That’s a higher purpose to the health professions. And that’s that inbuilt caring, wanting to do the best for your patients. And that reward for the procedure, actually giving the best advice possible. Being able to look after the patient in the best way possible is probably a much more motivating factor than rewarding a procedure by an extra $10.

Bethany Fishbein: Right. Because in that situation, it puts the financial reward at odds with what’s best for the patient. So the other place I see it in opticals paid on commission, and the patient is between two frames and one frame looks better, but the other one is more expensive, which will lead to higher commission dollars. It’s the same thing. Like, I feel I’d never want what’s in the patient’s best interest and what’s in the team’s best interest to be opposite.

Gavin Rebello: Yeah, yeah. We want to, I think most people in our profession want to do the right thing and do it well. There will always be a percentage of any profession that’s solely money driven, of course, there will be that person. But, you know, again, as professionals, we’re looking for long term care, going home and knowing that you’ve done the right thing brings a sense of happiness and a sense of purpose, which is much more motivational than, say, that extra $10. So I try to think about when I was an employed optometrist and what actually motivated me as an optometrist, as an employed role, I started thinking about, well, what were the things that demotivated me? And this is a great time for somebody, you know, the listeners to maybe press pause and just get a notepad and just write down, you know, the things that used to motivate me when I was employed and the things that demotivated me. So things that demotivated me were unrealistic.

Bethany Fishbein: Before you get there, Gavin, can you just define demotivated?

Gavin Rebello: Yeah, no, that sense that you know, you can’t you can’t be bothered, you don’t want to do it, you know, you’re going to do your job. But are you going to go the extra mile? Things are running late? Or you’re really behind? You’re going to go in early of your own accord the next day and just catch up with things so that the practice runs better? You know, that sort of thing. Or just your heart sink, that feeling that you don’t really want to be there. You’re bored of the job, your shoulders are down, you haven’t got a spring in your step. The flatness, the emptiness, the press news in the morning going, you know, I don’t really want to go to work. So I wrote down the things that motivated me as an employee, being able to do a great job, seeing a smile on patients face, being able to save somebody’s sight. And I wrote down the things that demotivated me, unrealistic targets, not having enough time with a patient, squeeze-ins, unrealistic expectations, having a clinic that wasn’t very organized, that sort of thing. And these are all personal to me. And I looked at the list and I just asked myself, if I had more time with a patient, would I have felt more motivated in that job? And I went, well, yeah, of course I would have done.

And if my clinic flowed really nicely, if it was all booked really nicely, would I have felt better about that job? And I went, yeah, it did. And you see, I realized that you can’t motivate somebody. You can’t do something to motivate someone. Motivation is a free will thing. You know, if you ask me, Gavin, I want you to speak in your best American accent. And you try to offer me all sorts of incentives, money, whatever, flew me over to America or something. If I did not want to speak in an American accent, you could not make me speak in an American accent because it’s my choice. It’s my free will. So all we can do when we’re trying to have a more motivated team is to create an environment in which they feel motivated. So if my boss at the time I was an employed, when I was an employed optometrist, had actually taken the time to ask me how it was getting on and then I had more time with patients, my clinic flowed better. I could see the results of my work in the letters coming back from ophthalmology on my referral. So I could actually see that I’m making a difference. Then I would have felt much more motivated if I’d felt heard and listened to if I had a development plan, I would have felt more motivated.

So all of these things, I think we have to approach it from a well, how do I motivate people? And Simon Sinek has a great video on YouTube. He talks about Noah, Noah, the coffee barista. And it’s fantastic if you just Google this. And he says, you can’t, you know, it’s not you can’t ring people, can’t ring the effort out of people more than you can do. It’s just got to create an environment in which they blossom, in which they will give their best for sure. So write a list of what used to demotivate you. And the chances are be very similar to your team. The things that demotivate us as human beings are very, very similar in our in our profession.

We all tend to go into this profession for similar reasons, not the same, but similar reasons, and then try and create that environment in which they will feel motivated. And it’s a very individual thing. You know, some people will be more motivated by money than others. Somebody who’s younger in their career who is saving up a deposit for a house money is going to be forefront of their mind. Somebody who’s retiring, kids are flowing the nest, done all the university mortgages paid off, probably less so. So, you know, there is an individual thing here. So you do have to start getting to understand your team, understand what their passions are. But I do think there is one common thread amongst every human on the planet from a motivational point of view. And I think the one thing that we all want is to be happy.

I’ve never come across anyone that is striving to be unhappy, although sometimes when you look at some people, you think, well, maybe so. But no, I think everybody wants to be happy. And there are seven psychological drivers for motivation. There are seven psychological drivers that will bring us happiness. And the first one is to be loved. We all want to be loved. And the second is this sense of belonging. We all want to belong. And the third one is to feel important. Now, I list those three first, to be loved, to feel important and to belong. And I list those three first, because, you know, if you ask every single person or most people, sorry, most people, what’s the most important thing in your life? Most people will say my family, unless they’ve got challenging circumstances, of course, you know, I don’t want everybody in the same box, but most people say my family. So to be loved, to be loved by your family, to feel important, a sense of belonging. If you go back to school days, nobody wanted to be the person outside of the group. We wanted to be part of the group. And from a workplace perspective, that sense of belonging, that to each team member, feeling that they’re part of the family is really, really important. So what are we doing? Or what can we do as leaders to give it a more family feel? Well, to hear people, to see people, to listen to our team, to make them feel included. So perhaps a team huddle, rather than dictating how the patient journey is going to be and telling your team, why not just ask the question, how can we improve this part of the patient journey? I’d really love to hear your ideas because we’re one team here.

We’re looking after the patients as a team. So therefore, if we’re looking after the patients as a team, then surely, we need to hear our team because then they feel important because they’re being heard and listened to, and they feel that they’re included and they feel like the practice is their practice. And we refer back to the great game of business. And that’s where that was so successful because people were responsible for generating their targets. People were part of the family, all striving to achieve the goal or the mini game. And often they set the games themselves. Even better, part of that family fun.

Bethany Fishbein: Before you go on to the next ones, I’m thinking about this now as a practice owner. This is one of those that for me is easier to feel successful at as the owner of a really small practice versus a really large practice. And so one of the differences as we’ve talked about practices in the UK versus practices in the US is there are large multi-location, much larger teams, not exactly the same, but probably more akin to the hospital system or the NHS, like where the owner or the leader has layers of separation with some of the team. So I think about when we opened our practice and I had three people, there was no question. Of course, they were loved. We were spending every day together. We all loved each other. No problem. Belonging, it was so easy. As we got bigger, it gets harder. How do you keep that same feel in a larger company?

Gavin Rebello: You’re absolutely right. And some of my practices, we’ve got 15, 16, still small compared with the US. But because I’ve got eight practices, I’m not in the practices all of the time. So that becomes quite a challenge. But I’ve got managers or partners in the practice and they instill that same feeling. Team huddles is really, really important so that team members can contribute one to ones as well. So again, and really, and this is the hard thing for leaders is because we’re so focused on what we’re trying to achieve is we don’t often hear what our team members are saying. And Stephen Covey has this great, great quote, we often listen to respond, but actually, we should listen to understand. So that feeling of being listened to and heard in a one to one where the leader carves out time to spend with their team member and have a one to one. You see, one of the other drivers, psychological drivers is growth and improvement. We all want to be moving forward. So if the leader can create a personal development plan, and this ties in, there was another podcast site that you did, Bethany, it was a solo one, you didn’t interview anyone on this one. And you were talking about how do you keep hold of a valuable team member when they’ve hit the ceiling of their job remit? Well, this is growth and improvement. You created different layers that they could progress to. And that’s hugely motivating because they can see progression, they can see that the leader backs them, that they want them to be their best version, they want them to, in your case, to earn more here or, or to actually deliver more or stretch themselves and you were going to invest the time and the effort to help that. So having carving at that time to make sure that you understand your team member so that they grow and improve that they have this personal development plan is one of those key psychological drivers. And it does come down to that time. That time is actually helping the team member feel loved and important. Some owners will say, well, I don’t have the time, I’ve got to be in my lane, I’ve got to be seeing my patients. But what you’re really doing is saving yourself time having to recruit to replace, you need to look at the long term stability of the team and the family, the practice, rather than in and out, in and out, because you’re almost becoming a, you know, a hamster on a wheel, a busy fool. As owners, we have three hats, or two hats, we have our clinician hat, we have our manager hat, and we have our leader hat, and they’re all important. And we shouldn’t sacrifice the leader hat for the clinical sometimes because it creates more problems down the line.

Bethany Fishbein: So you’ve hit four here, we’ve got needing to be loved, belonging, feeling important, growth and improvement.

Gavin Rebello: So the next one, everyone wants to believe in something. Now, for some of us, that might be spiritual, but at workplace, it could be its purpose, it gives life meaning. So we need to believe now, this is really interesting. Sometimes in the business of busy in practice, we think our role is to examine eyes, and make sure they’re healthy. And if you’re doing optical as well to frame style and provide fantastic spectacles, but actually, we do more than that, we do more than that. And, you know, as optometrists, we know this, but I just wonder whether all of the team knows this, you see, what we do is we help the elderly stay independent. If they see well, they can continue to drive, which means they can maintain their independence, which means they’re not a burden on the family. If we help children focus better, and their eyes are better coordinated from a binocular vision point of view, then their eyes are less likely to get tired in the exam. Therefore, they can concentrate better. Therefore, they can probably do better in their exams. Therefore, they can reach their potential from a career perspective. We change lives. An office worker on screen all day. Well, again, if their vision is absolutely corrected perfectly, they’re less likely to make mistakes, they’re more likely to do well, they’re more likely to get their work done better, they’re more likely to be lined up for career prospects, which means they can look after their family better. We change lives. Now, as optometrists, we know this. I just wonder whether that higher purpose of what we do, that effect that we have on the public is distilled down to the team. Because soon as the team understands what they really do, what their contribution is, that’s absolutely a higher purpose, there’s meaning in their job, much more meaning than perhaps in many, many other jobs that they could get.

Bethany Fishbein: That’s a huge one. Because one of the things that tends to happen is as optometrists, we know this, and we’re constantly reminded of it, because we’re hearing those stories in the exam room all day long. You know, wow, thanks, Doc, last year, you noticed something and I went to my doctor and they diagnosed me with this and got me treatment before it led to a problem. Thank you so much. With my glasses, I can do better in school. I think that optometrists in general are really bad at then going out and sharing those stories. And I’m thinking now about my own practice. My partner does a lot of myopia management. And he has blocks of day where it’s just devoted to myopia. So the technicians that work with him during those times are hearing all of these stories and seeing the results and getting to know the patients long term, like they’re in there with him. And so all of them come out with this passion for myopia management, because that’s the thing they’re seeing make a difference. But that’s because their role in the office puts them in that direct proximity, where the person who made that appointment and collects the payments on the way out doesn’t know any of that unless we make the effort to tell them. That’s important.

Gavin Rebello: Absolutely. It’s a great thing to share in a team meeting and team huddle, the success stories, but for the whole of the team to feel like they’ve paid their part in that. And the person booking that appointment has had a massive role in that. They booked the appointment; they booked the right amount of time for that person to have the right amount of time with the optometrist to get all of the things done. They’ve had a huge role in that. And that sense of belonging, the company I work for changes people’s lives. That’s a great story about a job. And again, the other sense of purpose is we can build confidence or we can sap confidence in the frames that we encourage people to wear. So rather than approaching the frames just from a technical, optical, I can see better, we can think about actually this frame will help them feel younger. Who doesn’t want to feel younger? We know the impact of the right hairstyle or the wrong hairstyle. You go to a new hairdresser and it’s all gone wrong. How does that make us feel? And yet we look at the frames, we talk about the number of handbags or the number of shoes that people buy, and yet they still only buy one pair of spectacles. And when I’m having a conversation with them, I never look at their shoes. I look at their eyes. I’m making eye contact. And what’s framing their eyes is their spectacles. So we have a huge role in people’s confidence. We have a huge role in people’s lives. We have a huge role in independence. It’s a great story for the whole of the team to remember rather than just the clinical teams. Another psychological driver is we all need a place of our own, just simply a place, a place where we feel comfortable because it brings us stability. You know, a simple thing I’ve done with my optometrists is they’re in there for a few hours a day. I just say to them, how would you like your room decorated? Because it’s normally clinical white. Some of them keep them as clinical white. That’s how they like it. And some of them will pick some wallpaper and I’ll go, fine, let’s put some wallpaper up. I actually prefer a more softer feel to the practice. I think a lot of patients come in really nervous, apprehensive, and they walk into this sort of quite stark clinical room with all of these quite scary pieces of equipment. I want patients to relax a little bit. I think you get more, you get a better result if they’re a little bit more relaxed than if they’re really stressed. People don’t perform well when they’re stressed or nervous or worried. And again, I recognize that the optometrist is there all day. So I’ll encourage them to decorate the room within reason, of course. If they want to put photographs up, remind them of good things. I’m happy with that as well to make it more personal. Again, I want the patient to sort of connect with the optometrist. I don’t want them just to see them as an optometrist. I want them to see them as their optometrist.

Bethany Fishbein: I mean, it goes two things. It gives the optometrist a connection to their space. So, it’s somewhere where they like to be. And it absolutely does foster that connection and conversation because I see it all the time when I’m observing in an office. If they have a picture of themselves on a ski mountain in Utah, inevitably, someone will say, oh, do you like skiing? Do you like hockey? Is that your family? It’s just natural. And especially for a more introverted optometrist who might not be comfortable just starting that conversation, having some of those things is like props that somebody has to ask about. Maybe he will or won’t be embarrassed that I’m telling this story, but my partner Tobin was shy and introverted when he first started working with us as a technician 10 years ago. And so to try and help that, what we did was we took his name tag and we put his name and then under it we put pre-optometry student. And what it did was it made many of the patients say, oh, you’re a student. And it was just them now starting the conversation and that built connection. There are still patients now who remember him. He was their favorite technician. And now they come back and see him as the optometrist. So it works.

Gavin Rebello: One of the things when I took on one of my practices, my office was in the same room as the staff room. So if they’re having lunch and I’m on a I’m on an important call, they’re having to sit there in silence. They can’t relax. So one of the first things I did is I moved my office and I created a space where they could just relax and take time out from the business of the day and they can have a conversation if they want to have a conversation. They don’t have to just be quiet because I’m on the phone. And it was better for me as well because I could just work more freely in my office. So it was just about thinking about the structure of the practice.

Bethany Fishbein: How can you do it when you’re in a situation where you don’t have room for each staff member to have their own space? Because I see that even in my practice, there’s kind of the those who have desks and those who don’t. And not everybody needs a private space. How do you do that?

Gavin Rebello: Well, I mean, the UK is really tight on space, as you know, I’ve got some very small practices. I’m pretty sure the entire practice will fit in some of your consulting rooms. They’re so tiny. It’s a little bit of a challenge. These ones are very small community practices. They’re part time practices. So we actually close for lunch. It actually works better for everybody to be off at the same time. So there’s that downtime there. It’s not ideal. That’s the compromise we make. But it gives the team that space to be able to just go, right, calm, reset, set up for the afternoon. I also when I refit the practice in those sort of situations when I can’t carve out some real sort of space, they have inputs in the refit, you know, the colour, where we’re going with it, some choices, some ownership. It’s their practice. It’s risky, because you might have everyone saying completely different things. And you’ve got, you know, you’ve got your values of your practice, and you’ve got your corporate colours, your colours that you want to stick with. So often we’ll go, okay, I’ve got a choice of two, which of these two do you prefer? What are your thoughts on that one? That’s another way that can sometimes work. You’ve got to know your team on that one, be able to do that.

Bethany Fishbein: I think It could be as simple as clothing. During COVID, everybody was wearing scrubs. And then finally, I think it was our optical team came and said, like, can we wear clothes? Sure. Like, why? I’m just asking. And it was, you know, we want to feel comfortable, we want to show our own identities, we want to be able to show our own unique sense of fashion. Easy, right? Of course you can!

Gavin Rebello: Absolutely. And that’s that part of that feeling important, because you listened, you heard, you thought, well, yeah, that can that can work. There’s no negatives to that, really, in your practice. So that hearing them, being able to act on it is really important. I’ll took on one practice, and the owners were keen to retire, but they just took them a long time to actually finally retire. So that, you know, when often some owners, they take their foot off the gas, as they come up to retirement. So my first meeting with them was okay, you’ve all got a lot of experience here. I’m new, I’m the newest here, you’ve got a lot of experience. So what sort of practice do you want to be? And what are your frustrations? At the moment? What’s getting in the way for you to be the practice that you want to be? And I just wrote up all the frustrations on a whiteboard. And I tackled the easy ones first. And I left them all up on the whiteboard. But I just crossed off each one as I tackle them. And I was a new leader to them, I needed to build confidence, I needed to win trust.

My motivation was actually this was a great team, and I wanted them to be their best as well. So I called it the frustration board, and we left it up and I tackled them off. Luckily for me, all of their frustrations were the things that I wanted to improve anyway. But there were some things there that they knew the practice better than I did, because I was new in, there were some things on there that I truly wouldn’t have thought about. As a leader, I didn’t know some of their roles, the phones weren’t working. So we prioritise changing the phones, because then if the phones are working better, we’ll take more calls, we’ll get more appointments, we won’t lose patients. So it’s all common sense stuff. And your team, they want the practice to run better, and they see the glitches. And one of the other things I’ve done is I’ve forced myself to be front of house. It’s the scariest thing an optometrist can do, because it’s so hard, it’s all the multitasking. And I realized how inefficient the systems were, how many things the front of house team were putting up with, but not complaining, they would just get on with it. So there were some real simple improvements that we could put in place like a contact lens price, easy to find rather than having to pull out all the drawers and it’s all on different pieces of paper or different spreadsheets.

So, you know, simplify that to make life a little bit easier. So yeah, a place of their own, really, really important. Then this one’s a little bit strange. A degree of certainty and uncertainty. We sound a little bit contradictory, but we want some certainty, we want to know that we’re coming into work, we’ve got a certain number of patients, it’s a safe environment to work in. But if everything is certain, if everything is predictable, we can feel bored, brings on apathy, or we can feel trapped and hemmed in. And so there’s no freedoms. We want a little bit of uncertainty, because that’s the fun of life, the uncertainty, fun and interest. If we have too much uncertainty, of course, that’s too stressful. What mood is the boss going to be in? Are they going to be smiley? Or are they going to be really sort of fiery? No, we don’t want that sort of uncertainty. We want a bit of stability from that perspective. So a degree of certainty and a degree of uncertainty, a Goldilocks amount. And that’s the challenge for the leader. Not too much, not too little, just the right amount. That’s the challenge for the leader. And each team member will, you know, you’ll have some people that want things much more mapped out than others. If you decided to organise a college reunion for all of your university colleagues, and you sent out an email, an invitation, you know, that you’ll get an email straight back from one or two going, what’s the venue? What’s the time? What’s the dress code? Who’s going? What’s the menu? Is this, is there this option? Is that option? What time are we meeting? And there’ll be a million questions because they’re planners, they need to know everything is certain. And then we get a couple of other ripplers, you won’t even hear from them until the day before. You don’t know whether they’re coming or not coming because they’re sort of pretty easy going. We all have our comfort zone that we like to sit in. And some of us our comfort zones got pretty big. And some of us our comfort zones are pretty small. Some people like getting out of their comfort zone, they’re used to getting out of their comfort zone, and others aren’t. So we’ve really got to kind of test the water with the team. But we can’t make it too predictable. Otherwise, it can be a little bit boring. We want degree of certainty and uncertainty.

Bethany Fishbein: As always, Gavin, conversation with you leaves me with a spinning head, a list of things to think about makes me think about some things differently, more I want to share. And I hope that you will absolutely come back and do another episode with me sooner rather than later. This conversation today led to could lead to any number of additional topics. So for now, if someone wants to hear more of you, or get in touch with you, how do they find you?

Gavin Rebello: Well, I’m mostly based in the UK at the moment. I’m hoping to come over to see you guys and hook up with you guys in the near future at one of your conferences. I love coming over to the last one. It was fantastic. I haven’t even got a website at the moment because my big focus is getting my eight practices and mentoring my co-directors to get those practices reaching their best, getting their teams to reach their best. And then watch this space. I will be offering out more workshops, more mentoring. And when I’m there, Bethany, I’ll give you a shout.

Bethany Fishbein: Thank you. And more information on what Power Practice can do to help you have the practice of your dreams, whether that’s more money, more free time, stronger leadership, or whatever motivates you, you can find us at powerpractice.com. Thank you so much.

Gavin Rebello: Thanks, Bethany.