The EntreMD Podcast

The Real Reason Your Team Is Underperforming (And How to Fix It)

• Dr. Una • Episode 476

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I’ve seen it happen over and over again—brilliant doctors building businesses that hit six, seven, even multiple seven figures… only to start slowing down, pulling back, and sabotaging their own growth.

Why? Because they believe that growing their team means growing their problems.

If you want to increase the impact in your business massively, and do it in less time while creating freedom for yourself, the secret isn’t working harder. It’s building a rockstar team. But I get it: team building can feel like one of the most painful parts of entrepreneurship when you don’t know how to do it.

In this episode, I’m sharing exactly how to create a high-performing team without the burnout, frustration, and loss of profit. You’ll learn the five reasons your team might be underperforming, how to start leading like a true CEO, and how your next level of success is one leadership shift away.

This is the path to building a business you love—and living the life you’ve been dreaming of. 

Tune in!

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Key Takeaways:

  • 00:00 Intro 
  • 01:31 The benefits of having a rockstar team
  • 03:21 Symptoms of an underperforming team 
  • 05:27 Your responsibility as a leader
  • 06:18 Hiring for help, not results
  • 09:31 Having no clue what the vision is
  • 12:30 The leader is not willing to lead
  • 14:52 Having no systems 
  • 15:58 Not holding people accountable 
  • 18:54 What I want you to do 
  • 21:38 The cheapest and fastest way to solve this problem 
  • 24:21 Outro 

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Additional Resources:


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To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

You want to train, you want to coach, you want to onboard, you want to have those weekly meetings, you want to do all of those things. Otherwise, you're not going to have a rockstar team. Rockstar teams are built. Rockstar teams are created Rockstar teams. Do not come from the street and become rockstar teams, hi docs.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Imna. If you want to massively increase the impact in your business and you want to do it in less time, not more time you want to do this while creating freedom for yourself. The secret is a rockstar team, but one of the things that would be most painful about your journey as an entrepreneur is building a rockstar team, especially when you don't understand how to do it. I have seen people who have built practices or built businesses taking them to multiple, six figures, seven figures, multiple, seven figures and they got to a point where they started sabotaging their own growth because they knew that growth will mean more team members and, based on their experience, more team members meant more pain, less profits, more frustration, more burnout and I want to show you how to build a team without having to do that. And so you may have a team and you're like you know, my team is not performing, and all of that. You're going to find out why, you're going to find out how to fix that. And just to put this in front of you, in my own life and with the businesses, the companies that I run, I will tell you that the more companies I have, the less physical work I need to do. Right, like it built in such a way that for every team, every company, there's an arrowhead, there's somebody who's manning the project, there are people who understand the vision, there are people who are leveraging all of their creativity.

Speaker 1:

In fact, we just had Entremity Live and my job was the transformational content. I really didn't have to do anything else. I set the vision. This is what I want it to be like, these are the outcomes I want us to get, and then this is my role. I was very clear on my role, what I, and only I, could do, and the team really did take care of the rest and is because of this kind of team, and so I'm going to show you those things, and also with my clients, with the doctors in the Entree MD Business School, I've seen people go from you know, I don't know how to lead a team I'm so scared of doing meetings and all of these things to being people who have built teams.

Speaker 1:

Where I'm, I kid you not, they have significant family events happen and they send a text and they're like team, I will not be there for the next two weeks, take care of it. Can you send your team a text like that and they take care of it? Do they even know what taking care of it means? Right, yeah, and they've been gone and the people took care of what they needed to take care of and all of those things where people are brought team members on and they brought their weights, leading to exponential growth, like growth that the founder could not have created because their team members are unlocked and all that stuff. So this is something that is very possible, is very possible in your business and it will give you a version of your business you will love. And if you don't learn to do this, then as you grow it becomes more and more painful and you become like some of the people I was talking about who sabotage, and I don't want that to be, okay. Okay, so let's first of all talk about some symptoms of you know, an underperforming team, like how do I know my, my, my team is underperforming? Okay, if you find yourself micromanaging right, like you have to spell out every single thing and you have to follow up on every single step, and all of those kinds of things that your team is, your team has not performing.

Speaker 1:

If you find yourself redoing work, or, worse still, I've seen this and, oh my goodness, if you do it, you must stop immediately. It's not just that the work is being redone, it's that they're like oh my goodness, this person is not pulling their weight, so let me go hire another person to do what they should be doing. So not only is this person not pulling their weight, you're paying twice as much for one role. Okay, dr Eynn, don't get excited. Come back here.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so redoing the work when you find you cannot go on vacation. You cannot leave the building, you cannot leave the business, you cannot not be there, you cannot not check everything, you cannot go on vacation, or maybe you can go on quote, unquote, right Vacation. But if you go, everything falls apart and you have to work from wherever you are, or you find your team celebrating things that make you cry. So, for instance, if your schedule is light and your team is celebrating, you're a private practice owner, your schedule is light and your team is celebrating, they're not performing. They have no clue why they're there when they do not respect what you respect For instance, you understand the value of taking care of a customer and getting results and all of that stuff.

Speaker 1:

And when you have team members who are harsh to your customers and don't treat them right and do all of those things, they don't understand that's their paycheck. They think their paycheck comes from your 401k or some bank you have at the back of your house. They do not realize that money comes from taking care of customers and taking care of clients. We do this in a profitable way and we get paid. That's what happens, right? And so those are symptoms. Right, those are symptoms that your team is not performing. It's not performing, they're not proactive. They don't come with all of them to work. You know what I mean. And so the ones who are even in your company, who you consider high performers, are people who, if you tell them to do something, they do it. But what if you didn't tell them what to do, and they knew what to do. Like how magical would that be, right? So, anyway, so those are some symptoms. Okay, let's talk about what we do that creates that Right, and this is so important.

Speaker 1:

Guys, listen when I run audits for companies and they say you know our team, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Where I start looking from is from the leadership, it's not from the team, because, if you think about it, the leaders hire them, the leaders onboarded them, the leaders trained them, the leaders kept them. Like, this is a leadership thing. Now, could it be? There's something unfixable about the employee, of course, but it starts from leadership. And so, as a CEO, as a physician CEO, you want to take responsibility for your team. Your team is the way it is because of you, and this is not for you to judge and say, oh, that must mean I suck or anything. It's not that, because if it's you, then you can fix it. If it's not you, then there's nothing to be done, right, and it doesn't mean you're responsible for every single thing, but you are the leader. The buck stops with you. Let's look at why they're underperforming, and I'm going to give you five reasons here. And I don't want you to just listen to this and say this was interesting. As you listen to it, I want you to think about your business, and as you think about your business, I want you to think about what needs to change immediately, right, okay, all right.

Speaker 1:

So first is that you hired for help, not results. I did this a lot when I first started. Right, I just like, oh, my goodness, I'm so stressed, I hire somebody. Oh, my goodness, it's so busy. Oh, I just get an MA. Right. And because you do that, there are other things that are consequences of that. But because you do that, you cannot have rock stars. Rock stars don't function that way.

Speaker 1:

And so in the Entree into Business School, when we're talking about hiring, the starting point of a great hire is a great job description, and most people don't want to do this. You know what they want to do, what I did and what did I do? Google job description of an MA, okay, and I'll look at someone like, ooh, that's nice. And then I copy it and I paste it, and then I edit it and then that's my job description. The only problem is that company doesn't mirror my company. That company may have copied and pasted it from someone else. I have what I want. I have what I have pet peeves about. I have all of this stuff. And so when I hire the person based on that because I'm not clear what I want this person to do and the results I want them to create guess what I mean? Chances are you hire the wrong person, right? And so the starting point is deciding right, like even before the job description is what do I want this role to be responsible for?

Speaker 1:

And so let's say that you are a coach and you're bringing somebody in who is an assistant or a business manager of sorts or whatever, and you're like okay, well, I know that where I get most of my clients from is from them finding my, you know, from them listening to my podcast, and the people who listen to my podcast tend to find my podcast from other podcasts. As you're like, okay, one of the results of this person is that they are going to book me on four podcasts a month, right, do you see how? That's not a task, that's an outcome. Now, there are tasks they're going to need to do, right, they're going to create a database of all the podcasts that the person could be a guest on and they're going to pitch them and they're going to follow up and they're like there are all these things that they get to do, right, but this is the outcome For a practice administrator.

Speaker 1:

You may say one of their core results you want is that, you know, say you have four doctors, I want them seeing 20 patients a day. So you want to say, in this practice, every day, we see 80 patients, right. And again, you see how that's an outcome. It's not a task, right. And so now to do that, oh, the person is going to need to make sure the confirmations are done, they're going to need to hit the recaller and they're going to need to build relationships with referral sources and all these things that they need to do to pull off that outcome, right. And so you now need to start start thinking like we don't just want people to help, but like help us do the vitals. No, we want them to have results, like outcomes that they're responsible for, that they're owners of, right. And then, when you do that, then you have people that know what it is to win, and then they can try to win Right.

Speaker 1:

And so that's the first thing, and if you're not doing that, you want to take some time after this episode and sit with it and say, hey, what are the outcomes I want for this role? Think three, five or seven I like five and seven, but you know at least five like what are the outcomes for this role, this role, right, and stuff like that. Okay, that's the first, the first reason. The second reason is that they have no clue what the vision is. They have no clue what the vision is. They have no clue where this company is going. They have no clue on the impact it will have in the world. And because they're unclear on that, they just show up and they do whatever and they think their work is mundane and they think it's just a job and the worst kind of job is just a job, right.

Speaker 1:

And so I'll give you an example I have, like with my executive assistant, right, there could be a whole post, oh, my goodness. Like in the entrepreneur business school, there could be a whole post about somebody who is so great. They're. Like, you know, like two years ago when I joined the entrepreneur business school, you know I was joining it to grow my business and all of those things. It didn't occur to me that not only will I grow my business and grow my team and have more time off. But now I have more time off to be with my family and I just lost a family member and I had the freedom to be there for them and freedom to be there as they walk through all of that. And I've had the freedom to go on these vacations. I've had the time to focus on my health. I've lost X number of pounds, I've been able to work out consistently for X amount of time and I've acquired a whole network of friends that are like really family that I never knew I needed and stuff.

Speaker 1:

Like you know, people post things like that and so I would take that, like you know, copy the link and stuff. Nobody outside the group can see it, and I'd send it to my EA. I said, go read this post, see it. And I sent it to my EA. I said go read this post. And they go read it. They're like, oh my goodness and all of that, and I'm like that's the work you do.

Speaker 1:

I know sometimes you think you're booking me on podcasts. I know sometimes you think you're handling my email. I know sometimes that's what you think you're doing, but I need you to understand the impact of your work. You are changing these doctors' lives, and these doctors are the vision boards for the rest of the physician community, and so when people see examples of their lives, they're changed too. And so I'm telling my executive assistant like the ripple effect of your life probably can't be measured on this side of eternity, what is that? That's part of vision casting, and so it's not just work and it's not mundane, and it's not just doing tasks. It's like I'm changing the world, and so it's not just work and it's not mundane, and it's not just doing tasks. It's like I'm changing the world.

Speaker 1:

And so you want to cast vision. Where are we going? What are we doing? What change are we trying to make in the world? Why does our work matter? Right, and things like that? You want to do that, and many times we shy away from that because we're like I don't want to impose my vision on somebody else or I don't want to feel like I'm controlling. Sometimes it's that. Some other times it's flat out like why would anybody believe this? Right, you may never have uttered your vision because you think it's silly or foolish or not like somebody else's. And I'm telling you you're a CEO and your business is important, and what you do in the world is a requirement for us to get, whatever result it is that your business creates. And so I want to invite you to own that vision and start taking steps, Even if it starts with the results it's already created. Like. Start from that, and so your team can see they're part of something big and great and amazing. Okay, okay. So that's the second thing.

Speaker 1:

The third reason why teams are not performing is that the leader is not willing to lead. The leader is not willing to lead, and how do you know? You're not willing to lead. You're not willing to cast vision, you're not willing to hold meetings, you're not willing to. I mean, like, when it comes to working with your people, you're like I shouldn't need to do that, they should know this already. It doesn't take all that. Maybe you're mad because they can't read your mind. You haven't equipped them to win. You haven't told them how to win. You barely even onboarded them. You just show them like this is how you get into the building, this is how you log into your account, but nothing. And so if you don't show people how to win and train them to win, they can't win. They just cannot win. They cannot win Right, and again, is that starting point of leadership? And so you want to ask yourself like am I having weekly meetings with my team and if you have a really large team, it may not be your entire team, but at least it will be your direct reports, right, but am I having weekly meetings with them? Am I checking in with them? This is the one that it took me a while to get Like are you coaching them? Because I'm like if they can't deal with it, that's their problems. They're human For me.

Speaker 1:

I may have people in my company and everybody in my company sells. You're not going to work here if you're not going to sell. That's just not going to happen. And so I know people have stuff around that and I have to coach them through it. I have to coach them through it. There may be people who maybe they're scared of certain demographics, of your patients and stuff like that. You have to coach them through it. You have a front desk person who's terrified of asking people for money and holding them accountable. You're going to coach them through it because you're the business owner and you don't want to collect the money. So what do you think about the person who's your front desk. They don't want to collect it either, and so you want to train and you want to train and you want to train. These are the things you want to have.

Speaker 1:

A rockstar team Rockstar teams are built. Rockstar teams are created. Rockstar teams do not come from the streets and become rockstar teams. Think about the NBA, for instance. You can get as many rockstar players as you want and put them on a team, but they're not going to come on as a championship team. They're going to become a championship team as you bring them in and you build culture and you build a connection between them and you build the chemistry and all of that stuff. Otherwise, you can have a lot of stars and they'll never have a championship like ever, and that's the reason why.

Speaker 1:

Right, okay, so you got to be willing to lead. All right, number four. Number four is no systems. We bring the team in, which is one part of it, but we don't have the processes. So we're just like, yeah, go do this, but we haven't defined what that is. So it's time for you to start looking into SOPs, standard operating procedures. How do we get things done? How do we check somebody in? How do we collect co-pays? How do we send out statements for outstanding balances? How do we pitch podcasts? How do we respond to this kind of email? Like there is a way and you say we just do it, it's common sense. No, it's not Like you already have a system. The system just needs to be documented so your people can execute using the system. Right. And you might go like, oh my goodness, then it's a thousand things I need to do. Start from somewhere. Start with the thing that comes up the most or the thing that has the highest opportunity cost and start training people from there. Start documenting your systems and there's ways, right, you can train people and have it recorded and they create the system. You can do that too, but you need to direct that right. Like that needs to be happening in some kind of way. So, whether you're there or not, you kind of have a feel for how things are happening. Otherwise, you don't know right, you don't know, okay.

Speaker 1:

And the fifth thing, which was one of mine as well, which is you hate holding people accountable. Rather than fire somebody or hold the person accountable and put them on a performance improvement plan or things like that, you just hire someone else to do what they should have done. This comes up all the time, where doctors say Dr Una, you know this is happening, that's happening and I'm like okay, so what is this person's? What are their key result areas? What are we going to do about this? They're like you know what? I think I'll just hire somebody else to do that. I just hire somebody else to do that. Okay, let me tell you the thing.

Speaker 1:

There's some people who do not like being held accountable, and those are your underperformers. They don't like being held accountable. You have other types of team, but if you change this, you can win. Here too. They want to win. They don't want to just be there, they want to win. And so if you build an environment with a lack of accountability, what will end up happening is your high performers will leave and your poor performers will stay, and they will love it and they will poorly perform the entire time that they're there. It is called a disaster. That's what that's called.

Speaker 1:

And so if you truly want to have this team that is a rockstar team, is a team of champions, then you want to start holding your people accountable. And this is pretty simple, right, like, if you define okay, for my practice manager. These are the five result areas. Then what that means is when you have meetings, those meetings are based on the five result areas. So in these areas we're meeting our targets, in these areas we're not. And where do you think you're having a roadblock? What can we fix? What can we shift? And once you shift those, then you can start winning there.

Speaker 1:

They want to know. They want to know where you think they're doing it well. They want to know where you think they're not doing it well. They want to know what your ideas are for improving. They want to do the work to improve. If you do not build that culture, they will not stay.

Speaker 1:

There's a doctor that was in the entrepreneurial business school. I talked to her many times about an underperformer. I'm like you need to get this person off your team because they're destroying your team and they're so much more expensive than you think they are. And so finally, she summoned the courage to de-hire this person, and the day she fired her best performing team member best performing was like oh my goodness. I'm glad you did this, because I had just decided that if this person is still going to be here, that I'm not going to be here. So she would have kept the underperformer and her best performing person would have left because of the underperformer.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so that is called sanctioned incompetence. That means you approve of incompetence. That means you're deciding the culture of your business is incompetence and high capacity. People will not stay. They just cannot stay, because what that means is work hard or not, you're all treated the same. Excel or not, you're treated the same. Bring your creativity to work or not, you're treated the same. They're not going to stay, just like you wouldn't stay in an environment like that, right, okay. What do you want to do in an environment like that? Right, okay, what do you want to do? You want to start having meetings based on key result areas. Where are we? What are we doing? Are we hitting it? If they're not hitting it, that's an opportunity to coach them. And then the next week you come back. You see where we are. That's it. That's how it goes. That's how it goes. So what do I want you to start working on this stuff right now. Pick something in each of these where you find that you have a deficiency and then just go for it. Just go for it.

Speaker 1:

Don't believe the narrative like oh, my goodness, I'm not the CEO who can do this. Of course, there was a time you were not the person who could do IVs. You were not the person who could do intubations. You were not the person who could replace knees and stuff like that. You were not the person who could hit a hundred thousand in revenue. You're not the person who could hit seven figures in revenue. You have become all of these things, all of the things that you are now. At one point in time, you were not Okay, so you may not be the team leader who's doing this, and so you have an underperforming team. But guess what? If you start doing this and start tweaking and tweaking and tweaking, guess what you're going to have in the next 90 days a different team, a different you and a different team. So no time like the present.

Speaker 1:

Okay, but before we do that, I want to kind of pull out a calculator here, because I need you to get a good feel. A good feel for what this is right, like the opportunity cost of not doing this. So let's use a practice manager, for instance. Okay, let's say you have a practice manager and you know this person is. You know you're paying them, you're paying them pretty well, and all of that stuff and your practice is at $750,000. And if you manage them to the metrics, if you manage them to the results, if you cast vision, if you equipped them, if you decided to coach them, if you decided to do all the things, if you did that over the course of 12 months, they could take your practice to a million.

Speaker 1:

Okay, let's just say, let's just say they could do that. Okay, and they can like, if you read the book the profitable private practice playbook and if you're a private practice owner you don't have the book, I need you to pause this and go order it and then come right back. And if you know anybody in private practice, I need you to get them a copy as a gift, make it up whatever holiday you want to use, and that's the profitable private practice playbook. So there are many ways to do this, okay. So let's say, this person could take you from 750,000 to a million. That means they can get you an extra $250,000 in revenue. Okay, I want you to think about that Now. If you let them the way I'm describing, that could lead to an extra $250,000.

Speaker 1:

If you lead them the way you're leading them now it's another year, maybe you do a little better and it's $800,000,000. What is the difference between $800,000 and a million dollars? It's $200,000. The opportunity cost of not shifting the way you're leading your team is $200,000. $200,000, multiple, six figures, so it's not just the person's salary.

Speaker 1:

Many times we compare the wrong numbers. Many times we compare the wrong numbers. The number you need to compare is a high capacity team versus a poorly performing team. What will be the difference in revenue? What will be the difference in impact? That's what you want to look at. That is a terrible number. So the question is do I want to keep throwing $200,000 down the drain or do I want to add this $200,000 to my business? Right, okay.

Speaker 1:

So if you're running a business I'm just going to stop here and say this real quick If you're running a business, especially if it's over $500,000 in revenue, and you found that the symptoms of an underperforming team are in your business, and when you look at why they're underperforming, you're like oh, my goodness, I do this stuff. Here's the deal. The cheapest and fastest way you can solve this problem is by bringing yourself into the EntreMD Business School. Now, like I said, the difference when you start leading that team could be $200,000. It could be $100,000. It could be $400,000. It could be any of those numbers. Here's the thing the EntreMD Business School, your investment is like $30,000. Because sometimes people will tell me the investment is high. I'm like, no, it's not high. The price of ignorance as an entrepreneur is high. That's what's high, right? And so if you compare 200,000 to 30,000, you pay the 30,000 all day, every day and twice on Sunday. Okay, so again, I'm just talking numbers, right, because we're talking numbers, I want you to think about that, and you will be in a community where one you'll see people who are doing this the way it needs to be done.

Speaker 1:

Two is that you get expert. You get access to world class mentorship on how to do this. Three is you get access to coaching on how to do this when you come for our live sessions and when you get to ask your specific questions, and all of that. Four is you get accountability. You get accountability sometimes even from just the students doing what they do, because you'll be challenged every day to continue to grow and to do the things you're scared of, because in the entrepreneur business school we do the things that we're scared of. And I could go on and on and on right. But what I would really love is for you to have a team that is very functional, a team that is very high performing, a team that is a rockstar team, because that is the pathway to massive impact in less time, not more time. This is how you get your time back. This is how you get freedom within your business. This is how you fall in love with your business.

Speaker 1:

I will always bring you back to the story of you know the doctor who talked about her business being burnt out and she just wanted to have a private equity firm come get it. And then she came into the Entremdi Business School and started working on it and in a few years she was down to two and a half days a week and her practice had grown so much that she had her first million dollar month. That's what happens when you build a team. That is exactly what happens when you build a team, regardless of if you come into the school or not. I've given you enough for you to take and to start working on and to start creating transformation in your business.

Speaker 1:

But when you think about, oh, I'm burnt out, I'm tired, our profits are dwindling, I feel like I'm the only one doing everything and I feel like if something needs to be done, right, I need to do it.

Speaker 1:

If you're feeling all of these things, this episode is the answer. So if you need to listen to it again, do it. If you need to sit with someone else on your team and work through it, but start creating these changes, because you, my friend, can build a business that is your dream business and build your dream life concurrently. And this is the pathway. I see it for you, I envision it for you. You know where. You love what you do, you're helping so many people, you're bringing in the revenue, you have the time freedom, you have the time to spend with your family and you love life. I know that has not been the experience for us in the physician community, but this is the experience that you would now have access to. So lean all the way in, get this done, share with another doctor in your world, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Entree and View podcast.