“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
R. Buckminster Fuller, Designer, Inventor, Futurist
Let me re-direct your attention to the Buckminster Fuller quote above. This is an important distinction to make. I always get questions about my team at Jones And Co., asking how I can get my team to DO that? How can I get them to do all this stuff and seemingly embrace it? Where does their passion come from? I also hear a lot of ‘my staff won’t do that’ and “if I only had staff like yours”…
Here’s the thing. I’m no Tony Robbins (Look him up if you don’t know the name). I’m not some motivational guru that can whip my team into a state of excitement and have them raring to go after I deliver the perfect words to stir their minds and hearts. That’s not me.
And it’s probably not you. But you don’t need to worry about that.
Motivation, while important, wears off. It doesn’t last. What I’ve found to be more effective at inspiring the troops long-term is results. When you crack this, it becomes part of your practice’s culture. So, you don’t need to deliver the rousing speeches. You just need to point at the results.
Results are what motivate my team. I don’t try to persuade them of anything beyond open-mindedness. Even a smidgen of open-mindedness in the beginning is enough. You just need to get them to open that door just a crack. The important conversation you need to have with your team is a pretty simple one. It goes like this:
“Here’s the deal. We want to grow the practice and make it better for you, for me and for our clients. If we keep doing the same things we’ve always done then nothing will change. So we are going to try some new things. They work in other practices. I think they will work for us. But let’s test it out and see for ourselves. Here’s the first thing I want to try. Let’s do this for a month and see what happens. Let’s talk about it each week and you can fill me in on how it’s working, any successes, any obstacles. Let’s test it.”
That’s as motivational as you need to be. Then, you give them the tool or the strategy and let the RESULTS convince them. This is exactly why I recommend the strategies I do for getting started with Optical Success Academy and getting your team on board. Use my Price Guide Tool for dispensing and let the first effortless upgrade, where the patient spends £150 more than normal, do the convincing. Buy a coffee machine, nice tea, and fancy teacups and saucers and design a little tea ceremony. Let the first patient’s praise and unexpected delight convince them that this is worth doing. Take the lowest-priced frames off display and then point it out to them when the average dispense magically increases in a matter of weeks. Let THAT convince them.
This is what Buckminster Fuller is talking about. Put a strategy in place or a tool in place that when they do it they will see a new result. That is what changes their thinking. That is where it all begins.