It’s an important distinction to know that you always have control. Obviously there are many things you can’t control. But no matter how bad things are you always ultimately have control of two things. Tony Robbins says “You are always in control of two things: 1. What you focus on 2. How you are going to respond.”
Things happen to you in life. You can’t control that. But you DO get to decide what those things mean and how you are going to respond.
Example. The council decides to dig up the street in front of your place of business and cause all kinds of disruption to your business. You get to decide what that means and what you are going to do next.
One practice owner decides that it’s not fair and he is a helpless victim. And his reaction is to spend all his time complaining about it to anyone who’ll listen. He’ll lower his expectations for his business and expect to do poorly. He’ll use it as his excuse for everything.
Another practice owner has the exact same thing happen, but decides that it is a challenge. He sees it as an opportunity to strengthen his business. He focuses on ALL the things he can do better. So that when the challenge passes and things go back to normal, he’ll have a better business because of it.
One of the key values to teach your team is responsibility. To have responsibility is to have control. I want my team to always remember they have responsibility. I explain carefully to them what this really means.
Responsibility means they have ‘the ability to respond.’ So no matter what happens in the practice with a supplier or with a customer, no matter what the problem, they know that they always have responsibility. They can respond. They can do something to make the situation better.
This is very different to how most employees think. Most automatically think: “That’s not my job / that’s not my problem / that’s not my fault / there is nothing I can do / someone else can do it / I tried and they said no / I’ll tell the boss I don’t know what to do and get him to handle it”.
When you have responsibility as a core value, it trains them to think:
“What can I do about this?”
And they can always do something. So if your team constantly bring you every problem that turns up, or if you personally have to get involved in every customer issue to come to your team’s rescue, it is because of responsibility. They think you have responsibility and they don’t. You have the ability to respond and they don’t. It’s time to talk more clearly about responsibility with your team.