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[00:00:00] Picture this, um, you’re standing at the back of this beautiful, totally packed church, okay. Setting the scene, right? And you’re a groomsman in a wedding, and the coordinator just hands you this massive, like, incredibly heavy roll of white fabric. Oh boy. Yeah. Your single job is to roll out the runner for the bride.
So the coordinator gives you, you know, this rapid fire set of instructions turns on her heel and just vanishes into the crowd. Leaving you completely stranded. Exactly. You look across the aisle at the other groomsmen holding the opposite end of the roll. And, uh, reality sets in because you have the tools.
I mean, you have the role, but the actual coordination is just completely missing, right? You’re just standing there holding a heavy piece of fabric while hundreds of people wait for something to happen. The thought running through your head is like, how come we’re so smart and none of us have any idea what we’re actually supposed to do, or you know when we’re supposed to do it?
It’s the worst feeling. It really is. Well, welcome to the Chiropractic Deep Dive. This is a special [00:01:00] segment of the Successful Chiro Podcast, brought to you by Five Star Management. We are so glad you’re joining us. Absolutely. And as a proud part of the Five Star team, I can tell you we see this exact wedding runner scenario playing out in clinics across the country.
Every single day. Oh, without a doubt. So we’re addressing you directly today, whether you’re the chiropractor, the clinic director, or the owner. You have an intelligent, capable team, but without the right guidance. They’re lost. Exactly. Half of them are sitting at the billing desk or the front counter wondering if what they are doing actually matters.
They’re completely disconnected from the mission and vision of the practice. Yeah. And it creates this massive execution gap. Hmm. I mean, the staff is holding the fabric of your practice, but the procession is just falling apart. It’s a disaster. It is. That story about the wedding runner actually comes directly from our source material today.
It’s from an incredibly detailed Zoom masterclass led by Dr. Noel Lloyd. Oh, that’s right. Titled the Best Darn [00:02:00] Office Meeting ever, wasn’t it? You got it. He was that groomsman. And he uses that deeply uncomfortable moment to illustrate, you know, a profound failure in how clinics communicate because he kind of flips the traditional narrative on its head, right?
Yeah. So often we hear clinic owners complain that meetings are just, uh, an administrative burden. Yeah. They hate him. They view pulling the team off the floor as a total distraction from revenue generating patient care. Mm-hmm. But Dr. Lloyd argues the exact opposite. He really does. He positions the weekly office meeting, not as some necessary evil, but as the single most powerful practice development tool a clinic possesses, which is such a paradigm shift.
Well, if we look at the psychology of practice management, the resistance to meetings usually stems from how poorly they’re executed. Oh, for sure. And this masterclass, one participant highlighted the pervasive culture of the, uh, crap hits the fan meeting, the panic meeting. Yes. It’s a highly reactive model.
The [00:03:00] clinic goes weeks without a formal sit down and the team’s only pulled into a room when, you know, schedules are imploding or collections are dropping, or somebody made a massive mistake. Exactly. And the participant pointed out that this inadvertently trains the staff to believe we only meet when we suck.
Wow. We only meet when we suck. Think about the neurological response to that. It’s pure stress, right? The moment the clinic director announces a 2:00 PM team huddle, the collective cortisol levels in the office just spike. They think they’re in trouble. Yeah. The staff immediately assumes they’re walking into an ambush instead of a proactive strategy session.
The meeting becomes this exercise in defense and survival, and that defensive posture completely shuts down any creative problem solving. You just can’t innovate when you’re terrified. No, you definitely can’t. Plus, when you only meet in a state of crisis, the meetings themselves lack structure. Another participant described these as loosey goosey gatherings.
Loose goosey. I love that term [00:04:00] because there’s no established rhythm or agenda, right? The team sits down to fix a specific bottleneck, let’s say, uh, an issue with the phone scripts, okay? Pretty standard issue, but the conversation immediately derails. The lack of a container means 20 minutes are burned, discussing irrelevant office drama, or like everyone’s after work plans, which leaves you with maybe 10 panicked minutes to actually discuss the phone script.
Exactly. Nothing gets resolved. The scripts remain broken, and the team leaves feeling like they just wasted an hour of their lives. It’s exhausting for everyone. You know, it strikes me that running a clinic this way is entirely contradictory to the philosophy of chiropractic care itself. Oh, how so? Well, operating purely on a crap hits the fan meeting schedule is exactly like a patient who refuses to maintain their spinal health and only limps into your office when they physically cannot walk.
Oh, wow. That is a perfect parallel, right? It’s entirely symptom-based management. You are [00:05:00] applying symptom-based management to your leadership. And just as you educate your patients that symptom-based care is exhausting and painful and ultimately more expensive. The exact same thing applies to running a business yes, without maintenance, which is what a consistent structured meeting provides.
You are guaranteed to hit a crisis. So how do we fix it? If crisis meetings are the problem. Mm-hmm. What’s Dr. Lloyd’s solution to making these actually useful? Breaking this cycle requires a fundamental shift in how the agenda is built. It requires a ruthless filtration system, so the team actually trusts that the meeting will be valuable and Dr.
Lloyd provides that filtration system, right? Yeah. Through a concept shared by one of the participants, he does before any topic is allowed to you know, consume oxygen in the weekly meeting. It has to pass a rigid three part test. Okay? What’s the test? Does it help the patient experience? Does it help the team, or does it make us money?
I love that. So simple, right? If it doesn’t directly move the needle on at least one of those [00:06:00] three pillars, it does not make the agenda. Period. That filter is vital because it protects the clinic director from turning the meeting into just a giant grievance session. Oh, definitely. Because Dr. Lloyd has a strict rule about this, right?
The office meeting is not a space for unstructured complaining. No venting in a group setting, often masquerades as problem solving, but psychologically it just reinforces a culture of helplessness. It really drags the energy of the room down. It does. So instead of complaining, Dr. Lloyd structures the meeting around three specific functions.
Calculating commending and clarifying. I really wanna dig deep into that commending function. Let’s do it because we all understand the basic management concept of, you know, praising your team, but the masterclass went far beyond just generic pats on the back. Yeah. It focused on what actually fuels a chiropractic team on a neurological level.
One participant shared how critical it is for the front desk and billing staff to hear [00:07:00] specific patient testimonies during these meetings, which makes so much sense if we examine the daily reality of a billing specialist or a front desk ca. Their environment is highly transactional, very much so.
They’re staring at software screens, they’re battling insurance companies over denied claims, managing a ringing phone, just constant putting out fires. Exactly. Over time, that cognitive load creates a disconnect. The staff member loses sight of the human being behind all that paperwork. The paperwork just becomes a barrier to them going home at 5:00 PM Right?
But when the clinic director pauses the meeting and says, Hey, I wanna share a testimony about Sarah a month ago, she couldn’t lift her toddler without debilitating pain today because of the care she received here. She’s back to playing with her kids. It changes everything. It really does. You are taking that billing specialist’s mundane data entry, and attaching it directly to a life-altering outcome.
You’re answering that fundamental human question, does [00:08:00] my work actually matter? You’re creating a direct line of sight between their administrative task and the patients restored health. That is the absolute highest form of engagement fuel. Absolutely. And what’s fascinating about Dr. Lloyd’s approach to commending is that it doesn’t just apply to those massive life-changing miracles.
Right? The small stuff matters too. Exactly. The masterclass placed equal importance on celebrating micro wins. Like there was a moment where a participant talked about the profound relief of finally boxing up and shipping out old obsolete phone and internet equipment. Oh man. The clutter. Just getting that out of the office, right.
Stuff that had just been sitting there, most leaders would look at that and think, well, um, that’s just part of the job. Why do we need to talk about it? Yeah. And they’d brush it off. But if you have ever been the person responsible for managing a messy telecom transition while also trying to handle a waiting room full of patients, you know, the deep soul level relief of finally getting those old routers out the door, it [00:09:00] is huge.
Taking two minutes in the meeting to acknowledge that invisible labor, it validates the staff member’s effort. It proves that leadership actually sees the friction they’re dealing with every day. The challenge, of course, is that the clinic director rarely sees that friction in real time because they’re in the back.
Exactly. This brings up the massive operational bottleneck in almost every chiropractic clinic. The doctors in the back, adjusting patients in a state of deep clinical focus. Yeah. Meanwhile, the front desk is managing the chaos of scheduling payments, patient flow. The two halves of the clinic are operating in completely different realities.
So how does a clinic director actually know what’s going wrong out at the front desk? Because the doctor can’t physically be in two places at once. Right? You need a system for that. How do they gather the information to commend the team or clarify issues without constantly breaking their clinical focus?
A participant shared a brilliant asynchronous communication tool to solve this exact [00:10:00] bottleneck. They use a daily checkout sheet. Okay. A checkout sheet, how does that work? It’s a physical or digital log that lives with the front desk staff throughout the day. As the doctor is busy treating patients, the staff documents specific challenges and wins right as they occur.
So like if the spinal scanner keeps glitching? Yes. Hmm. Or a patient presented a highly complex insurance question that stalled the intake process. The genius of that checkout sheet is that it acts as an isolation mechanism. Exactly, because normally the CA tries to catch the doctor in the hallway between adjustments and the doctor’s distracted, right?
The doctor gives a half answer and then gets frustrated later when the task is done wrong. But with the sheet, the problem is safely captured. It doesn’t fester, and it doesn’t interrupt patient care. That sheet then becomes the raw reality-based data used to build the weekly meeting agenda. It ensures the meeting is grounded in the actual operational reality of the clinic rather than whatever the doctor [00:11:00] assumes is happening.
But, and this is a big but for a tool like the checkout sheet to function, there has to be an underlying culture of psychological safety. Oh, for sure. The staff must feel secure documenting the ugly parts of the day. Dr. Lloyd conceptualizes this through a principle he calls diplomatic immunity.
Diplomatic immunity. That is, um. Probably one of the hardest things for a founder or an owner to genuinely implement. It takes a lot of vulnerability. It really does. It means looking your team in the eye and giving them explicit, ironclad permission to tell you what you need to hear, even if it directly challenges your own ideas.
Yeah. It’s the leader saying, you are safe to tell me that the new workflow I designed is actually causing a massive traffic jam in the waiting room. Implementing that requires profound emotional regulation from the clinic director. I mean, you cannot grant diplomatic immunity and then punish the ca who bravely tells you that your communication style felt rushed or [00:12:00] confusing, right?
If the leader gets defensive, the immunity is revoked instantly, and the team will immediately go back to hiding the clinic’s flaws. So assuming you have established that safety, the masterclass offered this incredible micro skill to ensure the communication loop is actually closed. Oh, this is such a great tool.
A team member shared a verbal formula. They used to prevent the classic execution gap because we’ve all experienced leaving a conversation thinking we are perfectly aligned only to realize days later, we were operating from completely different blueprints. Happens all the time. So this team member uses a technique called parroting or paring back instructions.
The cognitive mechanics of parroting are just brilliant. Human beings naturally filter instructions right through their own biases and assumptions. We can’t help it. We really can’t. Yeah. So to bypass that. The team member looks at the doctor and uses a specific script. They say, this is what I hear you say, and these are my action steps.
This is what I hear you say. I love that they then verbally reconstruct [00:13:00] the entire assignment back to the doctor like, you want me to audit these specific files, you wanna format it this way and you need it on your desk by Thursday at noon. Is that accurate? It forces absolute clarity in real time.
Yes, it does. The doctor is given the immediate opportunity to say, yes, that’s exactly the outcome I want. Or no, wait, we’re misaligned. Let me clarify. It eliminates that devastating frustration of a staff member spending three days on a project. Only to present it to the doctor and hear, why on earth did you do it like this?
Oh, the worst. It saves hundreds of hours of wasted payroll. It really does. Mm-hmm. But implementing these tools, diplomatic immunity, parroting open feedback, it can trigger friction when leadership styles clash. Okay. I have to push back here and play devil’s advocate on behalf of the staff listening. Go for it.
What happens when a clinic director’s ego gets in the way? Let’s say a staff member attempts to use diplomatic immunity to clarify a broken system, and the doctor simply crosses their arms and declares. Look, this [00:14:00] is my practice. My name is on the door, and I am going to do things the way I want to do them.
Yeah, a classic defensive response. How does a team navigate a leader who retreats into authoritarianism? It is a highly realistic scenario. Ego is the ultimate destroyer of clinical alignment. When Dr. Lloyd posed that exact hypothetical , a participant offered a masterful neutralizing response.
Oh, what did they say? If a doctor retreats to, it’s my practice. I do what I want. The team members should calmly and respectfully ask, do you want to continue in the direction the critic is going right now, or do you want to hit the goals we set? Oh, wow. That response is breathtaking because it entirely bypasses the emotional conflict.
Exactly. Doesn’t attack the doctor’s ego or their authority. It’s simply holds up a mirror to the math and the mission of the practice. Right. Do you wanna continue in the direction we’re going, or do you wanna hit the goals we set? It forces the leader to reconcile their desire for total control with their desire for growth.
It centers the entire [00:15:00] conversation back on the shared vision, which is exactly where a high functioning meeting should live. It’s brilliant, but you know, all of this profound philosophy, the filtering, the commending, the diplomatic immunity. It, it’s all useless if it isn’t placed inside a highly structured container, which is where we shift from theory to the actual blueprint Uhhuh, because as members of Five Star Management, we are obsessed with actionable frameworks.
We really are. You can have the best communication skills in the world, but if your meeting is an unstructured, sprawling 90 minute marathon, your team is still gonna hate it. They’ll dread it every week. So what is Dr. Lloyd’s exact formula for this meeting? Well, his master agenda is designed to prevent cognitive fatigue by capping the entire process at 20 to 30 minutes.
Keeping a comprehensive clinic meeting under 30 minutes seems impossible to most owners. I know it sounds crazy, but the secret lies in the preparation and the sequence. The meeting [00:16:00] begins with a rapid fire stats review. Okay? They look at weekly, monthly, and year to date numbers. The mechanism that keeps this fast is that nobody is digging through software or pulling reports during the meeting.
Right? They do it beforehand. Exactly. The data is pulled from the team’s prepared call sheets beforehand. Everyone arrives already knowing the math, the friction of discovery is removed. You aren’t figuring out where you are. You are analyzing where you are. Perfect way to put it. From there, the agenda flows directly into records and wins, which is that dedicated space for this specific commending we unpacked earlier.
Yes. You validate the behaviors you wanna see repeated, like we hit a record number of scheduled new patients on Tuesday because the front desk executed the new phone script flawlessly. Then what’s next? The third phase covers completed and current projects. And to keep this from devolving into a chaotic brainstorming session, Dr.
Lloyd insists on the use of formal project sheets. Oh, that makes sense. Like let’s look at the cognitive load of running a major clinic event. [00:17:00] Say an upcoming ladies night. There are dozens of moving variables, tons. You have catering, internal marketing, physical signage, staff scheduling. If you just ask the room, Hey, how are we doing on ladies night?
You are gonna get a messy, fragmented update. Everyone’s just guessing, right? People will try to remember what they accomplished last week, and critical tasks will inevitably fall through the cracks. The project sheet eliminates that memory burden. The person spearheading the event simply reads down the organized list just going item by item exactly.
They state what has been completed, what is currently pending, and specifically where they’re experiencing bottlenecks and need support from the rest of the team. It transforms project management from an emotional memory-based struggle into a clean binary checklist. Yes, and once the current projects are tracked, the final phase of the agenda opens up to new projects and q and a.
So if the clinic is launching a new initiative, this is where they figure out the who, [00:18:00] what, when, and why. Right. The leader opens the floor, leveraging that diplomatic immunity so the staff can voice any concerns about the new workflow before it goes live. But Dr. Lloyd issues a massive warning about how this meeting concludes, doesn’t he?
He does, because the ultimate failure of any leadership gathering is a lack of accountability. It’s so true. You can spend 30 highly efficient minutes architecting a brilliant new patient flow or refining your financial protocols. But if you close the meeting without explicit individualized assignments, the meeting was a complete waste of time just talking in circles.
If you do not point to specific individuals and say you are responsible for X, you’re responsible for Y, and both are due by Friday at noon. Nothing will change. It takes us right back to that heavy roll of white fabric at the wedding. The team can understand the vision, they can see the goal, but if you don’t assign who is holding which end of the fabric and exactly when they need to start unrolling it, everyone will just [00:19:00] stand there looking smart while the practice stagnates.
Accountability is the physical bridge between talking about growth and actually achieving it. You have to lock in those commitments before a single person leaves that room. It transforms the meeting from a passive listening exercise into an active deployment of resources. Before we go, I wanna leave everyone with a mindset shift to Mull over.
Yeah, lay it on us. What if you stopped viewing the weekly office meeting as an interruption to the real work of your clinic and started seeing it as the actual engine that makes the real work possible? The engine. I love that, high performance engine requires deliberate maintenance. It does. If you neglect it, you’ll eventually find yourself managing breakdowns instead of driving growth.
That shift from reactive crisis management to proactive system building is what separates a struggling clinic from a thriving, scalable enterprise. So if you are tired of operating in the dark, if you are ready to stop having those crap hits the fan meetings, and [00:20:00] want to install proven systems like the ones we’ve explored today.
You need to take action. Don’t just sit on this information right as a listener of this deep dive. Your next step is to book a free call with , Dr. George Birnbach. He is a master at diagnosing exactly where your clinic’s engine is, sputtering.
He really is, and he’ll give you the exact blueprint to fix it. The link to book that free call is sitting right there in your show notes. It is an incredible opportunity to get a high level objective analysis of your operational friction points. It truly is. Furthermore, you need to get yourself and your key team members in a room with us.
Yes. Come see us. You absolutely have to come out and join the Five Star management team in person at our live two day event in Chicago, Illinois. It is called Streamline Scale Succeed. It’s a game changer for your practice. Immersing yourself in an environment with hundreds of other driven chiropractors and learning how to implement these systems live will fundamentally change the trajectory of your practice.
Do not wait on this. Grab your tickets using the link in the [00:21:00] show notes right now. We can’t wait to see you there. Finally, make sure you hit subscribe to the Successful Chiro Podcast so you never miss out on our weekly deep dives and actionable practice building tips. Your team is smart, capable, and standing right beside you.
Don’t leave them holding the fabric without a plan. Give them the clarity they crave. Run the best darn office meeting ever, and watch your practice thrive. Thanks for joining us, and we will catch you on the next deep dive.
