The staff video we provide with this course is designed to walk you and your employees through the entire process needed to create a collaborative vision for your practice, from start to finish. It starts by covering the key concepts we’ve discussed in the course up to this point – specifically, what a vision is and why it’s important to create one, and why it’s important that it is created collaboratively. Although much of this information is similar to what we’ve covered so far, it’s focused on sharing that information with the staff as well.
After this information is covered, we walk you and your employees through the steps for creating a collaborative vision for your practice. These steps are:
- Creating ground rules for collaboration. Several of the steps for creating a collaborative vision for your practice involve team discussions. Creating ground rules helps your team have these conversations effectively by establishing the behaviors everyone expects of one another during the meeting.
- Describing the ideal practice. In this step, employees describe what their ideal practice would be like. They do this individually first by answering questions like, “If you were working at your ideal practice, what would you tell your friends and family about the place you work and the people you work with? How would the people in this practice solve problems? How much fun would the people in this practice have working there?” Then, they share their descriptions with their teammates. Everyone’s answers are combined to create one collaborative vision of the ideal practice – the kind of practice everyone agrees they want to work towards achieving.
- Defining “The Why.” Once your employees have described their ideal practice, we discuss the fact that making this vision a reality is going to be difficult. Because of this, they’ll need something to keep them motivated when the going gets tough. This thing is “the why,” or why it’s worth it. Why it’s worth it to them to do the hard work needed to transform their practice. In this step, employees individually answer a series of questions that help them determine why working to create a better practice matters to them personally.
- Determining “Towards” Behaviors. After determining why creating a better practice is worth it, your employees work together to come up with a list of “towards” behaviors. Towards behaviors are the specific actions employees can take each day to move them towards creating the practice they want. Although they come up with these behaviors together, we emphasize the importance of focusing only on the actions they can take individually. So, “management fixing things for us,” or “my coworkers showing up with a better attitude,” wouldn’t be good towards behaviors, while “coming to work with a better attitude myself,” would be.
- Determining “Away” Behaviors. The final step in creating a collaborative vision for the practice you want is to determine and agree upon the away behaviors employees will no longer participate in. Away behaviors are actions that move us away from creating the kind of practice we want. They often look like “gossiping”, saying “it’s not my job” or refusing to help others on the team when they need it.
As you can probably tell from these descriptions, each step requires you and your employees to complete one or more activities. And so, we have structured the video to make completing these activities as easy as possible. Each activity has clear visual clues that indicate when they start and stop and written instructions so your employees can reference them as needed.
You may be wondering what your role is in these activities – what will you be expected to do and how can you be sure you and your employees have completed each step successfully? On the resources tab on this page, you can find a document that outlines each activity, describes your role in helping your employees complete it, provides tips for facilitation, and even provides some sample responses to the questions in the activities. This resource includes everything you need to be sure that each of the steps in our process is facilitated successfully, but before you read it, let’s take a minute to discuss what facilitation is in the first place.
