Kiera shares with listeners how to run quarterly meetings to get clarity, alignment, and accountability. She touches on the creation of 90-day plans, creating a definition of done, and why instilling a traction cadence is so helpful and practical.

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The Dental A Team (00:02 )

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and welcome to the podcast today. I hope you're having an amazing day. I hope today's a great day for you. And today we're going to dig into quarterly meetings, ⁓ traction style. So this is based on the framework by Gina Wickman in traction. I've talked about them before. I used to talk about them a lot more and I feel like it's been a hot minute since we brought this up. There's tons of episodes on quarterly meetings. Quarterly meetings are one of my favorite things in the annual planning.

 

and how to do this because practices who run like this, who operate like this, they truly do so great. Like honest to goodness, so great. And I'm so excited for you to learn how to do these quarterly meetings. ⁓ To me, they're like the guiding principles of a freaking successful practice. So I hope you're excited about it. ⁓ A lot of practices skip these or they run them very loosely. And I want to help you learn how to run these.

 

very effectively, very efficiently, what they should look like, what you can have. I've been running these for, gosh, I don't know, seven years plus. I've learned a lot through the ways. I have somebody who helps coach our meetings, because I used to self-implement myself, and it's been so beneficial to have somebody help and how much my perspective has changed by having somebody help run them who knows how to do them so well. I love doing this. Yes, we've been trained by traction. We are not traction ourselves.

 

We do portions of it, but we do Dental A Team's version of it. ⁓ And what I've heard from offices that work with us on them ⁓ is they love that we have the dental background too. So we're able to help solve a lot of their issues, a lot of their problems, but to give the clarity, to give the confidence in these. So I'm excited. We're going to kind of go through how to run a quarterly meeting to get clarity, alignment, and accountability. And that's what it's ultimately for. And two, I feel like give simplicity too. Because once you know like what you're supposed to work on for the quarter, ⁓

 

Everybody's now aligned, everybody's rowing together. So for that, ⁓ I just want you guys to, I'll kind of walk you through a whole journey of how to do this. So number one, I want you just to go back on last quarter and how did last quarter go for you? What worked, what didn't work, what got done? I think right now you don't even know what happened. Well, it might be time for you to start looking into adding quarterly meetings to your plate. If you do know, rock on, how did you know that? Does your whole team know how you did?

 

Does the whole leadership team behind it? And then what is like, what are you working on this quarter? Do you know, is there a focus? Is there a plan? ⁓ And so what we're supposed to do is, and I do this with lots of offices and honestly, offices that get this, the leadership team gets more ⁓ honest conversations, more accountability, more peer to peer accountability, more ownership, and the whole organization goes. So the way I break it down is your annual goal is like a mountain. So it's this huge mountain that we're trying to climb and each quarter are the big boulders.

 

to build up that mountain, so the rocks, and then we have little pebbles and to-dos of the day in, day out. And so every quarter we need to dedicate a full day, yes, a full day, where we actually break away, the leadership team does, and then the leadership team builds what they feel the next quarter needs to be, and then they take it and break it down per departments. So that's kind of like my favorite way to do this. So what we do is we have our mountain, our annual goals, where we're going, we know where we're headed, and then from there we're gonna break it down and build those smaller rocks.

 

When we're going into a quarterly, we look at where we are based on where we want to be for the year. How did last quarter go? What were the wins? What were the losses? We started having people grade the quarter in the leadership team and that's been real fun. And that's just to see if everybody's aligned. So how do we do on an ABCD? Did we accomplish the things that we set out to do? Are we on track for the year of where we wanted to be? What are we seeing from all that? And what lessons did we learn that we should either do again or not do? I think that's so paramount when I'm going into leadership departments and

 

working on them with these quarterlies is to see like, what did we do really well and what did we not do and what should we do again and what should we not do again? And when you break it down like that, it's so incredible. And then you go into building your next 90 day plan, if you will, is what these quarterly meetings are. What are the most important three to five things that have to get that in this next quarter that are going to take us three months that are big boulders to help us reach the top mountain point that we've all agreed to is where we want to get to by the end of this year. So if our goal this year is to produce 3 million.

 

We've to break that down by quarters. We've got to have projections. Obviously, not every quarter is going to be the same based on the ups and downs within a practice. That's something very common. ⁓ Usually, December is not as high. September is not as high. So let's make sure that we're on track for that. Then we're looking at our overhead. We're looking at big initiatives. So maybe it's an operations manual. Maybe it's hiring an associate. Maybe it's getting all of our assistance CPR certified. Maybe it's getting all of our assistance to where they can do

 

oral surgery, whatever it is, there's big initiatives. Maybe we need to bring billing in house. Maybe we need to outsource billing. Maybe we need to figure out medical billing. Those are big initiatives that are going to move an organization forward exponentially, depending upon your practices needs. So then we break it down. And what I love to do is when we build these 90 day plans, not just have people like what I used to do, and this is something I've learned that I think can really help you out a quarterly is I don't just set up a like, we need to get an operations manual done in 90 days. No, no, no, no.

 

What is, and this comes from the book Come Up for Air, what is the definition of done? So that means that every department needs to have a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly skeleton. We need to have 20 protocols done per person for all the different departments. That's what the definition of done of getting this operations manual done in 90 days looks like. What does onboarding an associate look like or onboarding a front office team member? It means that they know our company core values, they know our company mission, and that they're able to independently do X, and Z.

 

Well, what's awesome is when we have a definition of done, now everybody knows what that goal is. Is that realistic to get done in 90 days and what the focus is? Now, when I started working with teams and depending upon the size of it, a lot of times rocks are individual and they're individual department focused. But as organizations get larger and larger, sometimes we do what's called like a rallying cry or like a centralized focus. So maybe it's that this whole quarter,

 

the focus is getting everybody up on par for operations manual. And that's what we're all gonna focus on. If we just got that thing done amongst all departments, the whole organization would move faster. So there's no right or wrong way to do it. I've just found that depending upon the size of the organization and where they're located and what they're focused on, sometimes that whole collective initiative is the right thing to do. Other times the departments need individual focuses. So once we get those rocks or these big boulders with a 90 day plan with a definition of done, who's doing what,

 

is this realistic? Do we have the capacity to do it? Then from there you move into like solving issues and resolving. And if you set r