Git-R-Dun (Part 1)

Welcome to February! In the past few blogs, I talked about naming truth and aligning it with your Mission, Vision and Values (“MVV”); February is where your calendar starts asking, “Did you really mean it?” The pressure to hit goals, deadlines, and cash-flow targets ramps up, and suddenly all that beautiful truth gets stress-tested inside your practice workflows, tasks and staff huddles. 

In most practices, this is when ‘relationships’ quietly get downgraded from “strategic” to “nice-to-have.” Meetings get shorter and more transactional. One-on-ones become five minute status updates on notes, rejections, and noshows. Conversations shift to the content of work—visit types, authorizations, fabrication details and deadlines, claim reviews—and away from the human connections that actually make sustainable results possible. 

The hard truth? If your MVV says you value people, but your leadership behavior treats them like billing units or documentation machines, your culture hears the truth you actually live. The gap between your posted values and your practiced values is where burnout, turnover, and passive resistance to your processes live. Over time, results suffer precisely because relationships were treated as expendable. 

From a leadership perspective, I find it helpful to think in two big buckets: behaviors that drive results and behaviors that build relationships. If you mapped them on a simple xy graph (results on one axis, relationships on the other), you’d see four quadrants. Leaders who are weak in both don’t last long. Leaders who are strong in just one bucket eventually hit a ceiling—either burning through people to hit targets or being well liked but not trusted to get things done.​ 

The leaders who change the game for their practices are the ones in the upper right quadrant: strong in results and strong in relationships. They refuse the false choice between driving productivity and honoring people. They know that in a health care practice, you can’t deliver consistent clinical quality, clean claims, and a great patient experience if your team doesn’t trust you or each other. When these are all aligned, you find that the sum is indeed greater than the parts. You end up with better patient care, better operations, and better lives for the team. 

So how do you show up that way on a Monday morning when your schedule is packed, your backlog list is long, and your task queue is screaming? One practical lens is how you engage with people. The Eblin Group describes three basic modes of engagement: transient, transactional, and transformational. We feel all three in healthcare, often in the same day.​ 

Transient engagement is the “drive by leadership” we’re all guilty of when we’re tired or rushed. You pop into the front desk, fire off a few commands about copays or patient recall campaigns, check your phone while someone’s talking, and leave before a real question lands. Your attention is somewhere else, and your team can feel it. In a practice, transient engagement doesn’t just fail to add value—it subtracts it. It creates 1+1=1 outcomes: more confusion, more rework, and more emotional withdrawal. 

Transactional engagement is where most of the process enabled work gets done, and that’s not a bad thing. You’re clarifying visit types, setting timelines on incomplete notes, or deciding how to handle a payer’s new rule set. You ask open ended questions, solve problems, assign owners, and move on. This is the “Get-R-Dun” energy your MVV absolutely needs to translate into measurable outcomes like improved first pass claim rates or reduced days in A/R. 

Transformational engagement is different. It still gets stuff done, but the agenda isn’t just completion—it’s connection. You’re fully present, curious, and tuned into what’s being said and unsaid. You’re reminding yourself that the biller, the therapist, the front desk team member in front of you is not a cog in the system; they are a person carrying stress, ideas, and potential. Ironically, when you engage this way, you often unlock far better results because trust and creativity increase. 

In O&P care, transformational moments can look small but powerful: a five minute huddle where you ask, “What’s getting in the way of good documentation for you right now?” and then actually listen. A one-on-one where the first agenda item is the person, not the metrics. A training where you pause the software clicks and ask, “Does this workflow reflect how we say we want to care for patients and each other?” Those moments carry your MVV from the poster to the practice. 

Here’s where your earlier work on truth comes back into play. When you name your practice’s truths and tie them to your MVV, you create an alignment jig for your decisions. In February, that jig will ask you: are you using results to justify relational shortcuts, or are you telling the truth that results and relationships are mutually supportive? When people feel genuinely seen and valued, they bring more of themselves to the work.​ 

For this week, I’m not asking you to overhaul your leadership style. I’m inviting you to notice. Pay attention to when you slip into transient engagement and how people react. Notice when you’re purely transactional and what it produces. And notice the impact when you slow down just enough to be transformational with even one person. Next week, in Part 2, we’ll get very practical about what that looks like inside your processes and practice management workflows.