Hi, I'm Chris. I'm one of the directors of the Veterinary Management Group. I've worked in senior operational management within the veterinary sector for the last 13 years with roles at Vets Now, the vet, Southern Counties veterinary specialists, vet partners, and currently I'm working for the Pets at Home veterinary Group as a strategic project manager.

I've designed and delivered soft skills training on a variety of topics throughout my career, including leadership development workshops for new managers of their partners. And today I'm going to talk about developing practise, strategy and values. Now this is a re-recording of the first of the March webinar, which was plagued unfortunately by internet connectivity issues.

So here's what we're going to cover, what strategy is, how to develop a, a practise strategy, and establishing a set of values. So we're just going to start with this 10 minute MBA on what strategy is the definitions and principles. So when we think about developing a strategy, we ask ourselves these sorts of questions.

What is your practice's mission? That means, what's its purpose? What's it there to do, it's reasons for it, for its existence.

So for example, if you compare different veterinary groups such as Blue Cross, PDSA, Goddards, Easy Pet Care, Blacks, a local independent practise in the community, a certificate led practise, a referral centre, an out of hours provider like Vets now, the Royal Veterinary College, they've all got different reasons for existence, different missions. So here we're asking, you know, what customers are we there to serve and what customers aren't we there to serve as well, and what clinical services are we there to provide. So that's what mission is about.

And then the next aspect is vision. So we, we've established why we exist, but, but, but what do we want to be? You know, what is our practises vision?

Where's it, where's it heading? The classic, where do you see yourself in five years' time question? So for example, what future clinical services can you provide and who are your customers going to be of the future?

And then the values, the values really are the foundations that support the vision and shape the culture, and they're about how people behave, how they treat each other and how they treat your customers. And then what's our strategy? How are we going to deliver on the vision?

How are we gonna get our practise from where it is now to where it wants to be and stay true to our mission? And then the next question we really have to ask ourselves here is, is this all aligned? Is it all genuine and, and how will we know we're achieving what we've set out to do?

What are we going to measure to, to, to show we're achieving things? How are we going to adapt it as we move forward? So, strategy, is defined here, really.

It's about winning, by differentiating yourself from your competitors, and gaining and maintaining, what Michael Porter calls a competitive advantage. So it's providing something to customers better or different, to, to what your competitors provide. It's about how you align your people and your activities to deliver on this kind of sweet spot where your purpose is there.

Everything that's going on in the environment around you and what is within your internal area are all sort of focused in on providing that that sweet spot. Strategy can be planned, and, and most people try and plan it in line with business' objectives, but, but it's also often emergent because things are changing all the time in the market or, or, you're gaining new skills and competences within your practise. And some strategies are driven by the market, they're externally driven, whereas others are more driven internally by what you believe you're going to be doing.

And again, it's usually a combination of both. So for example, if you're, you're a football team, unless you're really the best football team in the world that has one way of playing that, that, that nobody can beat, then at times, you're going to adapt your, your strategy to suit, the external environment around you, as well as just relying on the internal aspects of what you have. Strategy is ultimately a quest for what portto calls value.

It's about finding answers to the questions, why do we want to compete? Where do we want to compete, and how do we want to compete. Now, strategy doesn't mean, I mean, value doesn't mean cheap.

And one way of looking at value is this thing called the value equation, which you can see before you here, where, it outlines that value really is the, the outcome. Of, of what you get, the clinical outcome, if you like, in, in our cases, and the process that you have to go through. That's what value is, and, and you divide that really by the price, and what we call the effort or the acquisition costs.

So for example, if, if you're a client who's referred to a specialist, yes, that comes at a higher price, on the lower side of the, the equation there. But hopefully results in a better clinical outcome by having experts in that particular area, dealing with your case. However, it may mean, some effort needs to go in because you have to travel some distance to a strange practise and so on.

And of course, in terms of the process, we're really talking about the, the customer and patient experience and you know, that particular referral centre may give you a fantastic customer experience, or you may not get as good a customer experiences as you get in your own practise. So that's the process element of that. Now Michael Porter suggests there's really only two ways that you can gain this competitive advantage.

First, he calls cost leadership where you, you perform activities differently and you, you try and get a cheaper process going. So there's a real emphasis here on cost and efficiency, high volume, low variety economies of scale, low cost materials, running like a well-oiled machine. The risks of a cost leadership strategy are people can copy it.

Someone may develop a better or more efficient process, and a focus on cost reduction may make the customer think that you're cheap. So, for example, when I worked for, for a, a group previously that focused very much on this cost leadership strategy, we found that, The clients were, were quite happy coming to us, for vaccinations, etc. But if their client, if their pet was actually sick, then quite often they would go to another veterinary practise because we hadn't really got forward this idea that, that, that we also had a premium element to us.

So the second part of, of, of, of, of, of ways of gaining competitive advantage is differentiation. So, for example, you know, a, a referral centre, or, you know, high-level first opinion practise with certificate holders or a really good first opinion practise where the emphasis is on quality, rather than cost leadership, quality of, of materials, quality of employees, quality of service of customer relationships, and so on, . The risks with, with the differentiation strategy mean that you could actually become more expensive and customers are prepared to pay and also living up to the, the, the value that you're promising.

These are just some of the different ways in which businesses can choose to provide value to customers. I'm sure as you look at these value propositions, you can identify some companies that that adopt these sorts of strategies. So if you think about Apple, if you think about John Lewis, Aldi, Uber, Amazon, Savile Roadtailors, Marks and Spencer's, Virgin, you can see how they might be providing different value propositions to their customers.

And if also we think within the vet world. So if you think about, Fitzpatrick's, for example, the value proposition that it's putting forward, Willows, another referral centre that has a particular, brand proposition. Compare that with the likes of Easy Pett Care.

It's quite clear what value proposition, Easy Pett Care has, and these sort of pop up vaccination clinics that appear, you know, what are they, what are they trying to do here? What's their value proposition? That's now outsourcing solution provider, blacks, you know, high quality service champion type approach.

So you can see how a veterinary practise can kind of position itself against any of these, value propositions that are there and this slide, you're welcome to go back and read it at any other point, explains and how that gets set up. OK, so that's the 10 minute MBA done. So now let's look at how we do this in practise.

So, this is the process in a nutshell. So the first kind of aspect of it is, is strategic analysis. We ask ourselves, what's our purpose?

It's going back to that mission idea, you know, what we're here for. Then it's looking at our external environment, looking at our internal environment within the practise. And doing some analysis and then coming up with some strategy options.

And then what we want to do with those options is narrow them down so that we make, we make some choices. And once we've decided what our strategy is going to be, we then need to deploy it. So that's very much about how we implement our strategy, how we then monitor it, review it, and adapt it, so on.

So, for strategic analysis, you can't be a good old SWOT. I'm sure absolutely everybody in the entire universe has heard of SWOT, and it's just a fantastically simple, but really effective framework for, for strategic thinking, focusing on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, of course. But first, before we, we go into the swap, let's revisit the idea of, of mission and purpose.

So can I ask you a question? Here we go. What does Harley Davidson sell?

Now, if we were on QI right now, I'm pretty sure someone would set the Klaxon off by saying motorbikes. However, when you think about it, what does Harley Davidson actually sell? This according to a Harley Davidson executive is what they actually sell.

What we sell is the ability for a 43 year old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him. So interesting spin on that. And here's a few other ways in which some companies have, have thought about their, their purpose.

Starbucks. They're claiming they're about people serving coffee, not just coffee, people serving coffee. President of Black and Decker here saying, you know, last year we sold a million quarter inch drills, not because people wanted quarter inch drills, but because they wanted quarter inch holes.

So What does your veterinary practise exist for? Again, this is, this is really focusing on the vision and mission aspect. So this is getting your people to think about this.

Keep it, keep it simple, ask people, you know, what does the practise exist for, what's its purpose, what makes it special? What would make it even better, and just see if they can capture it in a few sentences or bullet points, which you can then use later for for writing your mission and vision. So the kind of things they need to think about here is why are they working there and not somewhere down the road?

Why should, should clients come here rather than somewhere down the road? And where does our practise sit in what I call our, our veterinary world? And this is a, a model of our veterinary world.

It's what I call the whole practise model. I adapted this from David Meister's 1993 3S model who suggests that a professional service firm competes in three areas and needs to balance achieving goals across all three of those areas. And those areas, according to Meister, are service to satisfy the demands of the client, marketplace, satisfaction to satisfy the demands of the people marketplace, and success, the satisfaction of its investors and its economic ambitions.

In the veterinary world, we've also got a 4th area, and that's the reason why most of our people do what they do to provide the best possible care for our patients. So this model's a really, really useful way of looking at the practise in a number of ways and especially in developing strategy. I sometimes call it the four Cs because you could label these clinical, customer, colleague, and commercial.

All 4 areas of this business are equally important. What we do for our patients, our clients, our team of people, and the financial health of the business in order for us to provide a balanced approach to veterinary practise. Now, as individuals, we may all be naturally drawn to particular areas over, over others, and in situations that are challenging or require strategic thinking, the trick really is to step back from our own natural biases.

So I may be a vet and all I want to do is treat patients and that's the quadrant I sit in, or I may be the, the practise. Owner, and I need this to make some money, and I tend to sit in that business quadrant, or perhaps I'm a head nurse that's concerned about the team, and I'm very much sitting in this bit at the moment, or I'm, I'm, I'm my head of client care, and I'm very much parked in the customer camp. You know, we all have these perspectives.

So what we need to do sometimes just step back from that, listen to others, consider all four perspectives in order to make rounded and coherent decisions. So the success of a practise comes from having team members that meet the needs of patients, meet the needs of clients, each other's needs, and of the business as a whole, and bring these perspectives together. So this is a, a, a really useful model I find.

OK, so back to how we use the SWOT. Now, let's bear in mind that effective decisions are made by people who share the same vision and values, but have different priorities and perceptions around how things should be done. So people that are camped a little bit in different areas and can see things from different angles, .

So bringing these people together and discussing and gaining consensus, debating and reaching agreement on the way forward, it is hugely beneficial to, to strategy. A receptionist view of the practise is just as valid as that of your clinical director. It just brings a different perspective.

Now, what I propose you do is you introduce all colleagues to the swap framework and the whole practise model and ask them to spend some time thinking about each of the four parts of the whole of the whole practise model and noting down what they feel the practise is strong on, weak on what threats it faces, and what opportunities it could take, considering also your competitors. So essentially do a swat on each of those quadrants of the whole practise model. So, You need to think about patient care and care and clinical performance.

What services are we offering? What are the level of our clinical standards? Are we providing a caring, safe, and happy environment for our patients?

Think about that. The customer service and experience, how well are our existing clients being looked after, how well are they being retained and engaged with, how well are we doing at attracting new ones, the people and team side of things, how well do our colleagues support, challenge, and care for each other, how well do they work as a team, share the same values, how well are we attracting, engaging, retaining and developing the right people. And finally, the sort of commercial and financial side of this, how, how effective are we at maximising our profitable income through pricing, charging, selling, controlling costs and debt, and so on.

So get everybody to, to swat away at each of these areas and then arrange a team meeting to discuss everyone's ideas and perspectives and agree what aspects to focus on. Now, I'm gonna quickly show you some other frameworks that, that can help with this, but essentially, you only really need to give these, just swap your practise and, and compare with your competitors in all of these areas, have good discussions around it and formulate or refine a strategy from there. But a few quick frameworks that I'll go through, you can use yourselves or, or, or you can if you wish, give to your people, or you might just take a few tips from this that you can add into the instructions that you're giving to people.

But whatever you do, use your own language, rather than some of the kind of NBA speak that I'm probably gonna end up accidentally lapsing into. So, let's move forward with this. So one, one model that's, that's quite commonly used for, for analysing opportunities and threats is the, is the peel or pest or pest neither are various versions of this, sort of looking at what's going on politically.

And regulatory in their economic aspects, sociocultural demographics, so things like the feminization of the workforce, pet ownership, these sorts of things, technological, what's going on there, legal areas such as competition law, environmental laws, and so on. So think about what's stable and what's changing, what are our opportunities and threats. So this is really for, for that part of the SAT.

Another useful part for the opportunities and threats, but this comes from Michael Porter again. This is his five forces that affect profitability. So what factors should, should we consider for our practise?

If you understand the nature and relative importance of these various aspects, you can defend against threats. So I'll give you some examples here. We look at competitive rivalry, you know, what other practises are competing for your clients and how are they doing it may swap them as well.

How different or similar are you in what you're offering in your pricing strategy? Do you have that unique sweet spot, a strong brand identity? Is your year on year growth still strong, or is it slowed down?

So in other words, are there plenty of clients to go around or fighting for market share? On the threat of new entrants, you know, ask yourself, how likely is it that a new practise will open in the area? What can you do now to create barriers to that?

So in terms of developing your brand, product differentiation, people's skills and experience, bonding people to the practise, your people and clients, tying clients in with care plans and great value and service. And, and building up a kind of war chest, if you like, so that should you, should you, encounter a new entrant to the market that you're able to engage in a price war if necessary, but I would try and avoid that like the plague, but mostly it's about trying to bond people and tie them in investing right now in your equipment and facilities, so you're in a really good place. The threat of substitutes, so close substitutes are kind of more sensitive to competitor price.

So, so if you're a, a, cost leadership type approach, and another person that, that, you know, bargain vets opens just alongside you. You're going to struggle, if you're a certificate led practise and another certificate led practise opens up beside you, you're going to struggle, but hopefully you've had time to build up, what you, what, what you have and make it more powerful so that they can't really get off the ground. You might have direct substitutes or online pharmacies, or indirect, such as, you know, people spending on something on other, things other than their pets.

Then there's sort of buyer and supplier power. So the buyer is your customer and the supplier obviously is, are your suppliers. So this is thinking about, you know, the relative power and importance.

So if you're the only authorhopod within 50 miles, then, you know, you're in a pretty good, position of, of power and importance. If you're part of a buying group, that gives you a bit of clout. And the degree of substitutability and differentiation, so, You know, you, you, if you're the that only orthopod, then, you know, vets are us down the road will amputate for a tenner.

So that's your, that's your choices really. Those are your, your, your substitute abilities, not, you know, but there's quite a good deal of differentiation there. If several with from, in terms of your suppliers, you know, obviously, several suppliers offer the same drug or they offer drugs that do the same thing.

So the more of those there are, the more you're in a position of power rather than your suppliers, that kind of thing. Depth of relationship and switching costs, so the more you can make yourself a one-stop shop for all of your clients' needs, the better. And the, the, the more control of information you have, the better.

And the more you know about medicine. Remember, the client may go to Doctor Google and look at things, but you definitely know much more about medicine. And also, practises often get hung up on prices of competitors, but really ask yourself in terms of that information, how much do clients actually know?

How much do they actually measure in terms of cost? Yes, a few of them shop around, but mostly not. If you provide the right level of service, we're in the right area.

OK, so that's, that's looking at our sort of external context, if you like. If we're looking at our internal context, our own sort of strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of our competitors and threats and opportunities that results, we ask us, you know, what are our assets? Where are we strong?

Where are we weak? . And, you know, our assets, what are they?

What, what, what do assets mean? Assets are what you have and what you do. So you have physical assets such as your location, you know, if you're in a nice corner, that's got high visibility and so on, your signage, the layout of your practise, you know, how big your, your reception areas, how many theatres you've got, the equipment that you, you have, these are all things that are physical assets.

Financial assets, obviously want access to capital, you've got your profitability, cash flow, and all those kind of things. And then there's intangibles. Now, intangibles actually make up most of the company's market value in the vast majority of cases.

OK. If you look at Nurofen is is always a good example of this. You know, Nurofen is, is, is ibuprofen, but it's just absurdly priced.

It's just got this kind of brand value, which I think has been declining now for a number of years, but another example might be Apple. People are paying a high, a high premium for a brand. And again, I think perhaps You know, in terms of their value proposition, Apple is, is declining now as well.

It's maybe not the innovative value proposition it used to be. But these intangibles are really, really, really important. And what are they?

There are people, first of all, first and foremost, are people, their knowledge, their experience, their expertise, their skill sets, their capabilities, their values. Their motivation, their loyalty, how they collaborate, their adaptability, how they approach learning, and so on, are people really important. Then we have this structural capital idea, which is how we go about recruiting, retaining, developing, engaging, and effectively deploying these people.

So this is all around our processes, our policies, our practises, how we structure our, our practise, our leadership and management style, the culture and all these kind of aspects. And then there's what we call relational capital, which is your reputation and relationships. That's about your reputation for the service that you provide, your brand image, any kind of strategic networks and partnerships you have, any relationships that you have with various stakeholders such as financial providers, products and service suppliers, clients, charities, locums, and all these kind of things.

These are lovely, fluffy and tangibles that are the most important, part of what you do. So, you know, what have we got here amongst these assets? What have we got that's valuable, that's rare, that, that's hard for others to copy, and how well set up are we to make the most of these valuable, rare and inimitable resources and capabilities.

OK, so. As I say, those previous couple of slides, you can kind of take them or leave and pick a few ideas and so on, but ultimately, it's all about this. It's about the swat of these different areas of the whole practise model.

That's the output that you're looking for. So the next step is once you've, you've asked the team to do the swat on these, these four areas is to get them together to have a meeting to discuss everyone's ideas and perspectives and agree what best aspects to focus on. So, bring the swats together.

Together to form one giant swat, capture any key sentences and bullets that encapsulate the mission and vision, going back to the to the purpose piece. OK, do that. That's a nice big meeting in itself.

Now, after that, you can either regroup for the next stages if you're a small team, or just create a small working group to distil these ideas into a coherent vision, mission strategy and and plan that you can then bring back to the wider group to finalise. Now, again, there's some tools that I'm going to give you over the next couple of slides, but, but good old posts it pads and whiteboards and discussions may work just as well and do translate some of this NBA babble into something a bit more straightforward for your team. So, remember that the value equation is really powerful way of thinking about value.

So you know, we can control our customers' experience. We can to a degree control our clinical outcome and how easy and difficult we make things for clients. And if we deliver these to a consistently high standard, then price becomes.

Largely irrelevant. So what can you do in your practise to add value? Is there one thing you could go back and change tomorrow that could, could improve this?

What customer pains and jobs are you ignoring or you could do better, to service? So some questions you can ask yourself when you're, you're, you're, you're looking at your various options is, you know, what, what can we eliminate? What are we doing that we just get rid of it?

Shouldn't be doing that. What can we just reduce to below the usual standard because we need to create capacity. We can't do everything.

So we need to focus. So if we're going to reduce some things and eliminate some things, what therefore are we going to raise well above the usual standard, and what are we going to create that we're not yet offering? So those are some really important questions to ask yourself as you're analysing your, your options, .

You know, there's also ANSO's matrix around how you might grow your business. I think I won't go into this in too much detail here. I'll just say, you know, go on to it, your, your internet provider, your search engine, and, and, and have a little look at this, but, there are different ways of, developing yourself and growing.

Once you, you, you've got a bunch of, of options in front of you, you want to look at, there are some various frameworks you can use to assess your options. So this is, this is an example of, of one here by Thompson, and it just asks you to look at your various, options that you're, you're putting forward and assess them, in terms of suitability, feasibility and acceptability. So first of all, I've got down here sort of appropriateness, or you can call that suitability or relevance or fit, you know, get your thesaurus out, call it whatever you want.

But basically, is this consistent with our strategic analysis, the SWOT, and how would it sustain or improve our competitive position? So, this is the appropriateness, but. How much is it actually using our strengths effectively?

How much is it actually seizing the opportunities we've identified? How far does this strategy overcome our weaknesses and our threats, and how much does it fit with our purpose, our brand, and the goals we want to achieve? So that's really what appropriateness is all about.

Desirability, can get your thesaurus out, choose your word, whatever you want. You can also call this acceptability, attractiveness, appeal. So how acceptable or attractive is this going to be to our various stakeholders such as customers, employees, investors, suppliers, etc.

You know, what are the potential and likely financial returns? What are the potential non-financial benefits, Bit of a risk analysis, the impact times likelihood. How is it going to go down with these various stakeholders?

And then the third part is feasibility or practicability, viability, achievability, you know, can we do it? Are we able to successfully implement this strategy? Can we fund it?

Do we have or can we easily get hold of the, the, the assets that we need, the people, the physical assets that we need? How capable are we of actually supporting this strategy? Do we have the right leadership in place, the right culture, the right structure to get this to the level we need, and how quickly can we achieve the market share we need to be successful and how easily can competitor reactions be coped with?

So that's one way that you could perhaps score your various options. Another is, is a thing called issues prioritisation where you just go, what are our real problems, our real issues and challenges, and then you just go, let's focus on these and work up options around them and evaluate and select, or you can frankly just do straightforward voting. That would work, as well, depending on what you've got on the table.

OK, so at the end of all this, you should have a mission, a vision, and a strategy that is owned by the team and is based on realistic multi-perspective views of the practise. The values piece is also a really important component since how people behave and their belief in the mission and vision of the practise needs to underlie and support the strategy. So you need to then communicate this, operationalize it, and ensure that it's working.

And you also then need to revisit the exercise periodically, so once a year, review progress against your mission and evolve the strategy as the practise continues to develop and adapt to changes. So, obviously, when it comes to deployment, this is going to involve change, uncertainty and risk and bringing people on the journey with you. I'm not going to do anything on change here.

That's a whole area in itself. But what I will say in the way in which you've approached. Producing the strategy, you will be already overcoming a lot of the obstacles that we get with change and doing all the right things by people in terms of evolving them and communicating with them.

So you're, you're really kind of halfway there when it comes to change. What usually happens if we are undergoing change is people often fail to predict the time it will take and the problems they will encounter, and also try to do too much at one time. And what often happens is other activities and commitments distract attention, divert resources, so you really need to make sure that you're focused.

And also the basis on which the strategy was formulated may change, so you may need to be flexible in terms of what you're doing there. In terms of monitoring it profit and loss accounts, so they're kind of boring and backward looking and only really look at financial outcomes. So the recommendation is, is a balanced scorecard approach, which looks at again, these, these four areas of the whole practise, try and get ways of measuring in here, as well as perhaps some, some soft measures as well.

So, for example, KPIs around patient care and clinical performances, there's lots of measures that you can get. So percentage of patients vaccinated. On health plans, parasite side sales, and all that kind of stuff, diagnostic ratios, surgical procedures, dentals, and so on.

So you can measure all sorts of things in terms of the clinical perspective. Also in terms of the, the customer perspective, you can be looking at your active client numbers, new client registrations, all these kinds of stuff, any reputational data you've got, surveys, reviews, and all that kind of stuff. People measurements, if you've got any measurements around recruitment, retention, engagement that are meaningful, use those, look at your CPD takeup, performance reviews, team meetings conducted, what your sales are per full-time equivalent that, your, your, your locum use, these sorts of things give you a reasonable indication of how well you're doing on the, on the people front.

And then financial, of course, we've got, we've got measures coming out of our, our ears in terms of sales, ATV missed charges, gross margin, wages as a percentage of sales overheads, debt control measures, and of course, ultimately profit. So that was strategy. So now we're going to just spend about 10 minutes on, on values.

So first of all, we'll, we'll start with a, a definition here on, on what values are, and you can have a, a, a, a read of that. But the important thing here to, to realise is that values are really, really important actually. The values-driven organisations can be very special indeed.

So for example, Jim Collins and Jerry Poorris. Is built to last. That shows that companies that consistently focused on building a values-driven culture over a period of several decades outperformed companies that did not by a factor of 6 and outperformed the general stock market by a factor of 15.

Values and behaviour drive your culture. Culture drives your employee satisfaction and employee engagement, and employee engagement drives customer satisfaction and the mission. And this in turn drives your financial performance.

Now when we talk about values, we're talking about the underlying principles and beliefs that people follow when making decisions. Teams' values help create a shared understanding around how to work together. They set the tone of how to treat one another.

And values can be positive or they can be limiting. So trust is a core value for creating a culture of teamwork, whereas the value of being liked can cause people to compromise their integrity in order to satisfy their need for connection. So Examples of some popular values here.

So we've got doing the right thing. So you might say we always act in an ethical and empathetic way towards our patients and clients and each other, even if it's not convenient or beneficial for us. This means we are honest and admit when we make mistakes, we help each other out and we make sure our clients are always respected.

So that's one example there. Here's another one, innovation. We like to think outside the box.

We create work that is authentic, engaging, and original. We do this for our blue sky thinking, growth mindset, and always challenging our internal biases. We are about doing things differently.

Collaboration, we work together, we don't work in silos, we share information and we value taking time to communicate, explain, and share our thoughts with one another. Everyone's perspective and opinion is respected. And there's a whole bunch of, of, of fairly common, values here that you can see, as well.

So, the organization's values by default often reflect the underlying beliefs of the current or past leadership, and they tend to kind of carry on, regardless. It's quite interesting that in the corporate world, if a practise has been acquired by a company with a different set of values, as opposed to a very similar set of values, this does affect post-acquisition performance across all four areas of the whole practise model. Usually, when a, a, a practise is acquired, by a corporate group, there's, there's usually a, a, a dip in performance and how quickly that comes back up is very much related to, to values.

So where values are aligned with the personal values of employees, it does drive engagement, high performance, it attracts and retains talent talented people and build a strong brand. However, when values aren't aligned, it's a dysfunctional environment, poor performance across the board, and either the leadership needs to change or people need to move on to a culture that's more suited to them. Or a cultural transformation needs to be undertaken.

So, how do we establish our team values or align our values is our next question. So, Establishing team values first of all, it's a good idea to do this as part of your internal strategic analysis. So having strong core values in your practise, as I say, gives this framework in which people can work as a team towards the practice's vision.

So if they value kindness and empathy, they're going to be more inclined to behave in a way that fosters trust. Collaboration and connection with their colleagues. Now every team is different, so it's not just a matter of going, I'll grab that value, grab that value and just apply a blanket set of values.

This needs to be authentic, needs to have meaning for people, and they need to be included in establishing these values if you're going to hold them to account for these values. Authenticity is absolutely critical. It's not about imposing aspirational, yet essentially meaningless values on people like some organisations do.

Values developed with everyone participating are more likely to be unique to your practise. Your team's core values will guide them in every decision they make, so it's important to take this process seriously. The process I'm going to quickly take you through just now is adapted from a Harvard Business Review article by Freeman in April 2018.

It's for a small team, but there are different ways and timescales of doing it, but the principles are here. So for example, you may need to reconvene several times or do a full day off site. If you're a large, practise, you may need representatives rather than all employees, and you may need sign-offs from CEOs, etc.

But These are the basic principles anyway. So first of all, prepare, schedule a meeting of several hours and ask people to reflect and prepare for that meeting. You know, what do you value, what unspoken values have contributed to our success so far, what differentiates our team from other teams, what values should govern the way we, we interact with each other, the way we interact with our clients, and with our patients, get people thinking and preparing.

Step two, Develop your values. Firstly, get that meeting together, gather ideas and organise them. So based on the reflection previously done, everyone should, should, should write down on the whiteboard, either sticking Post-it pants on or whatever, write down the potential values that describe the team's current or aspirational state.

Then look together for common themes and kind of cluster them. So if you've written on to Post-it pads, you know, if that's fairly similar to that, you can put it together and, and cluster. And then once you've got your, your clusters, then each person can independently write on a piece of paper their top 10 values that resonate and rank them in order of importance.

Then you can identify a short list of values. Now all you're doing at this stage is identifying the what, what are our values. So to do this, compare the lists, assigned points.

So for example, if somebody's put a number 1 on their list, some a value, then that gets 10 points, whereas if it's number 10 on the list, it gets 1 point. Once you've totted all that up, discussed the numbers, discussed the reasoning, explore areas of agreement and disagreement, explore trade-offs, and then vote to narrow down to having, you know, between, say, 3 and 7 values that you're going to take forward. So, once you've got those values for each of them, the how bit, now this may be a separate meeting, you may be, be be zoom zoned out by then, but, but, but if you do it, it's part of the same meeting or in a different meeting.

This is the how. So for each value, discuss and jot down some behaviours, actions, and short descriptions that demonstrate what that value means and how each one could and should be applied in your everyday work. So the kind of questions you ask yourself, you know, what does this value mean to us?

What does it look like actually in action? How might it be misinterpreted? That's a really good question.

How will we evaluate that we're sticking to this value? How will it change our relationships and interactions with each other, with clients and pets? So those are really important questions to be asking.

Then you can send a trusted colleague off to nail down the precise wording and interpretations, reconvene to discuss the draught a few days later, and reconvene as many times as is necessary, so you've got something that everyone can get behind. Now, when discussing interpretations, it's, it's really, you know, understanding what the chosen values means it's absolutely critical. To implementation.

So translating this shared understanding into these explanations of how we're going to see them, experience and live them in the workplace is really, really very critical. So, final step or next step is to integrate and live your values, day to day, to lead from the front, live your values yourself. So, for example, if you're in a leadership position and your team values openness and transparency, then if you forget to communicate important information, forget to involve your team in important decisions, that signals to them you don't really care about the values, they don't carry any weight.

So once you've created your values, everybody commit to actions that support them, because that helps build the trust within your team. Talk about the values. Prepare a presentation that outlines your values and associated behaviour, explaining what they are, how and why they came about, and then you can use that for employee on boarding.

You can also refer to them in meetings, correspondence, and so on. Live by the values. So, you know, base your recognition and reward around those values, performance management that incorporate the values.

Don't tolerate behaviour from anyone that doesn't meet the standards set by that value. This means you people get disciplined for not following the values. That's exactly the right thing to do.

Incorporate these values into how you conduct your interviews, your meetings, M&Ms, all these kind of things, yeah. And step 4, you know, revolve, review, evolve, annually revisit the values, and interpretations, and, you know, how can we better integrate this into our practise in the coming year. So, aligning, that, that's about how to develop values from scratch, but, but aligning, to a set of prescribed values.

So, for example, a previously independent practise with a set of, corporate values, post acquisition, how you align those. Now, hopefully, your partners and owner will have thought about values as part of deciding who to sell to, that certainly makes it much easier. .

But for simple alignments such as that, since you've already been given a set of values, then you just really skip to the interpretation part of the previously outlined process. So this is it here, discuss the interpretation of those values, and there's a couple of additional considerations which I've highlighted here. So, you know, ask yourself, how does this value compare and contrast with our current values and ways of working?

And check that your practises interpretation is compatible with the corporate interpretation. And you might find that discussions may un unearth some values conflicts, but hopefully you can get to a place where these are all nicely aligned. So that's the simple alignment bit.

However, if the prescribed values are too much at odds with people's personal values, you're going to need some help, and that's going to involve culture change. And that's an enormous topic in itself. So again, I'm not going to go into that here, but if, your existing practise values are in conflict with ones that are being given to you by the larger group, then it needs a culture change, programme.

And that's it. Now, do feel free to contact me if you have any questions or thoughts on this session, and I'd just like to say thanks very much for, for taking the time to listen to this.