EP33: Building a Legacy Team: Lessons From Our Company Retreat

In this episode, I unpack what I learned from our recent Corrective Chiropractic company retreat and why it became one of the most defining leadership moments of my year. We dug into the 6 Growth Engine Frameworks, the full team survey, and the real work that goes into building trust, communication, and alignment.

This wasn’t about checking boxes or reacting to issues. It was about slowing down, listening deeper, and recommitting to the kind of leadership that builds a legacy instead of a quick win. I share how Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team shaped our path forward, what I discovered about myself, and how these insights are transforming how I lead my clinics and develop my people.

If you’re a chiropractor or a leader who wants to build something that lasts, this conversation will give you a behind-the-scenes look at the mindset and the intentionality it takes to grow a strong, unified, high-performing team.

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Transcript

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This is the Austin Cohen Podcast where we talk real strategies for chiropractors ready to grow beyond the adjustment. If you're building a business, developing your leadership, and trying to build wealth without burning out, you are in the right place. Let's get to work What's up everybody? Welcome back. Austin Cohen podcast. Woo. We got a lot to talk about today, ladies and gentlemen. We got a lot to talk about today. Wow. I'm just coming back from our retreat. We had our company retreat last week. It was from Wednesday. We started at 5:00 PM We got done Friday at 10:00 AM and literally what I wanna talk about today, is just some of my takeaways, things I learned building company retreats, which is one of the best things that I've ever done historically. Even without having any agenda, it was just a time I knew I needed to take my team away, and we did. And there was no agenda, no structure. But you know what? We had good conversation. We built some relationships with each other and it was a really good opportunity for us to connect as a team. And so today what I want to do is really take you guys down that road of what I learned from my company retreat, and hopefully that'll give you some of you some really good ideas about how maybe you could lead a really good retreat. The retreat's not for me, by the way, at all. The treat's for the team and the team to be able to grow and have that space. If I look back at my retreat last week, there was something that really hit me though, which was not the agenda. We hired a consultant to come in. It wasn't even those sessions. Yeah, but it was really on Wednesday morning when I realized that, listen, I am not here to check any boxes anymore. And I'm here to build a company that lasts and continue the reputation that it's been able to build in this profession. And I want a company with leadership depth where we are building leaders and where people walk in every day knowing that they're part of a team that's gonna go somewhere And listen, that culture does not happen fast. It doesn't happen by checking boxes. It takes time, it takes patience, but also you have to look at yourself just as closely as you look at the business. And I'm speaking of that's what I had to do. So I'm not saying what you should do, I'm just saying what I've had to do is look at myself really deeply to see where, what's the willingness and what are we able to take in order to start making some change here. So I started the retreat on Wednesday afternoon. Like I said, we started Wednesday at five o'clock, had dinner. And we did our company retreat this year at a place called Lookout Mountain, which is right outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was only about an hour and a half to two hour drive. We used to do it in Destin, Florida, which is about five and a half, six hours from Atlanta. But we decided to keep a little closer to make it easier for people. It was difficult for about two locations. Charlotte and Beaufort were a little further away, we decided, we made the decision that next year we'll do it at Greenville, South Carolina, which is three hours away from all 13 locations. So very just centralized hub for everyone. I started, like I said, Wednesday night after we had some food and what I wanted to do was take my team through the six growth engine framework for chiropractic success. Now, I will not be sharing that on today's call, and the reason why is because I'm building that out with complete clarity and presenting that at Growth Summit. This is something that I've been working on over the last six to seven months, but it's something that I've been building over the last 16 years of creating and building over 20 clinics. And it's something where I've seen historically the clinics that do the best pour in and have an even distribution of the six growth engine framework. And so I'll be sharing this at growth Summit, like I said, but every one of the areas in the six. They're not delegated to somebody to, chance or in emotion. Every single one of them has gotta have clarity. There's gotta be direction, there's gotta be consistency. And as we started to unpack each one, you could tell the room was getting a little quiet. Like people weren't just listening. And that conversation, I could feel it like people were taking it in, they were internalizing it, and they were looking within to see how can they be better. And that was. Such a great reflection. It took us about an hour and a half to two hours to go through all six growth engine frameworks. But you could start to see the shift happening on Thursday. I hired a consultant to come in and what he did was he sent my entire team a survey of seven questions, which I'll share in a little bit. He sent them a survey, and on that survey had seven questions, and the seven questions were, do I belong? I understand and embrace my organization's core values. And I have the skills, my job demands, I belong. And it was positive, negative, neutral feedback in that. Then they got to leave comments. The next one, do I believe I know and believe my organization's? Why? I also believe in our leadership, my teammates, our strategic direction and the products of services. We provide accountability. Do I understand and embrace what I'm accountable for? I understand and embrace the purpose of my job and the roles that make up my job. I know what I should be thinking about in doing and why I'm accountable. And then we went into measured, do I understand and embrace how I'm measured? I understand and embrace how and why I'm measured and I know what constitutes a good job. My measures give me directions and help me to form strategies and do great work in all my roles. I am well measured. Heard do I understand and embrace how my organization listens and how I'm heard. I understand and embrace how and when my organization listens. And responds, I am heard developed. Do I understand and embrace how I'm developed? I understand and embrace my organization's development mechanisms and how I'm developed. I know how to take an active role in my own development I'm developing. And then last one is balanced. Do I understand and embrace how I maintain balance? I understand and embrace my organization's definition of balance and the mechanisms I can use to achieve my goals. For balance, I am balanced. The three components of balance are work, life, compensation, health and wellness. And like I said, we were able to get question and answer from everybody. This was an anonymous survey and we got to see the score for how we ranked. And it was very enlightening to learn a lot of these questions from my team. And listen, it was not pretty, like all of it. Yeah, there were some great answers and I had some really just awesome team members who called me afterwards and said, Hey, I just want you to know, you know that whatever the negative comments were are not a reflection of me. That was, were not mine. I have full trust and confidence in you as our leader and in this company, and I'm happy to be here, which was really cool actually to have a couple people call me after the company retreat to share that with me. I'm a guy of words of affirmation, so I really love that. But to hear that was really fascinating and really great actually. And. I didn't walk into that room reactive though. Like I knew I was gonna get feedback from people in those roles'cause it was completely anonymous. I didn't know who wrote what and I knew the feedback was gonna be tough, but I also knew I couldn't be reactive, nor did I wanna be reactive. Like I was not there to fight fires. I was truly there to just understand leadership is not a checklist, it is not a sprint like leadership. It's a commitment to walking back into that room again and again. And when the feedback stings, like the feedback did sting, like there was one person who said that they felt like this company is a hundred percent, 100% focused on revenue and not their people, right? First off, does that person belong? Why would they be here? And that's usually a person who may self-select out. But I can appreciate the feedback. Every team remember this guys, every team deserves a leader who does not flinch. And what we found in that survey was not negativity, it was direction, it was clarity, but it was the exact roadmap for what we needed. Now, I shared all those questions with you, so you can go back and listen to this and jot those questions down for your team. So what happens next? What happens next when you take that feedback? Obviously you want to create change and you're not gonna change it overnight. What you do is you build a processes now in order to create structure. So for example, what we learned was that our office managers have this job title of office manager, but they do a lot of different roles that aren't clearly defined. They also don't know what does excellence look like in that role, but then they don't know who to reach out to or where to go when they're not hitting their metrics. So it was really good to have this like funnel that we can bring everything down to as we build our processes. Once again, another conversation, we'll be having a growth summit. But the model I always look at when I get this feedback is I like to look at Lencioni's five Dysfunctions of a team. Very simple model, but it plays out in real time. When you get this, and the first thing, like every company, every leader needs to have is trust. Then they have healthy conflict, then they get commitment. Then there's accountability, and then you see results. Most companies wanna jump straight to results, right? They get this feedback and they wanna go into the results. How's the change? What's the change gonna happen? But the foundation is cracked. And you know what I told my team is like, Hey, we're not skipping steps guys. We're building this pyramid from the ground up. Brick by brick got a con conversation by conversations and expectation, by expectation. And as the CEO of the company, the easy move is just to react to everything. Whoa me, they're wrong. I'm right. The right move in this scenario is to slow down. I've gotta look at the whole system and I've gotta build it from the bottom. The trust has to be there. And when the trust is strong, everything else can become lighter. And so where we will begin with everybody is rebuilding trust, then we can have our healthy conflict and then we'll focus on our getting the commitment again, creating accountability, and then the results. So that is a really good framework for those that are looking to have hard conversations with people in order to grow. You can't just go straight into conflict. There's gotta be trust there because there's no trust. It does, nothing else matters. And I've talked about this before in previous podcast episodes too as well, where, when I talk about when I was talking about the five levels of leadership, so this is exactly what I'm talking about right here. It's very similar concepts. And if I look at personal growth from this retreat, like this was not the gain was not operational, like purely personal. I saw where I needed to grow as a leader, where I can communicate better, where I need to be more present. Where I need to call people up. Not call them out, but call'em up. Where I need to be more direct in a way that builds not just breaks guys. Some of my walkaways when I walked away from this place was just like this confidence that we're not just running clinics. And I've talked about this one of the podcasts, we're not running clinics, we're building people, we're building leaders. And I told every my team this, we're building something our future selves are gonna look back on and think that mattered. We made an impact and we built something that lasted. That is the part that keeps echoing in my mind is legacy. We have the right people right now. We've got the best people. Everybody who's on this team wants to be here. The these are not, these are the kind of people that they're showing up as leaders and they want to grow, but, and they, a lot of them grew up inside this company. Patients' lives will be changed, families will be supported because somebody decided to step up into their role and into their full potential and. I cannot continually elaborate on the knowledge and the feedback you can get from these type of retreats. Y'all this, these retreats are not meetings like it is a checkpoint and a recalibration. I get to breathe, listen, and really recommit to this long game again. So if you're listening to this and you're running a clinic or any business, I'm gonna tell you right now, one of the best decisions you can make is to step outta the daily grind. Once a year, give your team space to grow. People will tell you, oh, it costs too much, or it takes time. And you may think that too as well. When you do these events with intention, it truly becomes a springboard for you. It's a reset, essentially, like it is a strengthening of the foundation. You are rebuilding the foundation. You're not just going into results, you're not going into accountability, you're not going into commitment, you're not going into conflict. You're rebuilding trust, and that's what this retreat was for us. How do we build back up the right way, slow, steady, and aligned? A little bit of a shorter episode today, but just such a great time with my team. I wanted to share some of that feedback that I got from everybody and how you could use this and leverage this to your business. And you're just, you're building your clinic and your business brick by brick. I'm somebody who acquires clinics. I buy clinics. And when I'm buying clinics, there's almost zero foundation in the clinics that I buy when I work with my clients. In my Empire program, one of the biggest things I see is really just lack of leadership and vision. They're great on, they're great on clinical care, they're great on experience, they're great on the tactical stuff inside the business, but it come, a lot of it comes down to leadership and vision. How do you create leadership and vision? You get outta the daily grind for a weekend or a couple days or even a day, and you start listening to your team. Like I always say this, you guys have more resources now than ever before with chat, GPT and other AI platforms. Ask it, Hey, I'm going to do a retreat this weekend and I want to give a survey to my team to learn more about my company and where I've lost trust and how I can grow as a leader and we can grow this company. Give me a 20 question survey that I can give to them two weeks before and that I can study. But also upload to you to help me with a framework to grow. Very simple guys. Use your resources. So anyways, hope y'all enjoyed this. We'll get another episode out probably this week or next week, de before Thanksgiving. But great time right now to be doing these company retreats would be like November, December. And if you are being reactive and you don't know what you're gonna do or what to say, honestly, I probably will push it till January. Knowing that November was such a great time to do it as well. So anyways, hope everyone has a great day. Listen, gimme your feedback. If you're doing comfort of your treats, lemme know. How's that going for you? Have a great day everybody. thanks for listening to the Austin Cohen podcast. If this episode helped you grow, share it with another chiropractor who's ready to go beyond the adjustment, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. To learn more about building your business, leadership, and life on purpose, visit chiro one eighty.com or follow Austin on Instagram at Dr. Austin Cohen.