“I look after 10 chiropractic practices that are mostly populated with younger chiropractors. They expect far more money than when I started out and don’t seem to want to work very hard. Any suggestions?”




There may be some generational issues in play, and the high debt levels that many younger chiropractors are saddled with doesn’t help. However, there are some strategies you can employ that hold the promise of breaking through the resistance you may be experiencing. But first, a couple of important distinctions related to your “they don’t want to work very hard” observation.

Manage/Lead

Managing focuses on processes, organization, and efficiency. Managers plan, coordinate, and oversee daily operations, ensuring procedures are followed, recommended scripting is used, and the patient experience is consistently optimized.

Leading is about vision, inspiration, and encouragement. Leaders guide people toward a common goal, fostering innovation, adaptability, and vision casting. They prioritize people, culture, and personal and professional growth.

It sounds as if your issue may be more about leadership than management.

Motivate/Inspire

Motivating employees involves external incentives such as rewards, recognition, promotions, or deadlines. It drives short-term performance by addressing immediate needs or goals. Motivation, like a drug, often must be continually administered to maintain the wanted effect, and thus is rarely a sustainable, long-term strategy.

Inspiring employees requires tapping into their internal passion and purpose, aligning their personal values with the larger vision of your business. Inspiration holds the promise of long-term engagement, creativity, and enticing emotional commitment.

It sounds as if your challenge may be mostly about how to inspire your team.

Your Goals/Their Goals

Probably the most significant issue you’d want to be mindful of is that your goals are almost certainly not their goals.

I’m assuming your chiropractors are getting a salary. If there isn’t a base with increased pay from hitting certain statistical goals, your job is more difficult, but not impossible. Even then, once reaching a certain income level (which some may have already reached), more money is rarely much of an inducement to fuel the greater productivity you seek.

This is when you should appeal to their deeper purpose and the emotional rewards of serving a suffering public. This is challenging too, because what inspires you may not inspire them.

Just what is it that inspires each member on your team?

It is through this lens you’d want to frame the goals of your enterprise. Your ability to translate what inspires them into action steps that furthers the objectives of your business is how you shine as a leader.

Passion From Purpose

Start by uncovering why each member of your professional team chose to become a chiropractor. Be ready for an unhelpful vagueness, generalities, or a selfish inwardness about making a professional income, a shortcut to being a doctor, wanting to “work with my hands,” or far more common, “I don’t know.”

Your ability to help each of your doctors see themselves pursuing a bigger vision than simply paying down their student loans or driving a luxury automobile is essential. Your mission is to create an emotionally safe place where this introspection can take place—if it hasn’t—and be revealed if it has.

Many people do not know their purpose. Without this self-examination you have a culture that sees their job as work, reserving significant emotional investments for their personal time, hobbies, and other pursuits. This is a soulless existence, yet by some estimates, is shared by almost half of the workforce.

Hopefully you have team members who are passionate about chiropractic and find that serving patients is not merely a job, but a career, even a calling. If your young charges have not identified and articulated their purpose, their “prime directive,” start there. Ultimately, your mission is to inspire others to live their purpose—as they contribute to yours. (We explore this in more detail during Week 12 of HeadSpace Coaching.)

Doing Vs. Purpose

Many chiropractors, even those with considerable experience, think their purpose is to adjust patients. Because that’s what they do and derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. Case closed.

But adjusting patients is not a purpose.

Now, if an appliance in your home washes your dishes, it’s purpose is to wash dishes. Machines lack an emotional component essential for harnessing one’s discretionary energy. It’s this emotional piece you’d want to be especially mindful of.

Adjusting patients is merely a way to pursue, actualize, or attempt to manifest one’s purpose. In other words, it’s a means, not an end. As a leader you would want to coax your doctor’s to do the work necessary to uncover and put their purpose into language—which will help them—and guide you to more effectively harness their energies.

Uncovering a Big Why

Simon Sinek has tackled this subject in his popular book, Start With Why, How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. Until you read (or reread) this instructive book, coach your team to spend some time in deep thought about their unique answers to some of the following questions. They may help uncover some facet of one’s purpose. Don’t settle for the first answer. Go deep until it reverberates emotionally and feels naturally right.

1. What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve overcome, and how did they shape who you are?

2. What occasions have caused you to feel most alive and in a state of flow, and what were you doing?

3. In what situations did you find yourself experiencing joy (spiritual)—not merely happiness (emotional)?

4. Consider the perfect day in practice. What is the most important element that makes it perfect?

5. What problems or challenges do you feel deeply compelled to solve?

6. What wound are you trying to heal in others that you once had to heal in yourself?

7. In what specific ways would you like to make the world a better place?

8. If you knew you had only one year to live, what would you focus on?

9. If you were unable to practice, what activity or career would you pursue that might offer a similar sense of satisfaction?

10. When you’re on your deathbed, what will have been your greatest achievement?

Exploring the answers to these questions takes time. Months. Maybe years. And while you’d probably want to ask questions like these before hiring them, it’s never too late to show up curious and respectful.

Hope that helps. Thanks for the question.

Ask Bill your question.

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