๏ปฟCassie_Solo_Pod_6-2-26
[00:00:00] Cassie Kellner: Welcome to The Bloom Effect. I'm your host, Cassie Kellner, former chairside assistant turned team coach and founder of Everbloom. This podcast is all about the real stuff, honest convos, leadership lessons, and the heart behind thriving orthodontic teams. If you're ready to grow, lead, and bloom, let's dive in Welcome back to The Bloom Effect.
[00:00:24] I'm your host, Cassie Kilner, and founder of Everbloom, and I'm so excited that you carved out to- carved out the time for this one today because I wanna talk about a phrase that I hear constantly in practices, and every time I hear it, I feel it a little bit in my chest. Okay, you guys ready for the phrase?
[00:00:46] Here we go. "We've always done it this way." Take it in, guys. That's what we're unpacking today, and why it is one of the most dangerous phrases and things that is happening in your practice right now, and what it's actually costing you, and what you should be doing instead. So because I really do believe that a lot of what feels like a team problem or a communication problem or a retention problem actually starts here with this one quiet belief that the way you've always done something is still, take that in, is still the right way to do it.
[00:01:34] Now, sometimes that is true, but in 2026, I'm gonna argue that it's time to look at what we're currently doing and if it works in 2026. Okay? So let's go. First, I wanna talk about where the a- where this phrase actually lives because I think people assume that they'd recognize it if it was happening in their practice, and sometimes it will, right?
[00:02:02] But a lot of the time it won't because this phrase doesn't always announce itself. It's, it's... The, the obvious version is the one that shows up in a team meeting, right? Where you're talking about changing something, maybe you wanna move away from, paper lab slips, or you want to think off your handoffs when something happens.
[00:02:27] Maybe it's your new patient system and you wanna, think through that handoff, right? And someone on your team says out loud, "Well, we've always done it this way," and the energy in your room shifts, okay? Then people panic, and what happens? The idea can get tabled, and you move on because the resistance feels like too much to take on right now.
[00:02:53] You're getting too much pushback from too many individuals or one individual that has a lot of power in your practice, and the thing that wasn't working keeps not working. That version is super easy to spot. But then there's another version that does way more damage. And most practice owners never catch it because it happens in their own head.
[00:03:19] Okay? So someone on your team suggests something different, and your first instinct, your first instinct is, "That's not how we do things here." And you think about making the change and immediately start ca- calculating how much pushback you'd get, how long it would take, how much easier it is to keep doing it the way that you've always been doing it.
[00:03:45] And it doesn't That it doesn't necessarily feel like resistance. It actually just makes you feel like you're being realistic about the situation. But what it actually is, take this in, you guys, what it actually is is comfort. And comfort is not the same thing as right. Comfort is not the same thing as being right.
[00:04:12] Okay? And then there's, like, a third version here, and this one, I think, is probably the most important to understand. This term, this dangerous term, "We've always done it this way," actually then becomes a cultural belief that when things go unchallenged for long enough, even though they're broken, it becomes this kind of unspoken rule, and nobody asks questions because no one's ever questioned it before, right?
[00:04:44] And once this becomes cultural, it shapes every single thing in your practice. It shapes how your team handles problems, whether your team is actually bringing you ideas, whether your team feels safe enough to tell you when something isn't working. Take that in: whether your team feels safe enough to tell you when something is not working in your practice.
[00:05:13] Culture is built from what you tolerate. Take that in. Culture is built from what you tolerate and what you celebrate, right? So when you tolerate, "Oh, we've always done it this way. We're not gonna make this big change, and it's too much for us to comprehend or too much for us to take on right now," right?
[00:05:36] And as a reason to stay still, stay still, stay status quo, right? You are building a culture of staying still. And in 2026, staying still is not neutral. Staying still is actually falling behind. I have to, I have to be so real in this because if you stay still, right, you will, you will fall behind. This industry is moving incredibly fast.
[00:06:09] Let me be specific, okay? When I say the way we've always done it, I'm talking about paper lab slips, right? paper lab slips. This sticky note on the front desk monitor that has been there for three years and nobody remembers who wrote it. The verbal handoff that happens, at the end of an appointment between your clinical team and your scheduling coordinator, right?
[00:06:35] And maybe that note or that handoff or that communication didn't actually reach the right person. That person may or may not have remembered it accurately by the end of the day, and it's absolutely not traceable if something falls through. These are not systems, you guys. It is 2026. We are fresh off the Ortho Society, and let me tell you something I said to the Ortho Society when we were sitting there.
[00:07:05] In this digital day and age, and in the day and age of AI, there is no reason why we do not have dedicated systems that are digital in our practice. There's, there's, there's absolutely no reason. There is no reason why anyone should have paper SOPs, and I'm talking paper. I'm not even talking PDF, okay? If you have PDF, you're, you're, you're, you're ahead of the game.
[00:07:33] You need to have digital everything in your practice. We are in 2026. You need dedicated systems to be able to support your team. So when your team comes to you and says, "Hey, I saw this at a meeting," or, "I saw a lecture about this, and I really believe that this is the next step for this practice." Instead of the full-blown panic.
[00:07:59] That will happen. I'm not saying that you can't panic, by any means. Are you kidding? It's important that we're listening to our teams and we are not staying still, right? Because, these are... These things that I just talked about, those are not systems. These paper Post-its that are landing places or this message I gave to someone without holding accountability, these are not systems.
[00:08:19] These are workarounds, and every single workaround that you allow in your practice is a place where something can fall through. And let me tell you, whether you're a startup with five team members or you have four locations and five orthodontists working with you and t- 52 team members, things can fall through.
[00:08:42] if a lab case does not get followed up on because the paper slip got buried, a task that everyone assumed that someone else was handling because it was communicated out loud in a morning huddle, but nobody wrote it down. Patients slip, that slip through the cracks because the handoff lived in a sticky note and then ended in the trash.
[00:09:05] This isn't a... It's not a people problem. This is not a people problem. This is a systems problem. I talk about this often, building from the inside out. This is not a people problem. This is a systems problem, and we are not building systems that are good enough for 2026. Your team is doing exactly what they can and what they've been given.
[00:09:29] The issue is the structure, and if the structure is a p- is paper and memory and verbal agreements, then you have built something that just can't be held accountable. It cannot scale, scale, and it cannot protect anyone in your practice when things go left, when things go sideways, and that's including you.
[00:09:52] You as a leader listening to this cannot protect yourself when things go sideways. So here's what all of this actually costs you, and I wanna be honest with you about this because I think most practice owners have a vague sense that their systems are okay, or maybe they're not great, or they think they're great, but they haven't actually sat down with the price tag itself because the cost doesn't necessarily show up in a line item, right?
[00:10:24] You're not gonna find it in your numbers or Maybe you will because the cost of turnover is real, but you're not gonna find a tangible number in this if you don't have systems that work because this is invisible until it isn't, right? Until it shows up in the rework, until it shows up in the conversation you have to have three times because it wasn't captured right the first time, the task that keeps getting redone because whoever picked it up didn't have the to- context that they actually needed.
[00:10:53] The time, the time, you guys. Everyone I hear doesn't have enough time. None of us have enough time. It, it's... That's the truth. But the time that you or your team spend every single week putting out fires that a clear process, a clear SOP would have prevented, it shows up in your team. The, the slow burn of working somewhere where things keep falling through the cracks, nobody quite knows who- whose fault it is, even though we're superly, super secretly pointing fingers behind the scenes because nothing is documented, and the ownership was actually never assigned.
[00:11:41] That frustration builds quietly for months, and then one day someone hands you their notice, and you are absolutely blindsided, or maybe you're not. Even though, if you're being honest here, there were signs, right? It shows up in your patient experience. When the handoff gets dropped, patients feel it. They...
[00:12:03] Honestly, they can't name it, but they know something's off. They feel the gap between what they were told would happen and what actually happened. And in a world where they have more choices and reviews that are so public, right? That gap actually costs, and it shows up in you, in the exhaustion of being the one who holds it all together because you are the only one who fully understands how everything works.
[00:12:38] That can go for any team member in your practice, in the feeling that you cannot genuinely step away for a day because the moment you do, something breaks, in carrying the practice home with you every single night I have to tell you something. That is not leadership. That is a trap, and it is a trap built out of processes that were never documented and ownership that was never assigned.
[00:13:06] So I wanna talk about accountability because I know that this word excites people, but it also makes people incredibly uncomfortable, and I think I know why. Because no one wants to work somewhere that feels like surveillance, right? We're talking accountability, not micromanagement. And when practice owners start talking about systems and tracking and visibility, and sometimes that picture lands different for the team, and I get it, right?
[00:13:35] But that's not what accountability is to me. So let me be very direct. Accountability, take this in, you guys, accountability is clarity. It's knowing who owns what, when, and why. That's it. Who owns what, when, and why. Being able to look at any task and any process at any point and say, "That person owns this."
[00:14:01] And then if you go one step further, you go, "That person owns this, and if that person isn't here, that person," right? So you have a primary and secondary. "That is the secondary person who owns this." From this step to that step to the next step, theirs. And when something goes wrong, which it will, let's get real, we are human, we have a lot of moving parts in these practices, you can trace it.
[00:14:27] And this is not to punish anyone. This is just to understand what broke in the process, how do we fix it, and we just make sure that it doesn't happen again, right? And we want to make sure that it is written and documented, and then we fix it, and then we fix it again. And that's it. That's accountability.
[00:14:45] It's the only way that your systems become visible. When they live somewhere, then it's real. It's not in someone's head. It's not on a paper slip. It's not in a conversation from two months ago that nobody fully remembers because no one was, was awake at that 7:00 AM morning huddle. Here is what I have seen over and over and over again when I go into practices and I start building this.
[00:15:12] The team is relieved, right? They're not defensive. They're not resistant. They are relieved because so many of them have been operating without true clarity for some their entire careers, but for years they didn't fully know what was expected of them. They didn't know who owned what. They didn't know that they were doing their, their...
[00:15:36] They did not know that they were truly doing their best in their job, right? They were quietly hoping that they were doing it right. So when you build the systems with real visibility and real ownership, and you're not adding pressure to your team, you're actually removing it, you're telling them, "Here is what success looks like in your role.
[00:15:59] Here is what you own, and here is we know... Here is how we know that it's working." And I gotta tell you something, that is a gift. That is a gift for any operation out there, any operation. I don't care what industry you're in, right? There's something specific that I see in almost every single practice that I work with, and I want to name it directly because I think it's one of the most underestimated risks in this industry.
[00:16:28] I call it Knowledge in one person's head problem, right? It lives in your brain. If you have someone on your team who has been there for years and she knows everything, how the doctor likes their lab slips done, what their clin checks look like, which insurance company needs this, the patient who always cancel and needs to be called days ahead, the patient that needs more time.
[00:16:56] w- they know where, where everything lives, how everything w- works, what to do in the situations that were never formally addressed because she figured it out with trial by fire somewhere along the way. She's incredible. Take this in. If you're that person, yes, girl, yes. She's the kind of person you genuinely do not know what you would do without, right?
[00:17:23] You do not know what you would do without this individual. And your entire... This is what, this is... Take this in, you guys. This means your entire operation is one resignation, one medical leave, or one unexpected life event away from chaos because none of what this individual knows lives anywhere except Inside her head.
[00:17:54] And that is not her fault. That, my friends, is a perfect example of a systems failure, and it's one that practice owners create usually most times honestly without realizing it. And when they let things informally run for too long, your practice is more fragile than you know, right? What it's saying is it lives in this individual's head, but she's also trapped, too.
[00:18:22] When she's the only one who knows how something works, she can't actually take a day off without breathing, right? She carries it with her. She picks up her phone when she's on vacation. She answers the texts when she's sick because she knows what, w- what can happen if she doesn't, and that's not fair to her.
[00:18:40] And honestly, it's not sustainable to the practice owner, to the team, to the individual, to anyone. So the fix here is, my friends, documentation, pulling this knowledge out of individuals' heads and putting it somewhere real, a written process, clear ownership, a video, a very clear subject in Trainual, a system that a new person can follow if they had to, right?
[00:19:06] That's how you protect your people. That's how you protect your team. That's how you protect yourself as a leader. That's how you protect your practice, and that is how you stop being one resignation away from a crisis. I wanna address something before we keep going here because I think it's a... This is the part where some people start to check out, and so I wanna talk about digital systems and visible workflows and built-in accountability because s- people sometimes hear, "You need to overhaul new some...
[00:19:39] You, you need to overhaul everything. You need to buy this. You need to spend money here. You know, you don't have a, a... You don't have a six-month implementation before any of it gets better." That's not what I'm saying. This isn't a technology problem. There's no s- software that's going to fix your culture, right?
[00:19:59] Those things have to be built intentionally, and they start with decision. What I'm saying is that your systems have to live somewhere visible. Us at Everbloom, we have a toolbox. We use Trainual. We use Asana. We use Disk. We use Mint, right? It just has to live Somewhere. It can't be in a duster binder, dusty binder.
[00:20:20] It cannot be on a random server. It can't be on someone's desktop. It has to live in one designated area. It certainly can't be on a piece of paper that's getting lost, right? It's not someone's memory that can be interrupted. It's not a verbal agreement that two people on the same team can remember because guess what?
[00:20:40] They remember it differently. Don't you guys remember the game of telephone when we were younger? What it looks like, it's different for every single practice, and for some of you, it actually means using a task management system, right? A lot of people are using Asana. a, a lot of people are using Trainual.
[00:20:57] These are two very different tools. Trainual's for onboarding and training. Asana is for task management. It's essentially your practice brain where it holds all of your systems. And for others, it means just we're sharing processes in a digital way, right? They're written out clear, clearly, and anyone can access them, and for some, it means a digital tool, right?
[00:21:18] Platform matters less here, you guys. What I'm trying to get at is if it's not written down and it's not visible, if ownership isn't assigned to one specific person, it doesn't exist in a system. It exists in hope and hope is not a workflow. Okay, one more thing before I tell you what to do with all of this because I want to talk to you about this, "We've always done it this way" does to your culture when it goes unchallenged for long enough.
[00:21:49] Your team is watching how you respond to new ideas. They are watching whether you explore them or whether you dismiss them, whether you m- you're modeling curi- cur- whether you are modeling curiosity and openness or whether you default back to the way things have always been. I gotta tell you something, in 2026, that has to be the most exhausting piece when you work so hard as a team to put in a new process and then within 30 days you go back to the way things have always been because it was comfortable, right?
[00:22:24] Your team is calibrating their behavior based on what they see and if someone is suggesting a better, better, better way of doing something and it gets pushed back on or it gets tabled or, or it quietly disappears, they will stop suggesting things and they will keep doing things the way that they've always been done and that's not because they don't have ideas.
[00:22:47] That's because they learned that it wasn't worth them sharing this idea and when that happens, you have lost something that is really, really, really, really hard to get back. You've lost the honest feedback loop that tells you when something in your practice isn't. You are now operating on incomplete information.
[00:23:08] You think things are fine because no one is telling you that they're not, but that's the reason that no one is telling you. It's because they've learned you don't wanna hear it or you don't have the capacity to hear it or your leadership doesn't have the capacity to hear it, right? It's, it's not complicated Right?
[00:23:28] Asking why do we do it this way, and genuinely wanting to know the answer, being willing to say out loud, "I don't know if this is still the best way. Let's look at this." Creating a team environment where someone can say, "I think there's a better way," or, "I think that we can change this workflow and cut this entire process out because it's taking too long, and we don't really need it anymore in 2026 because we have a brand-new system that we're using."
[00:23:57] When you're able, when your team is able to say, "I think there's a better way," and, and, and they're able to be taken seriously, that's the shift in how you handle that one phrase. It can change your en- the entire climate of your practice. And a practice where people feel safe telling the truth will always, listen to this, will always outperform one where everyone just keeps their heads down.
[00:24:29] Okay, so here's what I actually want you to do with all of this. I want you to pick one process in your practice this week. Just one. Just one. Something that is currently paper-based or verbal only or primarily lives in someone's head. Oh my gosh, get that out of their head. It doesn't have to be the hardest one.
[00:24:46] I just want you to pick one, and I want you to ask you, yourself, your team, anyone, anyone, ask if anyone on your team needed to handle this today without being walked through it, without someone having to walk them through it, could they do it? Is ownership clearly assigned? Is there one specific person who owns this from start to finish, and do they know they own it?
[00:25:15] If that person called in sick tomorrow, what happens? Does the process keep moving, or does it stop? If your answers are no, no, and it stops, then you've found a starting point. And here's what I want you to do. You sit down whomever currently holds that process, and you document it, and it's not a 40-page manual.
[00:25:33] It's just a clear step-by-step for the modern learner Right? Who does what, when, where does it get recorded so that anyone can see it? You write it down somewhere so that it won't disappear. It has to be in a digital format. You assign one owner, and you make it visible. That's the first step. And then you do it again with the next one, and then the one after that.
[00:26:00] One process at a time. You build something that doesn't depend on any one person's memory to function, something that can handle a call-out, right? Somebody calls out sick, we're not panicking. Something that you could onboard someone new without three months of a learning curve, right? Something your team can actually stand on.
[00:26:23] So here's what I want you to walk away with today. This quote, "We've always done it this way," is not a reason, it's a reflex. And like any reflex, you can look at it directly, and you can question it, and you can choose to do something different. Your practice in 2026 is operating in a much different world, typically, unless you're a startup, than the one you built it in.
[00:26:50] If you opened your practice in 1998, I've got something to tell you: times have changed. You guys know this. We know this. Why do we know this? Because we'd all still be taking impressions if we were doing that, right? Your team has different needs. Your patients have different expectations. And the stakes, your culture, your retention, your own accountabil- your own accountability to actually lead without burning out, those stakes are higher than they have ev- ever, ever, ever been.
[00:27:20] So holding on to the way that you've always done something, especially when it's built on paper slips and sticky notes and one person's memory, is not loyalty to your practice. It is a risk. You built something worth protecting. Now build the systems that actually protect it. If this one hit close to home, please share it with someone in your practice or someone in your world who needs to hear it.
[00:27:49] And if you're ready to actually look at your systems and build systems, you can find me. You know where to find me, but I just want you to start here. Thanks for being with me today. I'll see you next time. Thank you for joining me on The Bloom Effect, where we keep it real, keep it growing, and always keep it team first.
[00:28:08] If today's episode sparked something for you, an idea, a shift, or just a reminder that you're not alone, take a second and share it with your team or a fellow ortho leader. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss a convo, and if you're loving the show, leave a review. It helps more practices find us and join the movement.
[00:28:26] And if you're ready to bring this kind of energy into your practice, visit discovereverbloom.com to learn more about working together. Until next time, keep leading with heart, keep building with intention, and keep blooming right where you're planted
