EntreLeadership - Business Owner: Our Team Survey Shocked Us

Episode Date: September 4, 2026

📝 Shape what comes next for the EntreLeadership show by participating in our 2026 audience study. After you complete the survey, you can enter for a chance to win a Standard ticket to EntreLeadership® Summit 2027.   When leadership breaks down in the middle, confusion spreads through the entire organization.  In this episode, Head Coach John Felkins coaches a business owner through how to identify gaps in her leadership structure, create greater role clarity, and equip her managers to lead with confidence.   Next Steps: ·      🎯 Not sure what to do next in your business? Let’s figure it out together. Book a free 30-minute consult call with the EntreLeadership Team. ·    🚀 Get the proven road map to scale your business.  ·      📞 Have a question for the show? Call 844-944-1070 or send us a message. ·      📚 Order Dave’s most recent EntreLeadership book, Build a Business You Love. ·      📧 Get EntreLeadership’s free weekly newsletter: expert advice and practical tips from the same playbook we used to build Ramsey Solutions into a $300 million company. ·      🌎 Attend our world-class leadership conference, EntreLeadership Summit. ·      📝 Stop guessing. Get a plan built for your business and someone who holds you to it. Find out which coaching option is right for you. ·      📈 Bad hires. Strategies that never get off the ground. 60-hour workweeks. Sleepless nights. EntreLeadership Master Series[KL3]  is where you trade all of that for the exact systems our Executive Team used to scale to $300 million. Don’t wait until seats are sold out.   Connect With Our Sponsors: ·      Go to Belay Solutions or text ENTRE to 55123 for their free resource! ·       See if Christian Healthcare Ministries Groups are the right fit for your organization. ·      Visit NetSuite today to learn more.   Listen to More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💰 George Kamel   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, I really need your help with something. I want you to shape what comes next for the Entree Leadership Show by participating in our 2026 audience study. Text survey to 33789 to get the link or go to ramsysolutions.com slash survey. Once you've completed the survey, you can enter for a chance to win a standard ticket to Entree Leadership Summit 2027. The survey closes September 30th. When leadership expectations aren't clear, confusion and resentment spread to the entire team.

Jennifer Scurry is the co-founder of a hospice care company in Indiana, and she's dealing with a challenge many growing business owners face. Her chain of command looks good on paper, but in practice, communication is breaking down. No one really knows what they're responsible for and the team members don't trust management. Today we're joining head coach John Falcons as he helps Jennifer uncover what's really causing these problems in her business and how to create more clarity and trust without becoming a micromanager. If you're struggling with inconsistent communication or a team that keeps looking to you

for answers, this conversation is for you. Let's get to it. Well, Jennifer, thanks for coming and hanging out today. Thanks for having me. Of course. Excited to be here. Well, we're excited to have you. Tell me a little bit about your business and what's going on.

We actually just did a clinical survey of our staff. How is our leadership doing? Are you able to perform your job to your satisfaction? We came back with overwhelming nose. Oh, that doesn't feel good, doesn't it? It does not feel good. But it's an opportunity. It hurts.

You know, it hurts to see that. That's not the goals that we have. Right. The biggest thing is middle management, not communicating effectively, feeling like the answer changes no matter who they go to, feeling that they don't trust the answers of the middle leadership. There's apparently been some conversations where they quote unquote hear, the middle management saying, I don't understand why they're not getting their job done because it's easy.

You know, those things are detrimental. We don't want to hear that. Right. And it was news to me. So that set off some bells too. Mm-hmm. Yep. So tell me a little bit more about the chain of command. How are you all set up? You and your partner, I assume, are at the head of the whole thing. And then who reports to you? So we have a director of professional services. Okay. And, you know, and, you're Human Resources report to us. The Director of Professional Services, clinical manager reports to her. Okay.

And then under the clinical manager, you have the whole clinical team. When it comes to hiring, performance reviews, and the leadership of those people, how much do you rely on HR versus how much do you rely on the clinical manager? The clinical manager, I would say, probably 80%.

80%? Quite a bit. Including the hiring and the selection of the... Yes. So as you look at the chain of command from top to front line, where are you seeing the breakdown? Knowing what I know now, the breakdown is with my...

Jamie and I, I feel like. Fair enough. Going to then the middle clinical team. Okay. What do you think the middle clinical team needs to? clinical team needs to be able to lead the frontline team successfully. They need better structure. What do you mean by structure?

So what I've realized here very, very recently is when I got help making up a KRA, yes. It was not what they're doing. The KRA, when we make a KRA, we had them list out their job duties. Okay. They are complete office. Okay, so you made a KRA, they make a KRA, and you guys are, you're missing each other. Absolutely.

Okay. Were there patterns or like, was there themes in how y'all missed each other, or was it just all over the place? It was all over the place. It was all over the place. Our business at that level seems to be running more task oriented. Sure. So, Jamie and I have more of a vision. Right.

And we're missing the mark casting that vision down. Okay. Potentially. So when I look at the KRA for the director of professional services, it's more benchmarking patient satisfaction, team camaraderie. And her job duties when she lists them out as like ordering supplies, running, you know, ordering patient supplies, making sure the on-call calendar's done. and things like that. And it's, they're not, they're not meshing. We're missing the mark there. What have you done around strategic planning

and setting 12 month goals and even further, like a three to five year vision for the company? So we did have a strategic meeting at the end of last year. Okay, was that your first? That was our first. Okay, all right. And we used the elite tool for that

and that was helpful. Actually, when we created that and we had that meeting, those goals have mostly been met. Fantastic. And then looking three to five years out, we haven't done that. That's okay. That's okay.

The way that we work that process is we ask ourselves, okay, what's our mission? What are we trying to accomplish in the world? Okay. You know, what is the difference that we want to make in the marketplace? And that's very thematic and not necessarily quantifiable. That's okay.

But then we ask ourselves, three to five years from today, what would it look like if we succeeded at our mission? So let's say, I'm going to totally make this up, so don't take what I'm about to say literally, but let's say we have hospice care and our mission is to make a difference in all of Indiana for customers that need to put a loved one into hospice care, that they would be confident, they would be comforted, and they would be, you know, taken care of, or whatever it is that you come up with. And then you gotta ask yourself, well, three years from now,

how will I know I've made progress on that? And you could say, well, we have this many customers today, we want to 3x the number of customers, or whatever it is. And that gives you a North Star that's far enough out in front of you that you know this is directional clarity. This is the way we're going.

It's not so much that it's 3x or 4. 3x or 4x, it's that we're going in this direction. And then, like you mentioned, everybody in the team knows that. This is what we're trying to do. This is what winning looks like. This is what we're trying to accomplish. We'll get right back to our episode, but first, as your business grows, everything gets more complex.

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dot a i slash ramsie now let's get back to the episode then we use the strategic planning process and our what we call the desired future where we say okay we know three to five years from today this is where we want to be where do we want to be by the end of the year because by the end of the year we can look at that and say we could get there three to five might feel really far away but at the end of the year we could hit this number we could do this we could have this satisfaction rating or this number of, you know, customers, whatever it is. And then we ask ourselves the question, what are four or five big things that we have to get done or be really good at to hit that 12-month mark?

And we write that down. And everybody knows, Jennifer is responsible for this one, Jamie's responsible for this one, Susie's responsible for this one, and Eddie is, I just added Susie and Eddie to your team. They're responsible for these. They're going to drive these initiatives because we know these four to five, four to six things are the things that are going to take what it's going to take to get to 12 months.

And then those people become kind of the air traffic controller to make sure those things happen. Like one of your things is going to be role clarity. We have directional clarity, but we need role clarity because we're all over the place on what a KRA actually is, right? Correct. And then my encouragement to you is,

is you did this once and you hit your numbers. Like, that's fantastic. I'll tell you, for us, we do this, and then every 90 days, we stop and check in. We say, okay, for the next 12, this is where we want to get. But every 90 days, every quarter, we take an afternoon or a day, and we say, where are we? What's working? What's not working? These four to six things, are we doing these?

And, you know, who needs help? What's not working? And sometimes we say, that got accomplished. we don't need to do that anymore. Let's put something new in that spot and keep churning towards our 12-month number. And we'd do that, month after month after month,

12 months after 12 months after 12 months. You and I both know, 36 months, three years. Goes by like that. Goes by like that. So I really applaud you for having the 12-month perspective, but just do it again. Just sit down again and say, y'all, and if you're like me,

I need to remind you of something. Make sure that you celebrate the win. Yeah. Right? Because it's so easy to hit the number. And in your head, in my head, next. Absolutely. Let's keep going.

100%. So just do it again. Refresh the whole thing. Set a new number and keep going. And then just tackle the thing. You know role clarity is a problem. So, you know, we have the clinical team and they're reporting to the director of professional services.

and the clinical manager, that's not working. We have a big problem. At what point do Jamie and I kind of step back in and maybe micromanage some of that a little bit? The other thing I'm realizing is we did not train them appropriately. I can appreciate that, and there might be cases to do that. And I will answer your question, but I really want you to set the North Star first.

Okay. Because you're the only one that can, get out ahead of the business and do that. Okay. And then once you have that in place, then I would say, look at your team. You know, you can write a whole list of your direct reports and your key people and ask yourself the question, where are the gaps that we need to fill? What I'm saying is, is you need to break it down into pieces.

Because if you look at all of that, if you say, gosh, our next level leadership, just, they're not quite where we need them to be. That can be kind of overwhelming. Very. And you don't know where to start. Sure. So write a list of names and then write the skills out, you know, that they all need to be in leadership. And then maybe what you can do, I've seen this work well, just put a little red, yellow, green, by skill, by name.

And then you've got a picture, and you can attack the picture in pieces, you know. This person needs this. This person needs this. This person needs this. But don't try and do it all at once, right? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And so I would just do a little bit of an audit on your team

after you've set the North Star because that's what everybody needs to move in the same direction and in the, you know, where you want to take the business. Then do the audit of the team and then start filling the holes. And I would encourage you that it doesn't need to be micromanagement or doesn't need to be thought of as micromanagement because training is not micromanagement.

Micromanagement is when you've trained somebody, you've given them the responsibility, but you stand over their shoulders still and watch them do that. And I know that's not what you're doing. Right. If somebody is just deficient in a skill, you come alongside them and you say, hey, you're fantastic, I don't want you to take this

as a lack of confidence, but I want to show you something. I want to share something with you that, you know what, it's my fault that I didn't show this to you before, but I want to show you this is the best way this works. Watch me do this. They watch you do it, then you say, now you do it, and I'm going to watch you do it and be here to answer your question.

And you do that until they get it and they don't have questions and then you say, you got this, holler if you, you know, if you run into a problem or you've got a question, and then you can take the step back. But if you just jump in and just do it, then they're not going to learn in the process. Correct. And then you're going to be, you're going to be right back to where you started. That makes sense. I appreciate that.

I think you can do it. You think that'll help? Thank you. Oh, I think it'll definitely help. Fantastic. You got this. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer.

One of the most common challenges businesses face is figuring out how to create clarity, alignment, and accountability as the team gets bigger. Because what worked when everyone reported directly to you often stops working as new leaders and new layers of responsibility are added. It starts with you creating that clarity from the top. The good news is you don't have to solve those challenges alone. If you're feeling stuck in your business, go ahead and schedule a free 30-minute consultation call with one of our Entree Leadership coaches. We'll help you cut through the confusion, figure out what's really holding your business back, and give you a clear plan to lead with confidence.

Just click the link in the description to schedule a call. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like and subscribe for more real-world leadership content. I'm your host Dave Ramsey, and this is Entree Leader. leadership.