Culture Focused Practice

In this episode of Culture Focused Practice , Dr. Tara Vossenkemper sits down with her integrator, Taylor, to unpack a simple idea that has surprisingly big implications for leadership: your meetings are feedback systems.  Sure, the agenda gives you data. Your scorecards, rocks, metrics, and issues all tell you something about your business. But Tara argues that the meeting itself is giving you ju...

In this episode of Culture Focused Practice , Dr. Tara Vossenkemper sits down with fractional CFO Carla Titus to unpack the stories leaders tell themselves about money—and why those stories can quietly keep businesses stuck. They explore why growth doesn't always mean financial health, how leaders mistake hope for strategy, and why so many business decisions are driven by anxiety instead of actual...

In this episode of Culture Focused Practice, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper tackles a leadership team dynamic that quietly creates a whole lot of frustration: confusing reporting with ownership. Tara breaks down why leadership teams can get really good at talking about problems, sharing updates, and making sure everyone feels informed—while somehow ending up in the exact same conversation week after week....

Encore Episode (Originally released  In this episode of the Culture Focused Practice podcast, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper steps into the Owner’s Room — her unfiltered space for talking about the real, raw side of leadership. No polished playbooks. No bulletproof strategies. Just the messy truth of what it feels like to lead when your business isn’t a machine but a living, breathing organism. Through fiv...

Encore Episode (Originally released in August 2025) In this episode of the Culture Focused Practice Podcast, we’re talking about why your group practice is not a machine (no matter how “well-oiled” you think it is) — it’s a living, breathing organism. I introduce the Living Practice Framework™ — my way of blending the structure of EOS with the cultural, leadership, and people pieces EOS doesn’t fu...

In this episode of Culture Focused Practice , Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explores the hard conversations leaders keep avoiding — and why insight alone doesn’t magically make those conversations easier to have. Tara breaks down the gap between awareness and behavior, the way self-protection lives in both the nervous system and leadership identity, and the stories many leaders unconsciously tell themselv...

What happens when the business finally gets quiet enough for you to hear yourself think again? In this episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explores the emotional space that opens up after survival mode starts to loosen its grip. Not the chaotic version of survival mode — the competent version. The nonstop producing, solving, carrying, and maintaining that slowly becomes normal. Tara reflects on: why th...

What if the thing slowing your business down… isn’t effort, but structure? In this Owner’s Room episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper reflects on the clarity that hit after the EOS conference — not because EOS was new, but because something finally clicked about why the practice has been hitting a ceiling despite using the system for years. Tara unpacks the difference between simply reporting numbers and...

What if the thing that feels like a capacity problem… is actually an ownership problem? In this episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper is reflecting on something that became clear only after she was forced to step back a bit: parts of the business don’t clearly belong to anyone. And when that happens, growth starts to stall. Using marketing as the clearest example, Tara unpacks the difference between exec...

In this episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper is working through something that’s very alive for her right now: What if inconsistent or unclear marketing in your practice isn’t a strategy problem… but an ownership problem? She walks through what happens when marketing is shared across roles — how responsibility fragments, results become inconsistent, and the owner becomes the default bottleneck. Even if...

In this Owner’s Room episode, Tara Vossenkemper is thinking out loud about a shift she doesn’t fully understand yet. Not burnout. Not depression. Just a different relationship to energy, work, and what feels worth doing. She names the context — perimenopause, progesterone, sobriety, coming off Adderall — and then moves through a set of real-time questions. What emerges is a clear pull toward depth...

In this episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper and Taylor explore a tension many leaders face: the difference between delegation and true ownership. What begins as an impromptu conversation becomes a deeper look at what it actually takes for accountability to live within a role—and why team members often continue to escalate decisions that should sit with them. Drawing on Tara’s transition of operational...

In this Owner’s Room episode, Tara Vossenkemper asks: If I had to build this again… what would I actually choose? Not what worked. Not what looked successful. What she’d say yes to — knowing the cost. She walks through the problems she wants to solve (higher-level, conceptual stuck points) and the ones she doesn’t (ops, logistics, being needed for maintenance). She also names a real-time shift tow...

In this episode of the Culture Focus Practice podcast, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explores why hiring is too high-impact to rely on intuition alone. She explains that your gut can absolutely be useful, but it is only one stream of data. When leaders treat intuition as the hiring strategy, they can end up mistaking familiarity, likability, or confidence for actual alignment with the role and the culture...

In this episode of the Culture Focused Practice Podcast , Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explores why EOS can start to feel frustrating, stuck, or ineffective — even when teams believe they’re implementing it correctly. She looks at three common breakdown points: accountability charts that lack clarity, IDS conversations that skip real grappling, and L10 meetings that slowly turn into status updates. When...

In this episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper and Taylor examine a moment that can feel destabilizing for many leaders: clustered resignations. Rather than treating multiple departures as an automatic signal that something is wrong, they explore how turnover can function as a form of organizational clarification. When a culture becomes more defined—through values, expectations, and structure—people often...

In this Owner’s Room episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explores what happens when EOS meets complexity theory. Through five questions and a scenario, she examines the difference between building for control versus building for emergence, how feedback loops actually operate inside leadership teams, and why traction is about predictability and adaptability. She also unpacks what vision means inside a c...

In this encore episode of the Culture Focused Podcast, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explores systems fatigue inside EOS and how to distinguish burnout from breakdown: Let’s talk about system fatigue—because yes, even with something as powerful as EOS, there comes a point where it feels heavy, clunky, or downright annoying. In this episode, I dig into what causes that burnout feeling around your systems,...

In this Owner’s Room episode of the Culture Focus Practice podcast, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper sits with a leadership problem most people don’t name because it doesn’t register as a crisis: information overload that leaves leaders inundated rather than uninformed. This episode isn’t about confusion or burnout. It’s about what happens when constant access, visibility, updates, and context quietly erode...

In this Owner’s Room episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper explores what it’s like to keep leading when you’re no longer at baseline — when you’re overstimulated, depleted, compressed by responsibility, and there’s no clean way to stop or reset. This isn’t about burnout in the traditional sense, and it’s not a productivity episode. It’s an honest, unscripted exploration of what happens when volume and co...

In this episode, Tara and Taylor sit inside a stretch of leadership that almost no one prepares you for: when the old vision no longer fits, but the new one hasn’t fully taken shape yet. Decisions still need to be made. People still need leadership. And the business doesn’t pause just because clarity is still forming. They explore how this season shows up differently in the Visionary seat versus t...

In this Owner’s Room episode, Dr. Tara Vossenkemper is talking about a weird (and honestly relieving) leadership shift: when the noise inside you gets quiet. Not because you’ve checked out — but because you’ve finally settled. The decision is already made internally, so you stop doing the whole “pre-explaining/pre-justifying/pre-narrating” thing to your team like you’re presenting a legal defense....

There’s a strange, quiet moment in leadership that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. It’s the moment when the vision that once gave you momentum… just stops organizing you. In this Owner’s Room episode of the Culture Focused Practice podcast, I answer unscripted leadership questions about what happens when a vision loses its pull — not because you failed, and not necessarily because the visi...

Marketing is one of those things every practice knows it needs — and almost no one feels confident doing. In this episode, I’m joined by John Sanders from RevKey , a Google Ads specialist who works almost exclusively with mental health practices. Together, we pull apart why marketing feels so murky, emotionally loaded, and ethically fraught for therapists — and why so many practice owners feel lik...

We talk about avoiding hard conversations like it’s a communication issue. It’s not. Most of the time, avoidance is a self-protection strategy — not from the other person, but from the feelings the conversation brings up in us . And while it might buy short-term relief, it quietly erodes trust, clarity, and leadership credibility over time. In this episode, I break down why avoidance feels safer t...