Hey there. I’m Dr. Tara Vossenkemper, and today I want to dive into something that’s been weighing on a lot of us: what happens when your hiring process is solid, your culture is dialed in, and still… no good candidates show up? That pit-in-your-stomach moment where the silence is louder than the “We’re hiring!” post you pushed out last week. You know the one.

Hiring shouldn’t feel like a never-ending obstacle course—but for most group practice owners, it does. Whether you're brand new to building a team or knee-deep in burnout from doing it all yourself, chances are your hiring funnel is doing more harm than good. And here's the kicker: you might not even realize it. In this post, we're digging into why your current system might be setting you up to fail, what to look for, and how to get back on track without losing your damn mind in the process.

Just because something feels tense doesn't mean you're dealing with true conflict. More often than not, it's something sneakier—unclear expectations, a broken system, or a values mismatch that’s been quietly brewing under the surface. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking “Why is this person being so difficult?”… this is for you.

Let’s be real: conflict doesn’t just feel hard—it feels like your entire nervous system wants to flip the table, crawl under it, or over-explain your way out of the conversation. If you’ve ever felt like you were crushing it one second and spiraling the next, you’re not broken. You’re just a human trying to navigate a tough conversation without losing your grounding.

Hard conversations suck. They just do. They're awkward, emotionally loaded, and personal in all the worst (and most important) ways. If you're in any kind of leadership or ownership role, you’ve either delayed one, over-explained one, or completely bailed on one. This guide is for the moments when you know you’ve got to say something, but the words just aren’t coming. Let’s fix that.

Let’s be real—conflict in a group practice isn’t if, it’s when. Whether you’re leading the whole damn team or just trying to make it through a Monday, tension is going to show up. And it can either fuel growth or completely derail everything you’ve built.

The trick? Learning how to actually handle conflict—without spiraling into gossip loops, weird vibes, or passive-aggressive Slack messages.

Let’s talk about something that’s low-key sabotaging your team (and your sanity): the gap between what you think you're communicating and what your team is actually hearing. That little space where intentions get lost, expectations get fuzzy, and suddenly you’re circling back for the fifth damn time on something that should’ve been handled.

Let’s talk about the clarity gap—that weird in-between where you think you're being clear, but your team is secretly (or not-so-secretly) confused. This is the place where communication goes to die, and nobody tells you until it’s a mess. We're unpacking how to close that gap without turning into a micromanaging dictator, because that’s not it.