“I pay an administrator to lead the staff and to manage the practice. I don’t have time, nor do I want to deal with people issues. I simply want to practice medicine.”

The question:

As the owner of your practice, can you delegate leadership to someone else?

Your active leadership is a secret to profitability! What is the most valuable resource of your practice? Is it the building, your credentials, your patients? Your employees are the practice’s most valuable resource. Your employees are the key to your patients having a positive experience. Your employees are the key to proper billing to ensure the finances of your practice are handled properly. If your employees are merely exchanging eight hours of work for a paycheck – you are leaving profits on the table.

To maximize profits, you must maximize the output of your employees. How?

“YOU,” the leader, must:

• Create a vision
  • Identify the 3-5 things that your practice will focus on and do better than any other practice. What is the hallmark of your practice as seen by colleagues, employees and patients?
• Communicate the vision
  • Keep these focus areas in front of you and your employees at all times. Hire, train, and invest resources in these 3-5 areas.
  • You must breathe life into these focus areas daily! Talk about them, highlight successes, share stories.
• Hire employees who share the vision
  • Hire employees that can contribute excellence in these 3-5 areas.
• Demonstrate an interest in your most valuable resource –
  • Show your employees that you care about them. Communicate with them, slow down and engage with them.
  • Become a student of each member of your team: know their name, role, responsibility, their unique talents and strengths, facts about their personal life, their motivators, their professional goals, job challenges and their needs
  • Look for opportunities to “engage.” Talk with them, show an interest in them professionally and as an individual. If work is simply “a job,” another practice can easily steal them away.
• Recognize and reward good work
  • Develop a way to recognize excellence. Recognize key contributions to any of the practice’s 3-5 focus areas.. Encourage a recognition culture- recognition should take place at all levels and from all levels.
  • Reward excellence. Public recognition, gift cards, monetary rewards, written commendations – whatever you choose, reward excellence.
• Invest in your most valued resource
  • Put your money where your talk is. If you say you value your employees, yet do not invest in them, your talk is cheap and you risk loosing your most valued asset.
  • Invest in their professional development through training. Your leadership has a great impact on the return on investment you get from your human resources. Your leadership is one of the keys to improving the output of your employees, and maximizing the practice’s profitability. Before you make your next hire, before you loose another employee, before morale declines – get leadership right. You cannot effectively delegate leadership – profitability rests with you!

Over the next few months this column will explore the key elements of leadership which have been highlighted in this article. If you’d like to learn more about leadership development or other strategic human resource strategies to improve your practice, please call Dialogue Consulting at 919-272-1482 or send a note to Tommy Re at tre@dialogueconsulting.net.