Your administrator and senior staff can help your practice excel — if you let them.

A central goal of every business is to extract maximum value from every resource. These resources include: capital, facilities, general staff, marketing, external advisors and especially senior staff and administration.

Now, some value extraction is obvious to see. For instance, it is easy to observe when a facility is being underutilized. Perhaps there is a room being used for storage that could instead be a revenue producing lane or testing room. Or each doctor might have a private office that sits relatively unused all day rather than a bullpen approach to officing.

Lay staff underutilization can be very obvious as well. Subjectively, you may see staff gathering in the hallway throughout the day with not enough work to do. Objectively, you can measure resource utilization with internal staffing ratio analysis and comparative benchmarking to industry standards.

But determining whether you are getting the most value from senior staff and your practice administrator may not be as obvious. It requires a nuanced skill as a practice owner to unlock the potential of your senior staff. It takes attention, reflection, time and effort. There has to be an intentional, ongoing effort to develop the safe environment that your administrator and senior staff need in order to feel free to be forthright and ambitious in their efforts to help your practice excel.

As skilled and hard working as your administrator may be, they are also human. And humans respond to the signals they perceive from you as their leader and employer.

You may be unconsciously — unintentionally — holding your senior staff back, reducing their value to you and your organization. Here’s how:

TOP WAYS OF HOLDING BACK STAFF

1. Dismissing their suggestions out of turn.

When you don’t ask questions about their ideas or why they think their solution is better than yours, it is discouraging and results in fewer future suggestions. The message you send is that either you really don’t understand the details of the issue and don’t want to learn more or you are uninterested in anyone else’s ideas other than your own.

2. Not supporting their ideas for positive change.

This sends the message that status quo is just fine for your practice.

3. Not rewarding them when they put their thinking cap on.

Even if their idea may need redirection, it should be rewarded. You want to encourage motivation and creativity in problem solving. Not all ideas are winners, but managers who feel their ideas are appreciated are more likely to keep the momentum of problem solving going.

4. Taking too much control when assigning projects.

This happens when you delegate a project to them then explain in minute detail how you want it done. What’s worse is taking the project away from them if they are not doing it exactly the way you would do it. This will feel demeaning to them and eventually squash their personal motivation to contribute.

5. Taking over new ideas or talking over them.

This essentially shuts down or erases their creative effort. To avoid doing this, you must suspend your naturally critical nature — which is great in the OR, but not so great administratively.

6. Leaving them out of doctor meetings.

With little exception, administrators belong in the room, even when sensitive topics are discussed. They usually end up being involved in solving the problems discussed or providing information needed to solve the problem. Without allowing administrators to hear the whole story, you are creating the potential for gaps in knowledge to occur or needed data to be overlooked.

7. Embargoing practice financial data.

This will only serve to create gaps in their knowledge that could inevitably impact future decision-making. It also sends the message that you do not trust your administrator to be confidential. If this trust is lacking, you need a new administrator or need to evaluate what is holding you back from trusting this critical professional resource.

CASE STUDY

Here is an example one of us (Corinne) was personally involved in many years ago as an administrator:

I had carefully curated documentation to terminate a faltering manager’s employment after spending more than one year trying to help her succeed. The majority of the partners agreed that this long-term manager just didn’t have what it took to be the department leader we needed. I was encouraged to replace her by the same majority of the owners. As I was about to proceed, I was abruptly stopped because a senior partner who had worked with and liked this manager for years objected.

Out of respect for the senior partner, the younger partners told me that I could not terminate the manager’s employment and that they would be especially understanding if goals in her area were not met, because they knew they were holding me back from being able to run the practice in the most efficient way.

This was a huge barrier to my being able to achieve practice goals and significantly curtailed my ambition for the practice. I had great respect and personally admired the partners, so I stayed. I continued to work hard but had to ratchet down my ambition and what I knew I could achieve at that practice, because I wanted to stay aligned with the owners. It was their practice, so I had to be the one to adjust my goals.

One year later when the manager’s actions continued to impact the practice negatively by stunting growth and creating unhappy employees, the decision to terminate her was approved. But I had already been conditioned to play it safe with similar decisions — to not rock the boat, to be less driven and ambitious in this environment. The partners were happy with the slower pace of change they set, and I adjusted while knowing I was capable of producing more.

In situations like this, sometimes an administrator will choose to leave, to find a practice more aligned with their own pace and ambition. Sometimes, they choose to realign their goals and ambition and they stay.

CONCLUSION

Might your administrative team have more to give if they felt more supported by you and the board?

If the answer could be, “Yes,” sit down with them for a frank discussion. Ask them if any of the seven examples of performance inhibition have been holding them back, then work together to unleash their potential and the potential of your practice. OM

Corinne Z. Wohl, MHSA, COE, is president of C. Wohl & Associates, Inc., a practice management consulting firm. Corinne earned her Masters of Health Services Administration degree at The George Washington University and has over 30 years of hospital, physician practice management and management consulting experience. Her latest book, co-authored with John Pinto, is “UP: Taking Ophthalmic Administrators and Their Management Teams to the Next Level of Skill, Performance and Career Satisfaction.” For information on how to purchase this book or other inquiries, she can be reached at czwohl@gmail.com or 609-410-2932.

John Pinto is the founder of J. Pinto & Associates, Inc., an ophthalmic practice consulting firm established in 1979. He is the most published author in the world on the subject of ophthalmic management and economics. The firm serves organizations worldwide, ranging from solo practices to high-volume market leaders, teaching centers and medical product companies, providing strategic planning, financial benchmarking and analysis, operations enhancement and marketing counsel. He can be contacted at pintoinc@aol.com or 619-223-2233.