Though it comes in many forms, mentoring produces a mutually beneficial relationship

Mentoring — a very personal, one-on-one subset of teaching — is the beating heart of medicine. Most of what you use today on the clinic floor or in the ASC didn’t come from a textbook, a journal or even a lecture. The important stuff was passed from colleague to colleague to colleague.

The same applies to the daily functioning of your practice, including the business affairs of your enterprise. Your staff benefit greatly when you foster the same mentoring environment with the practice’s benchmarks, spreadsheets and billing reports as you do on the clinic floor and in the OR.

There is a lot to learn in health care. The complexity of running your business rivals the complexities of medicine, itself. It takes constant learning and practiced skill to successfully run the little industrial plant that is your practice.

Mentoring within your practice can take many forms. It’s not just mentoring in the formal use of the word where someone senior works with a junior, less-experienced person. Any two people in your practice may present an opportunity for mentoring, creating benefits not only for each individual but also for the practice and its patients.

Here are six ways that mentors and mentees can interact within a practice setting and our advice for getting the most out of this relationship.

MENTOR-MENTEE INTERACTIONS

1. Practice owner to administrator

An experienced administrator and managing partner can collaborate by teaching each other the inner game of each other’s domain. This back and forth, reciprocating mentor-mentee relationship can help you both better achieve practice goals.

If the manager is more junior and/or promoted from a department director position, it is critical for one designated practice owner or managing partner to mentor the new administrator. Don’t assume that because a manager did a decent job running the clinic floor or front desk, that they are now prepared to direct the whole practice. As a provider, help them understand the big picture of the company, while they simultaneously teach you, perhaps, about the granular details where they may be an expert.

2. Administrator to department manager

The same kind of reciprocal mentoring present between high-functioning owners and administrators is ideally present between the administrator and their department leaders. The stronger the mid-level manager team, the more time the administrator has to concentrate on high-level functions like financial analysis, strategic planning, hiring providers and network development. So it behooves the administrator to put serious time (as much as an hour a week for each department head) into mentoring each mid-level staffer.

Don’t just undertake this mentoring in a hit-or-miss fashion. Collaborate with your lead tech to teach them advanced HR skills so they can better deal with difficult staff. Plan a course of study for your billing manager so they come to a mastery over the various revenue cycle benchmarks and computer reports.

3. Peer to peer

Assigning a knowledgeable and willing employee (non-manager) to mentor a newly hired employee helps both employees grow in their roles. The key is “willing.” Randomly assigning an employee to “oversee” the new tech is generally not successful.

On the other hand, an employee willing to take a new employee officially under their wing for the first 3 or 6 months is beneficial for both employees. You can’t be a mentor to a new employee without thinking about how your job and each skill is properly conducted. And, as a mentee, you may be less nervous taking your training from a nominal peer rather than your boss.

4. Doctor to doctor

This is the more commonly understood teaching relationship in medical settings. It should not be confined to your formal training years, or even your first few years in practice. In high-functioning client practices, we are just as likely to observe new grad doctors updating senior doctors on contemporary care pathways or surgical maneuvers as we are to see senior docs helping young associates learn how to practice in the real world.

Every doctor in your practice at every career stage should ask, “Who could I teach something to here? Who could I learn something from here?” And then pursue that relationship.

5. Doctor to patient

In even the newest doctor-patient relationship, a mentor-mentee relationship is naturally established. That relationship can flourish over the years, especially for patients with a chronic disease to manage. And it works in the other direction. Every thoughtful senior doctor will report that they are constantly mentored by their patients: tricks to induce greater compliance, pearls to make a procedure more comfortable or less scary and, in a geriatric practice like ophthalmology, how to gracefully approach one’s eventual retirement and physical decline.

6. Staff to doctor

In settings where trust has been established between a doctor and their employee (especially senior techs), it is not uncommon for such staff to respectfully take their doctor aside and share an observation about how a patient or staff interaction might have gone better.

Defensive, insecure doctors dread these comments. The best doctors — those who grow and improve over time — are open and encouraging of this feedback, and will overtly signal to one or more staff, “Please let me know if you think there is anything I could be saying or doing differently that would help improve patient care.”

HOW TO BE A BETTER MENTOR/MENTEE

Make the time commitment

As a mentor, you must provide access to yourself, including holding regularly scheduled meetings. As a mentee, you have to respect your mentor’s time commitment, which may amount to hundreds of hours over the course of a long professional relationship. Be prepared to make the time commitment. Mentorship can last for years.

Be a fabulous listener

Even though, as a mentor, you may have a lot to say, listening is sometimes more important. Especially, in the early going, don’t assume you know what your mentee needs to know. Look for what may not be obvious to your mentee but may be clearer to you. Find knowledge gaps where you can provide the biggest impact. As a mentee, speak up if your mentor seems to be focusing on topics that are less helpful.

Prioritize trust and motivation

Mentors and mentees need mutual trust, motivation and a common drive for the relationship to succeed and flourish over time. Don’t be afraid to speak up if the relationship seems to be growing stale or is not deepening.

Use reference materials actively

For practice staff and doctors alike, a mentor can help jumpstart further learning. For example, assign a short reading for your mentee, then discuss it at your next session.

Be positive and encouraging

This is not a relationship built on tough love. Support your mentees’ efforts, commiserate with their failures and celebrate their gains.

Don’t solve all of your mentee’s problems

Let them make their own mistakes. Let them fail and learn from the errors.

Don’t create excess dependency

Although this may be tempting and feel like you are helping, it is not in the best interest of your mentee. The best mentors help motivate their mentees to become independent thinkers and action-takers who continue to learn from others and not be dependent on the opinion or actions of others.

Advocate for your mentee ... when appropriate

Don’t apply undue advocacy for individuals not yet worthy. This can backfire for them in the future as it is best to avoid being placed in a position when you are not ready to succeed.

Help find what motivates them

Teach them how to ask the same questions of themselves for the years ahead, so they learn how to motivate themselves, find the ambition inside them and locate the fun and thrill of what drives them forward in their professional life.

Move on if necessary

Finally, be willing to release a mentee from your counsel, passing them on to someone more appropriate as their needs change over time. OM

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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 B. 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.