Here is a wonderful quote to start off with:
“The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful.”
As a practice owner, you are like the conductor of an orchestra. A great conductor will have a concept (vision statement) and will help their team play together and unify them. Your power as the CEO of your practice will come from your ability to unify your team and make each person powerful.
What abilities and skills do you, as the practice owner, need in order to conduct your “orchestra” in such a way as to empower your whole team?
Your Two Main Hats
If you own a practice, your first and foremost hat is your CEO hat (the conductor). Your second hat is your professional hat (part of the orchestra). Even though the executive hat is more important, it can seem a little invisible and be given less attention than your day-to-day hands-on production as the practitioner.
However, your highest possible level of success can only be achieved by knowing and performing all the functions of the executive of the practice. Do not underestimate this! You can always hire associates to do the day-to-day production of the services of the practice, but you cannot hire someone to be your boss if you own the practice.
An Office Manager, while an important position you can delegate lots of duties to, still needs to be directed by you. They are very rarely trained formally as executives. And besides, bottom line it is your net income, reputation and licence on the line.
Some of your CEO duties:
- Hiring the right team members.
- Training the staff in the way you want things done.
- Instituting policy and direction, including providing job descriptions, and policy manual, protocols and systems.
- Caring for your team; giving them attention; talking to them; getting ideas from them; helping them grow.
- Rewarding productivity and correcting non-production.
- Setting goals for the practice and ensuring they are met.
- Managing the practice by statistics to ensure stable growth and that the quality of the service is improving.
- Ensuring that the practice is profitable.
Executive Time
While there are more functions than the above short list, they do not have to be time consuming. You would do a better executive job and be more profitable if you took 2 hours per week out of your schedule to actually wear your CEO hat to do the above functions, thus improving the bottom line and the quality of service to your patients. It can take time to empower your staff and unify them into a very caring and productive team.
Give your CEO hat the importance it deserves and make your team more powerful!
