As the leader of your team, you have the huge responsibility of expressing your vision for your ideal practice and continuously steering the team toward those goals. Is it time to recalibrate your approach, starting with the way you communicate?
One of the keys to successful leadership is to work on engaging your staff in conversations rather than trying to shout them into submission. This doesn’t mean ongoing chatty sessions wherein you lose the ability to stretch people’s horizons though.
Here are a few ways bosses can increase their effectiveness by the way they communicate:
1. Bring the vision to life. Anyone can write a mission statement, full of lofty words that sound good. However, you then need to translate that vision into concrete actions and directions.
2. Ask smart questions. When you want cooperation, questions can be more powerful than statements. You want to engage the staff member’s heart and mind and get them thinking about the ideal answer and then all the steps necessary to get there. By being less dogmatic, you let people on your team build game plans that they too believe in.
3. Listen carefully. Staffs frequently have great ideas and if they know the direction you want to take your business, they can often come up with new insights you might not have thought of yourself. They are on the ground and may have data you might be missing for your planning.
4. Create pride. What shapes morale the most is your staff’s conviction that they are working for the best practice in town. If you’re conveying a clear vision, asking good questions, setting the right priorities and so on, you and your team are creating a practice that everyone can be proud of. Your clients or patients will feel that care level and after all, everything you do in your practice is so that they will receive ideal care.
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