Going 150 miles per hour as the practitioner, but can’t seem to get enough done outside of treating your patients? Do you ever feel frustrated by lack of time to manage the practice? Not getting where you want to go with the practice?
Being the CEO of your practice as well as being a hands-on practitioner can be very challenging and is not something you were taught how to do in school. Yet it is vital that you be a strong CEO if you want to have an inspiring and profitable practice. Kind of a Catch 22 situation.
Think about it … if you do not feel that you are being paid enough for all your hard work as the practitioner and as the owner of a business, then perhaps you are not wearing the CEO hat well enough.
Executive time …
For starters, you need EXECUTIVE TIME. Some of the key aspects of leadership are communication, coordination and follow up. When you don’t take time to do that, you can feel the stress building up in yourself. It is vital to plan out your short and long term objectives. Furthermore, you need to give your staff the opportunity to come and talk to you about any concerns they may have instead of ambushing you in between patients. Staff meetings and morning huddles lead to good team coordination and more effective production.
Use your executive time to draw up plans of what you want to accomplish and what you think you need to do in order to accomplish that. Look at your statistics at the end of the week and work out what needs to be done next week to improve over last week. Or if a statistic crashed, investigate to find out why and work out a handling.
When to do this …
So, when are you going to do this in your day? The answer is to set aside an inviolatable period of time, whether it is 30 minutes each day in the morning or at lunch time, or even 2 hours once a week. Or pick the slowest time in your day if there is such a thing. A time at the end of the day is a bad idea, by the way … that almost invariably gets stolen.
A very good trade off …
Executive time can be done outside of practice hours. However, giving up a bit of production time for management time is in fact a very good trade off because, if used cleverly, it will result in even more production and in a saner, calmer fashion.
Have fun with this! Let us know if you have any questions.
HOLIDAY SPECIAL:
HUGE SAVINGS ON OUR SERVICES!
CALL AND BOOK AN APPOINTMENT:
416-466-6217
Creative Commons Attribution: Permission is granted to repost this article in its entirety with credit to The Art of Management Inc. and a clickable link back to this page.
