"For private medical practice physicians, being able to
maximize your incomes is critical to your remaining
on the cutting edge of your medical skills and
knowledge, let alone your increased value to
your medical patients."
It is said that a team of people can achieve far more than the sum of the total of the individual’s
skills alone. I don't believe that.
If you discovered what factor it was in your medical practice business that’s holding you back from a much higher practice income, you probably would do something to eliminate it… right? The problem is a hell-raiser that, unfortunately, is almost never recognized by physicians in private medical practice as a significant benefit… if ever even considered.
“Teaming is the engine of organizational growth and profits, not the later consequences of learning their applications.”
The problem: The concept of “team-building” being a fundamental strategy for driving productivity, propelling income, and increasing efficiency for physicians in a private medical practice business is rarely taken seriously by medical doctors.
It’s one very profound strategy that drives most medical practice business planning well beyond any expected level of success. Your playing on any sports team earlier in your life should have already made the benefits of team efforts obvious to you.
You aren’t alone. This one issue likely reduces the incomes of over 95% of doctors in private medical practice and they don’t recognize it as essential.
If you’ve practiced for a few years, then you are also seeing evidence in your own office of all the symptoms pointing to a lack of a true team development effort backing you up.
Yet most physicians find that it’s too much of a strain to replace employees that are persistently sucking you dry and eating up your profits one way or another, such as...
- Repeatedly late to work
- Are gone out of the office often for personal reasons
- Treat your patients poorly
- Never seem to finish a task
- Disregard or forget your instructions
- Fail to offer any ideas for improvement of your office--they don't care.
And, you keep on paying them anyway… ”Cause it ain’t that bad of a problem.”
Dan S. Kennedy, business expert, often expresses his advice about employee management, “Hire only employees that are profitable to you... fire the rest.” If you don’t, you are giving consent to yourself to accept a significantly reduced medical practice income forever.
How does a “team” differ from the employee group you employ now?
“A team is defined as a group of people with a full set of complementary skills required to complete a task, job, or project.”
- Team members operate with a high degree of interdependence.
- Share authority and responsibility for self-management.
- Are accountable for the collective performance.
- Work toward a common goal and shared rewards.
Commonly, you’ll find present medical office employees that work independently, but by using their knowledge from previous employment positions to do the job you ask of them. They feel no accountability for collective performance of the whole office crew, only for themselves.
Each employee works for their own objectives, not yours. There are no common goals or shared rewards they are working for. Your employees don’t have a clue about what teamwork (experiential education and training) is all about not what it accomplishes that they could share in as well as become more valuable as an employee. They know their value when they get a raise in pay.
What does a team accomplish that your medical office employees will
rarely accomplish?
Benefits of, and why the interest in, team building and development in a business environment...
- They can generate a wider range of ideas and innovation than individuals.
- They are able to motivate themselves.
- They can bounce ideas off each team member.
- They often take more risks than individuals.
- They have a range of personalities such as workers, thinkers, leaders who contribute the right balance of skills necessary to achieve high performance.
- They support each other and are not just task-orientated.
- They can be a support mechanism that provides mentoring and allows others to grow in self-confidence and reliability.
If you have the individuals with the potential to create a high performance team, just imagine what they could achieve for your medical practice productivity and bottom line. Read more about this at www.callofthewild.com , a recognized British Business Coaching Company and the www.HarvardBusinessReview.com .
Designing a successful business team...
As you might expect, productive teams are composed of required elements to attain the desired business results. First, you must properly structure your team, and then select the right type of team member profile that fits the task. You wouldn’t recruit people who hate marketing, to do a marketing job. It means you have to know how to recruit the right members.
Required elements for team building...
- Team Goals: Goals must be clear and specific because the focus of the team activities is organized around those.
- Commitment: All team members must be fully committed to achieving the specific goals of that team…no personal agendas allowed. One rotten apple will ruin the barrel of apples.
- Trust: Successful teams must trust and rely on the other team members for advice, feedback,
and ideas.
- Mutual Respect: Trust is not present among team members unless they adhere to mutual respect for each other.
- Communication Intensity: For efficiency and speed of action the communication among all members must be a high priority so that at any one time every member knows what the other members are working on and the progress being made by them.
- Specific Roles for Each Member: This process enables each team member to understand exactly what they have been assigned to do and avoids duplication of activities, saves time, and keeps each member focused on their turf.
- Shared Rewards: Team members must be involved in establishing team goals and understand that they have a stake (in the eventual results) that is significant and impressive. You decide on what that is, or those are.
Don Hofstrand, co-director of Ag Marketing Resource Center, at Iowa State University, describes several types of teams...
- Functional Team: All team members play on a team, but don’t play as a team. For example, each baseball player has a fixed position and carries out the functions of that position by themselves. It’s the same model as an assembly line activity. In business, it’s the same relationship as between a supervisor and employee.
- Hierarchy Team: Team members work in unison but require a leader. In football, it’s often the quarterback or defensive lineman. Each member has a fixed position but follows an established play plan. Jobs can be done quickly and efficiently because of high flexibility. Each team member functions independently but in unison with the team.
- Organic Team: Basketball Team members have a preferred position, cover their teammates, and adjust their play according to the strengths and weaknesses of other players. Organic teams display synergy, uses the strengths of other members to minimize the weaknesses of others, but require considerable self-discipline and tamed ego control. This is the strongest
team model.
This type of team has members who know how to carry out the responsibilities of any other team member…a common factor found in most medical doctor offices. Each employee has an intimate knowledge of the others, which enables them to quickly adjust to disruptions, emergencies, and disgruntled patients.
With this background information about team building and how they work to improve business growth, efficiency, and productivity, you can begin to formulate your ideas about implementing these elements into your own medical practice.
How to implement teams into your medical practice business...
For small business or private medical practice offices the average 2 to 8 employees limits some of your options for creating team functions within your practice, but leaves you with at least two excellent opportunities.
First, you would best advised to implement an office team composed of every employee you have into a top rate team with a single assigned goal to accomplish.
A few highly important goals could be to create a marketing system for your medical practice that can be then used for years afterward, create a unique system for doctor-patient referrals to your business, or create a powerful patient recruiting system directly from the community and from your own patients.
Second, create a team using the employees from several medical offices. Those doctors would have to agree to cooperate in the process and all the offices participating could then benefit from the process as well as yours. The prime advantage to all the medical offices involved would be that the system devised by the team effort would be taken back to their offices and taught to the other employees…a-win-win.
The great benefit to the team members is that they are involved in an “experiential training and education” process which would give them the knowledge that would qualify them for the best jobs in the best offices later on… as well as the highest salaries.
Once you have selected the special people for your team building ideas based on their personal commitment to maximize the goals you have in mind, you have the task of training the team about what you intend for them to do and how you want it done.
It goes without saying that you (the doctor and boss) must be knowledgeable about team building work activities and processes, how to lead them through the team training process step by step, and be able to support the business team on a continuing basis.
It may be a big job for you, but the end result will likely blow your mind as to how fantastic your medical practice business will become over time.
It’s not a pipedream. It’s a method for you to rocket your medical practice quickly to the top. The proof of the value of using business teams for the improvement of any business is beyond debate.
Your extraordinary advantage of doing what 99% of other medical doctors are not doing puts you in a position that allows you all the opportunities for expanding your medical practice business that other medical doctors won’t have or ever know about.
As with any private medical practice business plans for improvement, it begins with hard work and considerable time spent. Once your team has reached the goal you set, you are at the perfect spot to do the same thing over again, often with the same team that no longer needs to be trained, with a new goal to go after... one after the other.
When you are familiar with the essentials of creating a medical practice business team, you can then modify them to meet your practice needs.
At present, your employees work in a segmented job environment with the often usual and inadequate communications with each other, distaste for helping each other at times, and agenda to work towards their own ends.
You can try to use your present employees to build a team, but you must remember that you will have to first remove all their personal agendas in their work, persuade them to work as a team dependent on each other, create their trust in you that they may not have, remove their previous work habits, and most importantly, be sure they are all committed to the goals you give them.
Another option is to hire experts in medical practice business and marketing“team-building” and “team development.” Their obligation to you is long-term. They don’t simply jump into a project, teach and train your team, and leave the rest to you. You can imagine the cost for this being done for you, but it certainly would be worth the cost to any medical practice.
The bottom line is that you have to be 100% committed to the process if you intend to use business teams for the medical practice management improvement of your income. Otherwise, don’t do it. You will be very disappointed if you are not completely committed to the process from the beginning and for long term.
A brief summary of what you should do...
- Gather all your employees together outside of regular office hours and proceed to them them the objectives you have for your medical practice business in the future...
----I want to obtain 5 new patients each month...
----I intend to double our practice income in 6 months... - Explain exactly how you want each employee in each of their assigned duty in the office a step by step process you want them to comply with for the purpose to increasing the efficiency of the office and the medical practice management of patients. Thus, avoiding conflicts of who is responsible for what process in the office. Should be in writing in an office manual--so they can go back and read it to refresh their duties.
- Have an employee staff meeting at least once every two weeks to discuss the progress being made, problems with the process, answer questions, praise/support your employees. You must tell each employee that they are doing a good job every week, but only if they are, let them know you see what they are doing.
Comments...
Persuading stiff-necked medical doctors to use well-documented and reliable business team methods is about as easy as asking them to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
The same is true about persuading physicians to get an MBA, sometime before they enter private practice. There is no denying that having both available would put you in the top 1% of practicing medical doctors in our country… in earnings and career satisfaction.
The truth is that with ObamaCare influence still in effect it will be so restrictive to private practice physicians in the future that the only way you will survive in private practice financially will be to grab and use these kinds of ideas and methods I’ve mentioned and those I haven’t told
you about yet.
One such method that can permit you to survive, in my opinion, is Concierge (cash only) medical practice. Read my articles on this website...
Article #11, Title, "Medical Practice Business Transformation---Concierge Practice (Part 1 of 2)
Article #12, Title, "Medical Practice Business Transformation---Concierge Practice (Part 2 0f 2)
The physician's mind today is not about finding more chores to do outside of seeing patients. The ferocious pressure on you to give up private practice and become a physician employee
is overwhelming.
However, we older medical doctors know that the freedom to practice medicine as we choose was key to deciding to become a physician in the first place. What motivates the new medical doctors to become a far better medical doctor today?
It was such a privilege to be able to practice medicine at a time when freedom to practice as we liked was possible. For that I am truly thankful.
----Professional Probe----
"Creating a team to do the
job is instinctual"
"Using your present employees to build a team for your
private medical practice may demonstrate to you
that your present office staff may be
entirely different than what you expected."
"Nursing the team along will avoid a stinking mess."
"However, when they are all are tuned in to the same objective
and all work together uniformly using their God-given various
talents, you will be obligated to continue your supervision
and instruction until the end goal is reached. When your team is
dressed out in similar medical office uniforms,
it's even more impressive."
Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #44, 3-16-22
