All employees, regardless of position, need to demonstrate basic competencies in areas such as showing up on time, being courteous, treating clients well, completing their work. This is just plain common sense. Beyond the basics staff members are responsible for their job-specific tasks. It’s often in these places where we, as managers or owners, become so engrossed in the day-to-day activities of the practice that we lose sight of the larger picture. I submit that one of our fundamental roles as a practice manager is to help increase the quality and success of the veterinary practice that employs us. Although one can argue that this can be accomplished one patient and one client at a time, I believe a larger argument can be made to leverage your entire staff to care for patients and clients so that you as practice manager or you as practice owner, can invest more of your time determining how to improve the overall practice.
Leveraging your staff comes through empowering them. But, what does this mean? I’ve read many articles debating this topic and still am not entirely sure how one empowers another. So, I decided to do a quick experiment. I sent an email to a dozen of the management or administrative staff members who report to me and asked them to answer this question: “What do you believe are the top 10 factors that lead to effective empowerment?” Before I sent the email, however, I wrote down the top 10 factors that I consider are important. Realizing these are subjective and can change from one day to the next, I listed the following ten (not in any particular order): communication, decisional input, trust, information, active listening, encouragement/motivation, praise, feedback, group meetings, and quick turn-around of work reviewed.
Responses were received from 8 of the 12 persons surveyed, and what I found interesting was that the many of the factors I thought were important came back as being important to a majority of these individuals. However, there were some differences. I thought trust would be listed by more respondents (half indicated trust as an important factor). I also believed the word “feedback” would be provided more often. Again, only about half of those who responded stated that feedback is important to them. As I reviewed the results of this very informal, non-scientific survey, I was struck by one prevailing thought: how do I know what my staff considers as important factors that lead to empowerment without asking them? I’m not sure I’ve really ever taken the time to ask them this question. While their responses are certainly not cookie cutter, it does give me some insight into what things are important to each of them. While I am pleased that there is much overlap of the factors they think are important with my own, and that perhaps this helps explain why we seemingly have a rich organizational culture, I also realize some areas for improvement. As I look at their individual responses, I see that some place more importance on softer factors such as trust, listening, encouragement and praise, while others tend to emphasize factors such as consistent performance reviews, incentives, up to date work tools and training. All are important factors, but I do think there are some subtle nuances between these two.
In closing, I believe there is much power to be gained in asking our staff, from time to time, what’s important to them, and how can we further assist them to be that much more effective in providing patient care and client service. I also think it’s equally important for us to tailor our communications, approach and other such factors, as much as possible, to each individual whom we supervise. In order to do this, we have to know them.
Jon Cunnington, MBA, CVPM
VHMA President