Management styles: striking a balance between Dr. Marshmallow and Dr. Terror

Which are you, the intimidator or the pushover? Take the quiz and find out.

Issue: June 1, 2001

ByJohn B. Pinto

Doctors young and old often ask, “How tough should I be with my staff?” Consider America’s marsupial, the humble opossum. Biologists know that “playing possum” is not some coy act. The animals actually pass out from sheer terror.

Do your staff look similarly dazed when you approach them? Or are you ophthalmology’s answer to Rodney Dangerfield, so meek that you get no respect?

Either extreme is bad for business. Too rough, and your staff will flinch when you come around the corner, avoid taking chances and hide all their mistakes from you. Too easy, and staff will neither respect your leadership position nor respond to your requests.

Getting the staff “pucker factor” just right is an art often practiced but rarely mastered. Milquetoast doctors go through life wondering why they’re chronically dissed. The most successful doctor-managers are naturals, whose supervisory skills are so adroit they verge on manipulation — management poetry in motion.

Suitable balance

Let’s explore how you might find a suitable balance. Applying the right pressure to your people — and the right release — starts with being sensitive to others, not a particularly surgeon-like trait, right? So before you try anything else on the way to being a better people manager, I’d like you to do the following exercise for an entire clinical morning or afternoon:

If yours is the typical clinic, in 4 hours you are going to be in contact with perhaps a dozen staff. As you interact with each person, even if it’s only for a moment’s passing in the hall, briskly ask yourself the following four questions:

What is this person’s fundamental mood? In particular, how receptive are they? Staff who are in a chronically happy and receptive mood are a snap to manage. It’s hard to gain basic job compliance from dour, unhappy staff, much less superior work.

What outcome do you want from your interaction with this person at this moment? If it’s a clinical staff member, you may desire a more careful preliminary work-up and evaluation of your next patient. If it’s a LASIK patient counselor, the performance standard you seek is that every qualified, medically-appropriate lead is converted to a surgical patient today.

What incentives can you offer this person to move them closer to your desired outcome? For most staff, this is nothing more than your respect and positive interaction. Make this recognition public, and they’ll not only walk on burning coals for you, they’ll dance on them.

Do staff seem to be proactively attentive to your needs, or do you have to ask for everything? The former can make clinical work a pleasure, while the latter is obviously exhausting and frustrating.

Now obviously, if you’re taking the time to think through this question set, you don’t have as much time as you ordinarily take to talk, which is all to the good. It’s hard to learn much about a person’s mood and incentives, or tune in your sensitivity antenna, when you’re the one talking.

Once your 4-hour session is over, I’d like you to consider if your morning or afternoon went any differently than usual. Did your staff seem more responsive to you and your patients’ needs? Perhaps most importantly, by trying to tune into their incentives, were you better able to get your needs met?

Take the quiz

Next, I’d like you to score yourself on the following quiz, filling in the blank lines with one of the following four words:

“Always” — 3 points
“Sometimes” — 2 points
“Rarely” — 1 point
“Never” — 0 points

I ___________ ask for something by saying “please.”
I ___________ acknowledge something provided to me by saying “thank you.”
I ___________ praise staff publicly and with sincerity, even if I have to fake it.
I ___________ reprimand privately, and through supervisors whenever possible.
I ___________ accept personal responsibility for anything that’s going wrong with the practice and attribute to staff responsibility for anything that’s going right.
I have ___________ believed that everyone is trying to be the best they can be. If they fall behind, it’s either because they were not correctly selected for the job, incorrectly trained or incorrectly motivated.
Rather than getting mad at staff, I _________substitute time I’d spent grousing with meaningful personal work to correct the problem.
I ____________ speak kindly and respectfully of (and to) others, even when they disappoint me.
If I was unhappy about a tech’s performance, I would ____________ see myself saying to my administrator or head tech something like: “I know we were really short of techs when Susan was hired and that she’s probably trying her best. But I’m a little concerned about her progress here. What do you think we should do?”

Scoring

Give yourself the appropriate points for each answer and add up your score. A score from 0 to 12 means you may need a full-time “personality coach.” I’m not joking. Select a trusted staff member or colleague, let them in on your score and your desire to change and empower them to give you their honest assessment of your progress at the end of each working day.

A score between 13 and 24 means you have room for improvement, but can probably “self-coach” yourself toward being a more effective staff manager. It’s certainly worth the effort. Even if you’re missing out on only 10% of your employees’ potential performance because of your management style, this could translate to a five- or six-figure personal income loss each year.

A score above 24 probably means you should be writing this article, not reading it. Keep up the good work.

For Your Information:

John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, now in its second edition, and the new book Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement. He can be reached at (800) 886-1235; fax: (619) 223-2253; e-mail: pintoinc@aol.com; Web site: www.pintoinc.com.