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How would practice administrators like to improve?
There are five main areas that administrators would like to focus on to better their performance.
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“Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.”
– Albert Einstein
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
– Ernest Hemingway
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”
– Jim Rohn
Ever since Dale Carnegie wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1936, self-improvement has been a very American passion. Whether it is diet and exercise changes, our love life or professional improvements, we all keep a list of needed fix-its at hand.
This list grows considerably from New Year’s Day to around springtime, when we toss the old list and renew with our New Year’s resolutions.
At April’s meeting of the American Society of Ophthalmic Administrators, we presented a brief workshop on administrative self-improvement. This session included a “flash survey” to learn what senior managers were most keen to improve. Five areas stood out.
John B. Pinto
Corinne Z. Wohl
Here is an exposition on these five areas for potential improvement. If you are an administrator reading this, you probably recognize some of your own goals for this year. If you are a surgeon, you might pass this on to your practice manager and arrange a formal discussion around ways that he could improve his performance from your perspective.
An infectiously high energy level
The most accomplished administrators we know have juice. Whether fueled by caffeine, spinning classes or a well-inherited, sparky nature, they are in constant motion. You cannot work with a person like this and not accomplish more yourself.
How do you get juicier if you are more languid by nature? With discipline, the path is easy.
- Exercise: Look at the photographs of the most dynamic CEOs in America today. They look like gym rats. If you do not personally have enough discipline to exercise on your own, hire a trainer.
- Eat right: There are numerous pathways to this, but most tend to be fat-sparing and rich in complex carbohydrates, and involve four to five small meals a day, tapering early as evening approaches. Sleep more and better: Aim for 8 hours and use an app to track the quality of your sleep.
- De-stress: Meditate, cultivate close friendships, compartmentalize your problems and do whatever else works for you to take the edge off.
- Arrive earlier: Superior managers arrive at the office an hour before anyone else.
- At work, see yourself as an actor on a stage: It is “show time” — you should be as kinetic, not frantic, as a Broadway star.
Communication skills
You are probably already a fairly good communicator, or you would not be advanced to the position you now hold. Take that to the next level.
- Shift your practice culture from oral to written: Put policies in writing, and use follow-up memos to underscore announcements at staff meetings.
- Follow up all important casual conversations in writing: “This follows up our discussion about __________.”
- Watch great communicators, such as politicians, CEOs on talk shows or news anchors, in action and copy what they do.
- Find a writing mentor to review and help improve your communication skills.
- If public speaking gives you the willies, do more of it. Join Toastmasters, and volunteer to lecture at national conferences.
A feel for and an enjoyment of numbers and benchmarks
For many practice managers, this is the wall. Unless you can climb over it — read a profit and loss statement, interpret spreadsheets, generate Excel graphs, memorize benchmarks — your career will be increasingly limited.
- You should get to the point of being able to briskly write a page-long narrative off the top of your head on the economic and volumetric performance of your practice.
- Study our industry’s normative benchmarks, which are widely published (starting with the fourth edition of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology).
- Harness your practice’s CPA and any outside consultants to mentor you in this area.
Learning how to align owners, managers and staff on a common mission
This can be some pretty heavy lifting. Practice alignment ideally comes from the top of the organization: the board. But when it does not, you have a vital role as administrator to tease out the mission of the practice in the boardroom.
- Every practice should have at least a short-form written strategic plan spelling out desirables: geographic service area, service mix, provider mix, growth rates, institutional relationships and succession plans.
- This document, no more than five pages in most settings, helps you prioritize the near-term tactics of the practice — things such as opening a new office, buying new capital equipment or revising the marketing plan.
- These strategic and tactical documents should be formally voted on at the board level.
Middle manager selection, training and delegation
An administrator without strong middle managers (lead tech, billing head, reception supervisor) is like a general without an army.
- At least half of all administrators today are burning out because they do not have a strong enough team of middle-level managers to delegate projects to.
- A common rookie error is to try to simultaneously be the practice administrator and the head of billing or technical services.
- This is fine in a modest solo practice with well under $1 million in annual collections, but any larger and you need to start developing the mid-levels.
- Make sure that each middle manager has a formal position description. Look at your to-do list. Anything that can be delegated to a subordinate should be taken off your list.
For more information:
John B. Pinto is president of J. Pinto & Associates Inc., an ophthalmic practice management consulting firm established in 1979. John is the country’s most-published author on ophthalmology management topics. He is the author of John Pinto’s Little Green Book of Ophthalmology, Turnaround: 21 Weeks to Ophthalmic Practice Survival and Permanent Improvement, Cashflow: The Practical Art of Earning More From Your Ophthalmology Practice, The Efficient Ophthalmologist, The Women of Ophthalmology, Legal Issues in Ophthalmology, Ophthalmic Leadership: A Practical Guide for Physicians, Administrators and Teams and a new book, Simple: The Inner Game of Ophthalmic Practice Success. He can be reached at pintoinc@aol.com; website: www.pintoinc.com.Corinne Z. Wohl, MHSA, COE, is the administrator at Delaware Ophthalmology Consultants. She can be reached at czwohl@gmail.com.