I wish I hadn’t done that: Learn to be the coach of your practice
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This column is the latest article in the ongoing series “I wish I hadn’t done that.” Past submissions can be read here.
I am not a good leader. Admittedly, “leadership” is somewhat of a generic term, and in the context of clinical medicine, a better word than “leader” might be “manager.”
So, to be more specific, let me clarify and say that I am not a good manager. And to be even more specific, I am not good at managing people.
Probably, this is because I hate doing the things that a good manager does. I hate meetings. I hate enforcing discipline, especially over petty infractions. Most of all, I hate assuming responsibility for the conduct of dozens of people, each doing some different thing.
I don’t think that I am alone in these aversions. I look around and see that many of my colleagues have also shirked responsibility for managing their own practice. Commonly, this occurs by appointing a glorified front desk worker to the honorary position of “office manager,” despite the fact that this person knows nothing about how to run the office. Others adopt an alternative strategy: selling their practice to private equity, thereby abdicating the role of management entirely.
These behaviors may owe to the fact that practice management is the definition of an inglorious subject, and it is vaguely humiliating to get good at a bad thing. Our formal medical training ignores it completely as a concept, and it just seems too grubby, pedestrian and boring to obsess over. However, these are the delusions and conceits that prevent us from understanding how our own practice operates.
I must admit that I have been “head-in-the-sand” willfully blind to the systems that make our practice run, with a naive focus exclusively on eye surgery, with inadequate attention on building our team.
The thing that “I wish I hadn’t done” is neglecting the crucial role of intentionally shaping our practice. Specifically, I regret not explicitly stating (and restating and emphasizing) our core beliefs, as a company, to our employees to create a common culture and shared sense of mission. I regret not taking a more active role in hiring, and especially in training our employees, rather than delegating these responsibilities to less senior staff. I regret failing to schedule regular meetings to provide feedback and to discuss problems. Most of all, I regret assuming someone else would/should do these things instead of me.
The greatest coaches attain their fame by building world-class organizations and by developing the full potential of the team. It might benefit us as clinicians to start thinking of ourselves less like the star player of our organization and more like the coach. It is more accurate, more humble and, in my opinion, more likely to produce a company where people want to work and want to bring their loved ones for care.
- For more information:
- Jack S. Parker, MD, PhD, of Parker Cornea in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, can be reached at jack.parker@gmail.com.
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