LEADERSHIP: The Day That Changed Everything - Why I Write this Blog

It all came to me in a flash!

One early January day, I was driving to work, thinking about the coming year, when I realized that I didn’t like working with several of my staff. No, it was worse than that: I dreaded facing them each day. My life was busy enough with a growing family, practice responsibilities, social commitments, and precious little time for myself. I was stretched to my personal limit and yet, consistently, I was being drained emotionally, dealing with my staff’s interpersonal conflicts, mediocre performance, and sometimes outright incompetence.

Why couldn’t they just get along and do their jobs? Why did I always have to remind, cajole, persuade, and intervene when things weren’t going well? Wouldn’t it be great to come to work each day to a harmonious, productive staff who were always on task, pleasant to the patients and to each other, and would contribute to making the practice better and more successful?

From all outward appearances, things were going well. Our practice had grown during the last seven years. We had done and were still doing most things well. Our patients and staff were generally happy; but unfortunately, I wasn’t. And despite my past efforts, things were not going to get better anytime soon. A growing realization began to dawn on me. In private practice, we spend nearly half of our waking life with our staff. So if I was unhappy during that portion of my life, then half of my entire life was unhappy.

What a sobering thought! And what an impetus for change!

During the period of rapid growth in our practice, we had hired many new assistants. In retrospect, I had paid more attention to the clinical skills of the applicants rather than their ability to work as integral part of a team. Since then, I had worked on building a better team, but most often the improvements were only marginal and temporary.

That’s when it hit me! Time after time, I had been trying to get them to change. But if they were to change, I had to change first.  I had to take a new approach.  For them to become a better team, I had to become a better leader.  How did Albert Einstein define insanity? “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I finally realized that I had been more than a little bit crazy in that regard.

The situation had now become intolerable. For the first time in my professional life, I had to take one hundred percent responsibility for what happened in my practice - the good as well as the bad. I had to stop blaming them and acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to become a better leader. No longer could I tolerate and ignore the staff who were holding us back. I had to search for ways to surround myself with a staff comprised exclusively of outstanding team members.

This blog is the product of that journey, a journey that took me from frustration on that winter day to a practice in which I was less stressed, more productive, and frankly, happy to spend time at the office with my staff.  It contains everything I wish I had known back then, but only discovered after a decade-long search. 

Hopefully for you, it can become an indispensable guide on how to have something that eludes many of us in private practice: How to build a happy and productive Staff Team and find success and fulfillment in clinical practice.