Our office “systems” or procedures are the habitual way our staff does their work – how they file insurance, schedule patients, or collect overdue accounts.  These procedures can either be well designed and reliable or they can be disorganized and inconsistent.

When things go wrong in the office, i...

These are the decisions that are forced on us, the ones that we feel are unfair, the ones where there are no seemingly good solutions.

Maybe we're short staffed and we can't find good employees. Or we spent a great deal of time training someone and they just quit.

How should we proceed?

1. Acknowl...

Whether it’s being a great parent or an outstanding clinician & team leader, we all want to become exceptional at what we do!

But those rare individuals who become truly exceptional, do so, NOT because they are BORN exceptional or BELIEVE they are exceptional.

On the contrary, they become exceptio...

WE are the biggest obstacle to exceptional teamwork!

We blame our staff for not getting along with each other, not treating patients well, and making too many mistakes.  We believe that “If only my staff would improve, my practice would improve!”

But when we do, things rarely get better.

I felt t...

You know how you want things done. You know how things should work. 

So, why does the staff keep making mistakes?

Why can’t they do what you’ve asked them to do?

Why do they keep forgetting how you want it done?

And why do you feel you have to micromanage them in order to get it “right” every ti...

I have as much trouble keeping New Year’s resolutions as anyone else.  With my birthday on December 30^th, the urge to make changes in my life is doubly strong.  Surprisingly, the resolutions I did keep were the ones we made in our practice.  There was power in having someone else keep me accountable...

I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to make any significant improvements to the practice after Thanksgiving and before the New Year.  Everyone is so distracted by the Holidays.

So, after many years of failed attempts at trying to make practice improvements during this season, we finally gave up....

In Key PEOPLE Principle #1, we discovered that:

Successful practices with great teams hire and retain “good heads” & “good hearts”, not necessarily just “good hands”.  And that great leaders recognize that hiring the right TYPE of person is more important than getting the best SKILLED person.  

In...

In Key PEOPLE Principle #1, we discovered that:

Successful practices with great teams hire and retain “good heads” & “good hearts”, not necessarily just “good hands”.  And that great team leaders recognize that hiring the right TYPE of person is more important than getting the best SKILLED person. ...

What DO successful practices do to get the right people on their team and get the wrong people off their team?   

There are probably as many approaches to finding good employees as there are practices.  Most of us have come up with a way to hire, fire, and review our staff through some form of tria...