This article uses information from the insightful book by the long-time dental consultant, Bianca Dornan at Practices Made Perfect.
In your dental practice, there are hundreds of tasks that can be done at any given time to improve the business. Knowing how to use concentration tricks to uncover these tasks is the first step. Having the capacity to accomplish them is the next one.
Unfortunately, not one person can hope to have enough capacity to accomplish every business boosting tactic on a regular basis. You’re going to need help! Delegating these activities to the people within your practice accomplishes a number of things on top of the actual jobs. Things like;
- Uncovering hidden talents of your employees
- Increasing buy-in from your team around business growth
- Adding accountability for task completion
- Opportunity to learn and expand abilities
For many practice owners or office managers, the problem isn’t with the concept of delegating tasks, but rather the execution of it. Especially in cases where your practice has been operating in a certain way for a long while, people in the practice can often be, or appear to be, resistant when asked to take on more duties. To tackle this, Bianca Dornan has developed a 4 part strategy to asking for help.
Step 1: Begin the ask with an action statement and an objective. Make sure your action statement is specific enough that the direction of the task is clear.
“Can you please help me with marketing. I would like to use social media [action] in order to get our name out to the community [objective].”
Step 2: Include key factors in order to further specify exactly what you’re looking for with this task, and make the results measurable.
“I would like to make sure that our personality shows through in every post [key factor]. I can commit to a budget of $100 per month from now until September [key factor]. My end goal is to have 150 new followers by September 30th [measurable goal].”
Step 3: Ask for their opinion on this new task. Perhaps they will need further clarification, training, or will have an objection. In any case, it’s important to get their feedback so that they feel included in the decision and buy-in to the results.
“What are your thoughts on this project?”
Step 4: Find out what they need in order to get started, and make a plan to provide them with it.
“What do you need from me in order to get going with this project?”
Every employee is different, and there may still be pushback. By using this guide to delegation, the stars in your office will become more obvious, and the weaker members that may require more managing/training will too. In either case, this exercise provides you with an opportunity to get your whole team moving towards better business outcomes.
