Staff Management

Micromanagement Tamer: Know Your Personality

By Laurie L. Sorrenson, OD, FAAO

If you’re the kind of doctor who not only thoroughly trains her employees, but also monitors and critiques each of their daily tasks, you may just be a micromanager. It’s a great thing that you care so much about your practice and your patients, but there are downsides to micromanagement. Chief among them is a disempowered staff.

It’s worth giving your employees the tools and guidance they need and then setting them free to provide superior service to patients. If you find it difficult to step away from the management of minutia, take a look at your own personality. Understanding yourself better will help you ease up on the controls.

[FREE RESOURCE: Click HERE to download a copy of Dr. Sorrenson’s staff matrix]

To get started on understanding yourself better, take a look at Personality Plus by Florence Littauer. The author does a great job outlining key personality types, including the strengths and potential pitfalls of each. For example, if you are a “perfect, melancholy,” and like things to be exactly your way, you are going to naturally be more of a micromanager. It helps to understand your own personality type and compensate. I have some perfect tendencies, but it is not my main personality type, so it is very easy for me to delegate and not micromanage. Nevertheless, I still have to watch myself. Here are my top tips for avoiding micromanagement:

Weekly meetings: Alternate who is in charge of running the weekly meeting. We go by alphabetical order and the person in charge also gets to choose the lunch for the day. If an educational or team bonding program is on the agenda, they get to choose that as well.

Responsibility matrix: We have the office broken into five functions and five areas, and staff names are written down with different responsibilities. It is that person’s responsibility to make sure their function is being done, and if not, to notify the doctor.

Have a scribe: A scribe will train staff to answer patients’ questions as the doctor would. That means that the doctor doesn’t have to answer all the questions, which brings me to one of the best ways to quit micromanaging…

Empower your staff: Here are two ways to do that.
• When a staff person asks you how to handle a situation, try replying: “What do you think we should do?” It may surprise you how often the staff member already knows what to do and is just seeking your approval. If it turns out the employee doesn’t have in mind the same solution as you do, then you discuss it. After that, when a situation comes up that is similar, they won’t have to ask you how to handle it.

• Let staff know that they have a fixed amount of dollars to make an upset patient happy (we set that fixed amount at $200). So, if a patient wants a $200 refund, any staff person can OK it. If a patient is unhappy that their contact lenses took too long, any staff person can pay for overnight delivery and send flowers with an apology.

Taking a step back and trusting a competent, well prepared staff isn’t easy, but your employees—and your patients—will thank you for making the leap.

Are you a micromanager? What are your strategies for giving your employees the preparation and resources they need and then standing back and letting them deliver great service?

Laurie L. Sorrenson, OD, FAAO, is president of Lakeline Vision Source in Austin, Texas. To contact her: sorrenson@att.net.

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