If your dental practice has employees, then you and your team cannot succeed without giving up some control. Sounds basic enough. We are all taught to share at and early age. Yet dental practices are no different than other organizations who struggle with the art of delegation.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks is the belief that no one else can do the task. Certainly no one else except the dentist can prepare a tooth for a crown, but short of specific duties that require a certain level of education and training, everything else can be delegated.
But what stymies the delegation of tasks? Primarily the fear that it will not get done correctly. Everyone has experienced times when it actually took longer to delegate the task because of the time involved with cleaning up a mess, a mess caused by someone who did the task poorly. Experiences like that kill the desire to delegate.
When you believe your team lacks the competence to help effectively, then you have two potential issues. First, your team may lack training. Too often there is an assumption that people will pick up the missing skills by watching you, but this rarely happens. There is no substitute for training and coaching and feedback. If you are not showing your team how to improve, if you are not dedicating time to pass along better skills, then you are training people to be bystanders. You can’t delegate to bystanders.
The second potential issue, which is much more serious, is that you hired the wrong personnel. If that is the case, you need to take the appropriate steps to transition that individual out of your practice.
If you or your team is feeling overwhelmed and if you are shouldering too much of the workload, look closely at how you ended up in that situation. Is it a case of needing to learn how to share? Or, do you need to dedicate more time to develop or build your team? Finding the right answer will do wonders for your success and your peace of mind.
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