The Most Effective Management Style for Long-Term Private Practice Success

Are you dictating to your staff? Or are you empowering them? The difference can make a huge difference in your work environment. Two Types of Management, Two Radically Different Outcomes Recently I was reading a book, Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg. It is an awesome book if you haven’t read it. In it, he talks about 5 different types of management. Two of them our the Authoritarian and the Trust/Empower style. I heard somebody else in the physical therapy space talking about the importance of us to give scripts to our staff. While I agree that it is good for us to be constantly testing what we say to patients and move in the right direction, I think it is a lot more important that we look at the type of management and we decipher that and decide on the type of management that we want to have for long term stability of our private practice. Rather than just handing scripts to our staff. Personally, I don’t want employees that regurgitate everything I say to do. I don’t want robots. I want staff that thinks. When we tell staff EXACTLY what to say, it does a couple of things that are really, really negative. Number one is it puts more stress, again, on the PT. So unless you are going out and you are buying scripts (ridiculous by the way), and handing them to your staff. That doesn’t really make sense to me. Its an authoritarian and it doesn’t work for me. Because again, it puts more stress on the PT and makes them more reliant on us. If you are like most practice owners and are implementing systems or automating things, we want to get away from that where everything is reliant on us. Our answer to everything being reliant on us is for us to dictate what our staff is going to say. Not good.