Adopting loose-tight approach to build, keep and develop your team

As a practice manager or owner, assembling, keeping and developing your team is your number one priority. Simply put, nothing is more important to do or spend your time on than helping your team develop. This is not something you can impose. It is not something you can actually do yourself – it is only something you can assist with, creating the right conditions to enable your team to gel and produce.

You cannot motivate people – you can only create the conditions for them to be motivated. And all your best efforts at creating the right environment can be so easily undone – or not even get started – if you don’t have the culture that allows these to happen. Teamwork is a cultural attitude to productivity.

Hire who you need

Attracting the best people is about creating a culture people want to be a part of. To do this you need to sweat the details. The details matter – if they matter to your team, they matter. Your aim is to create a culture no one wants to leave, but everyone wants to talk about.

Hiring isn’t a science – it requires time and patience. You need to hire for attitude. This is easier said than done, especially when you have a pressing need. Sometimes you feel the only quality you’re looking for in a candidate is a pulse. But – and you know it – this is a false economy and it will come back to haunt you, probably sooner rather than later.

To attract the right people, and ensure they will stay and contribute to the organisation, you need to match the values of the individual to the practice. You can only do this through a thorough vetting process, and by careful listening and patience.

You must not view recruitment as a short-term stopgap solution, no matter the pressure. You need to realise you can’t please everyone – you need to accept that from the beginning. Even when confronted with a candidate who appears ideal “on paper”, be prepared to walk away if he or she does not fit within the team. You need to hire people for careers, not jobs.

Keeping your team together

Part of a culture that helps people want to stay and be part of an organisation is a loose-tight attitude to managing people. Your staff are smart – they are adults, leave your practice each night to go home, and manage. They manage households, run their own small businesses or run the local parent-teacher association or scouts. They volunteer for local charities and help friends and relatives. These are very capable people – they just need to be set free and allowed to contribute. You treat them as incapable children at your expense.

But how do you enable your team while still having certain rules and standards? A loose-tight approach – being tight with your standards and expectations, but loose on how you allow your staff to achieve this. Give people responsibility and they’ll give you much more than you would otherwise expect.

Manage for the end result, not the immediate – think next year, not tomorrow. Sometimes this means preparing to let go – even to important, cherished individuals. Sometimes you need to be prepared to walk away. This is a difficult decision, but a brave one.

People will stay with an organisation if their job matches their interests. These are core interests and they may not immediately match what you have on offer or want from them. If you want to retain your best people, you need to understand this inherently. Many people leave their jobs because managers don’t understand the importance of work satisfaction.

Work satisfaction is not necessarily about what people are good at, but it is what makes them happy and what motivates them. Happiness translates into commitment – when people are happy and committed, they feel, and are, more engaged. When people are engaged with an organisation, they don’t feel like quitting.

Understanding what makes a person happy doesn’t require any special training, it just requires you to listen – actively listen – plus your time and patience. Again, this is about the details. The only way you are going to learn this and ensure action is being correctly taken is through a regular review process.

Scheduling time to sit down with each employee regularly, say monthly – even in an informal or semi-formal meeting – will help prevent someone’s career from “falling through the cracks”. Again, this is easier said than done in most busy practices, but like everything else, perseverance can make it happen, and once it starts happening regularly, it will become habitual and second nature to everyone involved. If you want to retain staff, this is one of the details you must sweat.

Help your team develop

Key to helping build a better team is truth. True to your word; true to yourself; true to your team. You need to demonstrate, through actions, what you preach. You need to make true one of your own hallmarks if you are going to help build a great team.

Certain hallmarks of excellent teams exist. Don’t be afraid to ask other leaders how they do things or what they avoid. Visit organisations and note what makes the team hold together, or not. Examine successful organisations, regardless of whether they are veterinary, to learn from their mistakes. No one is perfect; no one has the answers to everything, and it has usually already been done somewhere before.

Many valuable lessons can be learned from the Mayo Clinic – an innovative human hospital group based in the US. In addition to Mayo’s outstanding reputation, it is in a similar field to ourselves and very transparent, meaning a wealth of material is out there to be learned from.

The Mayo Clinic espouses few key hallmarks that are valuable to us. Pick what you feel is useful, merge them with your own thoughts and beliefs, and discard the rest. One of Mayo’s beliefs is in assembling expert care for individual patients. So, that sounds good.

Treating patients as individuals is important. Not just for the patient and the clinical care you are providing; not just for the client who will notice the level of individual care, but also for the team, as it shows how much you care about an individual patient. Patients, not numbers. This is just one hallmark and one you may or may not think is key – I do.

When you show how much you care, you live your values. People don’t work for companies – they work for organisations that share their values. When a shared set of values exists, you have a team.

You must not make teamwork optional. If you do, the values you live by become optional and you have a chink in your armour. When chinks in your values are exposed, negativity can creep in and people start interpreting what they want from an organisation. People will then leave, negativity and negative comments affect people directly, and this is five times as strong as an offsetting positive comment. So, to build your team, live your values and ensure collective responsibility exists to this end. Again, this is part of loose-tight management.

Certain hallmarks exist for a harmonious and productive workplace, including respect for the individual, being collaborative, being egalitarian and being meritocratic. Also, if you can eliminate or lessen the effect of politics within the organisation, more power to you.

You need to establish your own hallmarks and measure yourself against these, if you agree with them – and you must agree with them and need to be realistic. Be prepared to mark yourself down if you are coming up short and do something about it.

Summary

Attracting the right people, retaining them once they have committed to your practice and helping to develop them to build a better team, is the single most important thing you, as a manager, can do.

A business case exists for developing a better team, beyond the benefits of it being a better place to work. Poor teams with unacceptable behaviour make recruiting more difficult, as well as retaining the best and brightest almost impossible. Beyond that, there is also higher client turnover and the risk of a damaged reputation – and, of course, we all want to work in a nice place, in an excellent team.