I’m proud of my staff. They are the best. The first time I heard this said, I wasn’t sure of its sincerity or if it was just something nice that pharmaceutical reps say. However, after hearing it spontaneously from three different reps, I’m pretty convinced. Plus, I agree with its truthfulness. According to one rep, we are really different and seem like a happy family rather than a corporate office. In the words of another rep, we have a really sharp bunch, who ask smart medical questions, much smarter than any other offices called on by that rep. Still a third rep noted that while a lot of practices had some pretty dysfunctional staff politics with low morale and high turnover, ours seemed like such a cohesive happy team.
Another reason I know that our staff is different is that I’ve worked with different staff in the past, during my training and before I started my own practice. And even after I started my practice, I have a lot of contact with different practices and have even shared weekend call with other practices. So I do know what other offices are like. Most importantly, PATIENTS notice the difference, especially those who have been patients elsewhere. They often ask me what our secret is. The “secret” is really many different small secrets.
One secret is emphasizing selection over development. In other words, when people want to know how to train a staff to be so great, I remind them that it’s much easier if you first make some extra effort to CHOOSE the right people to start with. In the past, I used to go through an average of 40 resumes for each position. Lately, it’s been more like 1 out of every 25. This is attributed to better efforts at clearly announcing the details of the job description, so as to get fewer resumes from totally unqualified applicants. So, one secret to getting your staff to be excellent is to hire people who are fundamentally good in the first place. So, given a choice of applicant A: Someone who is very experienced, but not as great a person vs applicant B: Someone who is a hard-working, smart, good-hearted person with no experience, I would take B. It’s much easier to train a sharp, industrious, caring person the details of infertility treatment than to train an experienced infertility nurse how to be smart, hard-working and caring.
However, in all honesty, no matter how great a team is, there are always going to be moments of friction, especially when you are running a high-stress task such as competitive sports, fighting a war or providing high-tech fertility treatment. Recently, one thing that has really helped was to take into account everyone’s personality type. Many of you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs classification system. Well, there is one I like even better, called the Enneagram system. If you haven’t tested yourself yet, take a few moments to do so. If you also test your partner, you might gain some valuable insight into the dynamics of your interaction.
I started having all job applicants take the Enneagram as part of their application process. Right now, our office is a good mix. Just as a good NBA basketball team is not going to have eleven speedy point-guards nor eleven big centers, a good medical team is not going to have people all of a single personality type. In case you’re interested, we happen to be a Type 7 / Type 3 (me), a Type 7 / Type 9, Type 2 / Type 9, a Type 6, a Type 2 and a Type 2 / Type 8. In order to see how each of these types interact, check out these write-ups. The other day, when we were having some conflicts, I printed out these descriptions and had everyone read them. The tension melted and was replaced with rolling-in-the-aisles laughter regarding how uncannily accurate those descriptions were.
