August 2008
Hi Team M3:
People. People. People. Get the right people. Keep the right people. The riddle begins with “How”…to get them…but that is not all. It gets very complex when the question “Who?” enters the mystery. Then, the final part of the riddle is how to keep them.
The Recent Lesson: Great staff are not just people who give great patient care or who fit our five primary covenants. Those criteria make a really great candidate, and that’s all.
At 10 p.m. on a Sunday night in August one of the doctors emailed me her “quit notice”. I didn’t get it until the next day, Monday morning. No call. No notes. No meeting. Only an email. She quit, she stated in her email, because she was getting paid too little. (She copied her email to several other staff.) In fact, I would agree, in the sense that she was earning too little. According to our contract, if she had no patients, she would not get her full salary. Until she increased her patient load to an appropriate level – and a fair level – she would remain at a reduced salary. Getting paid too little was a strategic point in the contract that would get and keep her busy in case she decided she wanted to get paid for doing nothing. That was my guarantee for a fair exchange of work for money. The problem was, after taking off nearly 12 weeks of time for her wedding festivities in 2008, she had very few patients upon her return. She didn’t want to wait to increase her patient load to get paid. She wanted the salary now. When I said, “no”, she got mad enough to quit without notice (her contractual obligation was six-weeks notice).
Here is the bottom line: She was a great candidate, but a bad choice. One of the top criteria for choosing a candidate has to be “ability to be part of a winning team”. That immediately weeds out people with “entitlement issues” (i.e. I get to play when I want and everyone has to support me when I want.) It weeds out “poor sports” (i.e. This didn’t work out the way I wanted so it’s your fault.) Team players can’t have those characteristics and be on my team. (My husband, who loves sports, keeps me in the loop about great coaches and great teams. Now I believe that I should have been listening to him more carefully over the years!) As for now, I am correcting my interview process to find a Great Choice. No wonder headhunters get paid so much. This is what it’s all about.
So, there are people applying, as usual. The point that becomes clear comes from what one businessman recently said to me in a lunch meeting. He said that my staff is just the wrong size;(it is too small to be big and too big to be small); when there is more depth (as in, more staff who do the same thing) I won’t be caught in quite the same conundrum when one staff member leaves. That is where the pain is right now. Being down a critical player in the staff really hurts. It effects business, negatively, in many ways.
One of the reasons I am growing UHI is as a strategy to keep staff by giving them a place to grow and expand into. There is that added perk of (more easily) being able to let go of bad staff because I’d know I have back-ups.
People. People. People. Get the right people. Keep the right people. The riddle begins with “How”…to get them…but that is not all. It gets very complex when the question “Who?” enters the mystery. Then, the final part of the riddle is how to keep them.
The Recent Lesson: Great staff are not just people who give great patient care or who fit our five primary covenants. Those criteria make a really great candidate, and that’s all.
At 10 p.m. on a Sunday night in August one of the doctors emailed me her “quit notice”. I didn’t get it until the next day, Monday morning. No call. No notes. No meeting. Only an email. She quit, she stated in her email, because she was getting paid too little. (She copied her email to several other staff.) In fact, I would agree, in the sense that she was earning too little. According to our contract, if she had no patients, she would not get her full salary. Until she increased her patient load to an appropriate level – and a fair level – she would remain at a reduced salary. Getting paid too little was a strategic point in the contract that would get and keep her busy in case she decided she wanted to get paid for doing nothing. That was my guarantee for a fair exchange of work for money. The problem was, after taking off nearly 12 weeks of time for her wedding festivities in 2008, she had very few patients upon her return. She didn’t want to wait to increase her patient load to get paid. She wanted the salary now. When I said, “no”, she got mad enough to quit without notice (her contractual obligation was six-weeks notice).
Here is the bottom line: She was a great candidate, but a bad choice. One of the top criteria for choosing a candidate has to be “ability to be part of a winning team”. That immediately weeds out people with “entitlement issues” (i.e. I get to play when I want and everyone has to support me when I want.) It weeds out “poor sports” (i.e. This didn’t work out the way I wanted so it’s your fault.) Team players can’t have those characteristics and be on my team. (My husband, who loves sports, keeps me in the loop about great coaches and great teams. Now I believe that I should have been listening to him more carefully over the years!) As for now, I am correcting my interview process to find a Great Choice. No wonder headhunters get paid so much. This is what it’s all about.
So, there are people applying, as usual. The point that becomes clear comes from what one businessman recently said to me in a lunch meeting. He said that my staff is just the wrong size;(it is too small to be big and too big to be small); when there is more depth (as in, more staff who do the same thing) I won’t be caught in quite the same conundrum when one staff member leaves. That is where the pain is right now. Being down a critical player in the staff really hurts. It effects business, negatively, in many ways.
One of the reasons I am growing UHI is as a strategy to keep staff by giving them a place to grow and expand into. There is that added perk of (more easily) being able to let go of bad staff because I’d know I have back-ups.
posted by Dr. Amelia Case at Monday, December 29, 2008
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