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Veterinary Practice News Editorial Blog:
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Can You Tell That to My Boss?
By Katherine Dobbs, RVT, CVPM, PHR
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Recently I was in New Orleans for the Veterinary Specialists in Private Practice conference (VSIPP). (By the way, Who Dat? Won the Superbowl!) My colleagues and I discussed an important concept when it comes to any type of continuing education. Here’s the scene. You’re a manager, technician, receptionist, or any position in the hospital except the practice owner, and you go to expand your mind and bring back great ideas to the practice. In fact, hopefully your practice has helped pay for the trip, agreed with you about what topics you should attend, and expect that you will teach what you learned to the practice team when you return. Typically, those who are seeking CE find it exhilarating to learn something new. They come back from CE invigorated with the new things they want to teach and implement!!!...until the boss pops their balloon and deflates their hopes by ignoring their suggestions and squelching their enthusiasm. You’re left just wishing your practice owner had been sitting next to you during this CE lecture so they could understand how much this new procedure, theory, protocol, or piece of equipment can improve the practice and the patient or client care. Dejected, most veterinary professionals will just give up trying to convince their owners of good changes to be made. Some, in fact, will get to the point that they don’t even want to attend CE because they see no point. It’s as if they just want to tell the speaker, “hey, can you tell that to my boss, because there’s no way they’ll listen to me.” Such a shame.
So, how do you get your boss to listen to you and give these great new ideas a chance? You must identify why your boss should be interested in hearing what you have to say. Will this improve patient care? Add to the client experience? Contribute to the bottom-line profitability of the business? Make anyone’s lives easier on the team, in particular the practice owner’s life? It is not enough that YOU were convinced; you must discover what angle to use to convince your practice owner.
Are you presenting the information in a concise, yet appealing way, such as a summary or outline of the main points with supporting material, or are you just plopping down a proceedings manual or CD and expecting the practice owner to participate in hearing what you heard or seeing what you read? Practice owners only have so much time to devote to exploration of new material, so make it easy…give them the Cliff Notes version. Be sure you are also catching them at the appropriate time. Ask to schedule a brief meeting with them when they are not busy, instead of trying to throw this new idea at them during a busy appointment day. Give them incentive to look over what you brought back, and then schedule a follow-up meeting to find out their impression. We can’t expect the practice owner to be just as jazzed as we were about the new idea if they weren’t there for the whole song and dance…but hum them a few bars, and see if they can catch on to the tune!
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