This is the first in a 3-part series about the creation (or re-creation) of a vision and a system for your practice, how to ensure that your system stays in existence, and how to troubleshoot the inevitable issues which often arise.
Part One: Charting the Course
By Thomas Lecoq
The best role for the doctor in any practice is inspirational leader. You hold (and share) the vision for the practice; your speaking and encouragement constantly point the way to an ideal, with the best outcomes for patients at the center. When staff embrace this vision and take it on, they become leaders themselves.
That’s why we spend two days in our full consultation illustrating a literal map, a flow chart, of your ideal practice. Because if you don’t have a clear image of your destination, you won’t get there.
A clear plan for all to see.
Our Map is a wall-sized diagram of everything that happens in a thriving Vision Therapy practice. We teach it with considerable doctor input and together, keep pointing to your altruistic vision. Staff realizes you mean it, and they see how their own area of responsibility affects everyone else. The map makes everyone perfectly clear of their roles, and the shared vision inspires cooperation.
Our map details our whole system, and it is adapted to handle individual doctor concerns and situations. It is backed up by specific training, detailed manuals, videos and other materials so new staff can learn quickly what they are supposed to do and say.
The map is a visual display, and we recommend that it be present in EVERY staff meeting and training. Because it’s visual, it’s easy to identify when someone has arbitrarily changed something and your enrollment, marketing or other performance measures drop.
This is an incredibly effective way to communicate the doctor’s vision for their practice. It is a way to elevate yourself into being the leader of your practice, with a strong and effective team knowing exactly what you require of them.
Our map is a timeline of the interactions with the public (marketing), with patients, and with educators and professionals in a position to refer.
Don’t lose your way.
Without a visual display, we see that doctors lose track of what needs to happen for optimal practice effectiveness. Someone changes what they say or do and enrollment drops, or you find yourself patching, fixing, even angry. None of these are any fun, and practicing VT should be a joy. Remember how wonderful it is to see a child arrive kind of a scrambled visual and perceptual mess, then leave as bright shiny kids who are succeeding and happy?
The point of a map of your practice system is to keep before you and staff at all times, a visual display of what you are building together.
Charting enables great achievements.
In my youth, I worked at the plant where they built the Apollo, the vehicle that took us to the moon. They were using something called PERT charts. Every step of every part of the project was noted in the order in which they were to be completed. Each step affected the next. Losing track of some detail was an incredibly expensive disaster. With millions of parts and devices to design, build, test, refine then manufacture, without a map (PERT chart) it would be impossible to build the space capsule, the service rocket it rides on, or the other rocket stages.
Without those maps, we’d still be fiddling around trying to get up there.
What would you like to build?
Do you have a map, a visual display of exactly what you are building? Is everyone on the same page? Are you able to go home in time to see your children before bedtime? Do things run smoothly with everyone doing their best to make your shared vision of an ideal practice come true?
Whether starting cold or adding or expanding VT in an existing practice. I invite you to have a conversation with Amee Lecoq. We have an exercise called the Ideal Scene. We ask doctors to write out how a perfect day in practice would be for them. We help them tease it out in detail.
If you don’t have a clear idea of what would be perfect, then how can you possibly expect to develop it?
This is the very first step in working with us. We need to know what you really want, what moves you. From that, we can develop the plan, and a map, to get you there. Have a conversation with Amee Lecoq, set it up today.
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