Leadership Insights

from LeadershipOD.com

January 2011- Vol 2, Issue 1

In This Issue

Get Some Momentum

Stay in Touch

Click Here for Past Issues

Meta MORE Phosis

LeadershipOD will soon re-launch the popular MetaMOREPhosis Staff Development program by Doug Hanson.

Watch your mailbox for details about the start date and for other information.

To learn more about our team's experience with the program or to pre-register, please click here.

Greetings!

On New Year's Day, we sent out a survey and the response was phenomenal. I would like to thank everyone who took the time to let us know how you feel.

I tell people not to do surveys in their office unless they are willing to pay attention to the results and make adjustments based on the feedback. With that advice in mind, I want to share with you some of the survey results:

Most people who responded enjoyed the articles, but not everybody, but almost nobody forwards the articles to others. Only about half of the readership is made up of private practicing optometrists. The other readers are staff members, students and many are leaders from outside the profession.

There is some confusion out there about the purpose of this newsletter and other LeadershipOD services. And frankly, there is a good bit of confusion in here too. I have seen a need amongst many professionals to understand how to effectively become the CEO of their organization and life. I have seen a lot of anxiousness, fear and stress coming from a job that we should truly love. My vision for this newsletter is to help ease that frustration, by helping light the way.

We will be able to fill many requests for future topics like making every member of your team a star, team building, coaching techniques, partnership issues, retreats and training. Another idea we will immediately incorporate is for a Q and A section.

Thank you for a great inaugural year and thanks for your input.

Sincerely,
Mike Rothschild, LeadershipOD

Leadership Tips from Mike Rothschild

Get Some Momentum

Momentum is a measurement of the force resulting from a moving object. The more momentum an object has, the harder it is to stop. Momentum is a term used a lot in sports. When your team gets the momentum, you want to keep it.

Businesses and other organizations can have momentum too. It is how we gauge the progress we are making toward realizing our vision and reaching our goals. To build significant momentum, we simply need to 1) get moving and 2) maintain a constant direction.

Get Moving

Momentum is only possible if you are moving toward a goal. And that is only possible if you know what you are pursuing. To set the direction, you need a defined vision of what you are trying to build and that needs to be shared with the team. Define the barriers and the opportunities and develop the plan. Then, steps need to be taken to change the direction toward the vision you have created. Only leaders can create momentum, the team will follow and managers maintain.

Maintain a Constant Direction

It is often easy to give up on a good plan, to lose momentum before it even gets started. Some things that cause us to drift away from our initial direction are:

- distractions that seem more important because they are urgent

- other goals that are newer, more fun or easier

- unforeseen barriers

- whining from team members not sold on the idea

- others in the organization who lead more effectively than we do

Knowing that these and other momentum-blockers are out there, we can prepare and react appropriately when necessary.

We must keep our eye on the prize, the reason we created the momentum in the first place.To maintain direction, we need to evaluate ourselves consistently and from now on. A lot at first and then less frequently.

Not All Momentum is Good

Back to our sports analogy - When a team has momentum, it is good for one team and bad for the other. In business, the "other team" can be a lot of things. It can be decreasing morale of a team, increasing financial trouble or a relationship with decreasing communication. When things seem to have bad momentum, it is important to see it, call a timeout and find a way to stop it from getting worse. More on that next month.....

Stay in Touch with Office Meetings by Hope Vance

After a presentation, we always receive a handful of emails asking us about our office meetings. Most people want to know if we really do what Dr. Rothschild says we do. Since communication is such a vital part of what we do, it is important we have a good system to stay in touch. This is the Meeting System for WGEC:

Our office meets daily for about ten - fifteen minutes for a discussion of one of our 20 Basics. A different staff member is assigned a basic number to prepare for a discussion with the rest of the staff. During this brief meeting the office stays open but no patients are scheduled.

We also meet weekly for an hour with the office closed and the phones forwarded. (The agenda template is on the Resources tab of LeadershipOD.com.) A week prior to the meeting an agenda is created. On the agenda are announcements, new projects, graphs that demonstrate our progress and a training or educational workshop. A training workshop involves 1-2 staff members training the rest of the staff on a topic. An educational workshop is a lesson on a subject such as glaucoma, insurance, computers, financial wellness, etc.

Retreats are our specialty and done twice a year involving the whole staff spending two days together off site to create new goals, adjust the vision of the practice and to boost momentum.

Leadership Team meetings are held weekly to talk about strategies of the practice and the different goals that are to be accomplished.

The benefit of completing each of these types of meetings is to have good communication between each staff person and area of the office. By working as a team at each of these meetings it boosts morale and keeps everyone on the team motivated to want to continue working towards the vision that is created by the whole team.

If every member of the team is not constantly reminded of what other members of the team are doing the staff can start to work against each other. It is also a good time for everyone to re-group so that all are going in the same direction.

(Hope Vance is the Office Administrator for West Georgia Eye Care and the Consulting Coordinator for LeadershipOD.com. She can be reached at Hope@LeadershipOD.com.)