Time management: How to save time with delegation and trust your assistants?

There’s nothing quite as important as building a trustworthy team with reliable personal assistants when running a dental practice, or indeed any business at all. Effective task delegation is the best means of scaling your business, expanding your team while still leaving enough time for other endeavors and your personal life. Personal assistants, when chosen and trained appropriately, can essentially automate your workflow, letting you focus on your primary trade — dentistry. But wrongful delegation can also sow discord and harm your efforts.

Not all of us are lucky enough to have a personal assistant who handles most business and operational tasks, so you don’t have to worry about anything. When we fail to find such employees, we usually blame the lack of a sufficient talent pool. But, more often than not, the fault lies with us for failing to effectively utilize skills and talent. Choosing personal assistants is as delicate a task, complete with as many hierarchies as your entire pool of employees.

Finding the right personal assistant for the correct set of tasks can multiply your workflow capacities, helping you become a better leader and manager. To receive those benefits, you need to choose the right personal assistants, delegate the right kind of tasks to them, and groom them to handle your management-related tasks so that you can focus on being a dentist and tend to your patients. Below, we share tips on finding the ideal personal assistants, maximizing their potential, and other tips on workflow automation.

The best office managers and assistants aren’t found — they’re built.

People often assume they can simply find an assistant who can relieve all their management burdens. Sure, some people are lucky enough to stumble into the perfect managers who take over all management responsibilities and display immense loyalty from the start. But, more often than not, you find employees who have to slowly learn the ropes of your business. Instead of trying to find the best office manager, it’s worth learning to groom them into the perfect manager. After all, loyalty isn’t bought — it’s won.

One of the best ways to groom your potential office managers is through a hierarchy of tasks. Create a mental map of task-based hierarchies, with each level corresponding to more creativity, more automation, more skills, and more trust. If you have several employees or assistants in your dental clinic, you can create a mental tab on their progress. Lead them in the right direction and see how much initiative they show. As your employees show more initiative, make them climb higher with more responsibilities until you’ve found one employee to manage your business.

The following is a brief overview of the various levels and hierarchies your assistants need to climb

Level 1: Assistants

Dental assistants play many roles in assisting the primary dentist, such as taking x-rays, patient care, managing appointments, etc. Most dentists look for dental assistants who are technically skilled at their various roles and have a sufficiently friendly personality. When you first start working with your dental assistant, give them extremely detailed information on scheduling appointments, record keeping, taking notes, etc. Based on how they handle the tasks and their level of creative input, you can decide if you want to escalate their responsibilities.

Level 2: Executives

If your dental assistant displays sufficient skills and initiative with management, you can increase their tasks and autonomy. Administrative executives can manage your appointments, patients, records, contacts, vendors, and other business processes with limited supervision. They might still need to assist you during cleanings and in other similar tasks, but you can start moving them more towards business-related tasks. Executive-level employees should be perfectly familiar with the ins-and-outs of your business, capable of handling most day-to-day activities, though you shouldn’t give them sensitive and confidential details (yet).

Level 3: Manager

Once you trust your executive-level employees completely, and they display autonomy, you can shift them to the management side of your dental clinic entirely. Your office managers can handle your entire business at this stage — they manage your staff, run all business processes, deal with patients and vendors, etc., with little to no input. They know you and your business inside and out, take complete ownership of its success, and handle all your business needs before you can even anticipate them.

You need someone who has worked with you for several years and someone incredibly trustworthy to take this position because it involves high confidentiality and trust. But once you successfully groom the ideal dental assistant to take that position, you can rest assured that you can finally start focusing full-time on being a dentist. If you follow this hierarchy of tasks, you’ll soon have an office manager who handles over 80% of your management processes, so the dental clinic essentially runs independently.

Hold regular meetings with your assistants and managers.

Just because you have an office manager whom you trust implicitly doesn’t mean you can completely let go of the reigns. You must still stay on top of all your business tasks and keep yourself informed. Holding regular one-on-one meetings with your manager keeps them accountable and answerable while ensuring you know exactly what’s happening with your dental clinic. During the meeting, they can inform you about all the accomplished tasks or the progress of the ongoing tasks, so you know which tasks are officially closed. You can also give your assistant their next set of tasks for the coming weeks or months. Ideally, your office manager should be empowered to focus on business growth while you focus on dentistry and your patients’ well-being.

Provide resources and training to help them grow.

It’s essential to give your assistants and team members the resources and training they need to grow. You can either handle the training yourself or send your assistants for management workshops and courses. Investing in your assistant’s growth is going to increase their loyalty to your business, cultivate their skills, and help you eventually gain a dental clinic manager that handles all business-related tasks with no oversight.

Encourage greater ownership of the work and business.

Once your assistant climbs up the rungs to become your administrative executive or manager, they must treat your dental clinic like their own. They should have complete ownership over the business. But that sense of ownership comes with an inherent feeling; it’s not something you can ask them to do. Through encouragement, personal interactions, training courses, greater responsibility, your assistants will eventually see your business as their own, seeing its success as their own. Likewise, it’s your responsibility to entrust them with confidential details and the respect they need to manage your employees.

Once you have an assistant familiar with every aspect of your business and whom you trust implicitly, you can let loose and focus on the tasks you’re interested in more than anything else — dentistry and exceptional patient experience.

This article was originally published in the Zircon Medical Magazine for leading dental professionals. The article was based on an interview conducted with Dr. Kristina Worseg, the founder of a dental practice called Ordination Dr. Kristina Worseg in Vienna.