Effective leadership is crucial to every healthy practice. Your leadership must establish a clear vision for the objectives you want to accomplish. It must also establish the culture of the practice. This occurs from the selection of specific people for your team, their clarity in establishing a working process and management structure, and in establishing well-aligned incentives to share the rewards of success. Leadership is very important when practices seek to innovate as well. Innovation requires consistent adherence to sound assessment of an innovation. Where most practices fail at innovating is in their failure to properly assess the opportunity, and then if they decide to implement the innovation, most often leadership dumps the project on management without providing the resources or visible and vocal support that every innovation needs to gain adoption by a team. This is a recipe for failure.
Assessing innovation requires a candid look at the benefits and challenges with each one. What will it do to help your practice grow and improve profitability? What is the return on investment for the innovation, and how will it impact cash flow? What is the objective data that indicates likelihood of success with the innovation? What are the risks?
Lastly, if an innovation makes it beyond the initial assessment, practice leaders must decide what if any impact the project will have on clients and your staff? If it offers benefits to your clients, how will it affect your team? And what will it take to get your team fully behind this innovation initiative? Get your team involved in this process early, and challenge them to define the implementation plan.
Be careful in allowing yourself and your team to be so protective of changing the status quo that you miss the opportunities that are coming more rapidly than ever that might bring customer-satisfying and profit-generating innovation to your practice. Resist the efforts of your practice manager to keep you from innovating. Develop a solid plan for reviewing new opportunities thoroughly, and if you decide to implement in your practice, build support from the ownership, to management, to team leaders in each section of your practice. Provide incentives to reward each party for successful adoption and implementation.
