Building a dental practice is challenging. We must deliver top-quality care to patients while simultaneously running a regulated business.
For those reasons and others, many dentists find themselves stressed and overworked. Eventually, something goes wrong. The natural reaction during times of stress is to roll up our sleeves and work harder. The mindset is that training people takes too long and delegating to untrained team members is too risky.
The truth is, practice leaders can’t and shouldn’t do everything in their practice. That’s why you have a team. If you don’t have the time to train your team or confidence to delegate to them, the solution is not to do more work yourself. The solution is to either find the time to train them or get help training them. Here are five reasons every practice leader should delegate more.
Delegating tasks frees up your schedule.
What would you do with an extra hour in the day? What about an extra two or three hours? Delegating helps you literally create more time in the day to do whatever you want to do.
What if you didn’t work fewer hours but your time became more flexibility to attend events for your kids, go out to lunch with your spouse, or exercise?
Unless you delegate, you will never be in a position to cut back on hours or shift your time around the life you want to build for yourself or your family.
Delegating helps you focus on what you do best.
Many dentists not only dislike admin work, but they’re also not very good at it. Other people excel at admin work. Thus, delegating tasks to someone who can do it better allows you to turn your attention to your highest-value activity, caring for patients.
Delegating helps you train other people.
One of the most common excuses for not delegating is that it’s quicker to do a task yourself than to train someone else to do it, review their work, and provide feedback. While that is often true for one-off tasks, it is very shortsighted for tasks performed regularly at your practice. With those tasks, delegating allows you to invest a little additional time upfront to save a lot of time down the road once your team member is able to complete the task with limited supervision.
Delegating helps build team members into leaders.
Team members will never become leaders if we don’t give them additional responsibilities and build a culture of delegation. When we give team members higher-level work and delegate important tasks to them, they learn more than only new skills. The example we set when we train them and delegate tasks shows them important leadership traits. And if we build a culture of strategic delegation, they will gain experience training and supervising others.
Delegating helps team members learn to collaborate.
Establishing a culture of delegation at your practice allows all the benefits of delegation to flow throughout your practice. It gives team members an opportunity to work together to complete tasks delegated to them. Your team members become resources to each other. They learn to support each other. They learn to find each other’s strengths and utilize each other’s strengths to complete tasks faster and better.
Do you need to delegate more in your practice?
Many practice leaders struggle unnecessarily because they feel they need to do everything themselves if it’s going to get done right. While that may be true in the short-term, over the long-term, it’s a recipe for disaster. You will become more stressed and overworked. And you will eventually burn out.
If you regularly feel stressed, overworked, or burned out, chances are you could benefit from delegating more in your practice. If you want help building a culture of delegation, join the Delivering WOW Platinum Coaching Program today. By doing so, you and your team will get access to top training and coaching from experts in all facets of running a practice. This gives you the systems, processes, and support you need to make delegating easier.
This article originally appeared on DeliveringWOW.com.