Cultivate a Positive Culture

How can you make your patient’s day and add to your profitability? By building a positive culture that appreciates patients, employees, and providers. Follow these six tips.

Make their day. That’s the motto of one of my coaching students, Dr. Challa. You might ask, “Make whose day?” The answer is simple: Make your colleague’s day, your boss’s day, or your employee’s day. But most importantly, make your patient’s day.

When Dr. Challa first joined my program, his practice was already mature and successful. That’s why his key people expressed surprise when he brought on a coach to help guide the practice’s growth. They believed that because Kansas Medical Clinic (KMC) was already successful, they didn’t need any coaching.

Yet success isn’t static. Dr. Challa had always been a believer in the importance of culture. Over the years, KMC had participated in numerous initiatives to shape its culture in positive ways. But Dr. Challa had found these initiatives wore off after a couple of years. That led him to develop KMC’s culture from several different angles, including incorporating the Make Their Day philosophy into their daily work.

Here’s an example of this philosophy. Staff members use the sticky-note function in their electronic chart software to log personal details about each patient. That way, a provider can always ask a patient about something that’s personal. When he’s with an elderly patient, Dr. Challa might ask, “How’s your granddaughter Erin’s basketball going?” In response, the patient’s face lights up because she’s invited to talk about her favorite subject–her granddaughter–and she’s happy her doctor remembered a detail she’d told him six months before.

By making this sticky-note habit routine at KMC, Make Their Day has become the prevailing philosophy throughout the clinic. It is not only a guide for how providers treat patients, but also for how all staff members treat one another.

Designed to Enhance Culture

Dr. Challa and his leadership team have made the Make Their Day philosophy one part of a larger campaign to enhance KMC’s culture. Every employee receives a booklet called The Great Philosophy, which provides specific guidelines for maintaining positivity. It also encourages them to take care of one another, take breaks for rejuvenation, avoid the vortex of workplace drama, and follow the slogan “Play, within reason” to encourage spontaneity.

The result? An upbeat culture across KMC’s nine locations. Dr. Challa has fostered the kind of positive environment in which employees feel valued and genuinely enjoy their workday together. And true to form, he gives all the credit for this success to his top HR person, Sonya–”the best HR person we’ve ever had.”

The Hidden Hand That Shapes Your Team’s Behavior

Your practice’s culture is a powerful accelerator to building a well-functioning owner-independent practice when you’re not around and goes well beyond the systems you set up. The culture combines absorbed values, implicit priorities, and unstated “way we do things around here.” It’s the invisible hand that shapes your team’s behavior when no one is looking. And it’s what allows your team to handle new situations.

Cultivating a positive culture includes your personal behavior and the shared values you emphasize throughout your practice. What sort of conduct do you model for your team, especially in tough moments? When a challenge arises and it’s easy to get upset or cut corners, how do you behave? Many of your employees will simply follow your lead in how they deal both with day-to-day responsibilities and sticky dilemmas. Your personal behavior matters.

What shared values do you emphasize? When a team member performs in an exemplary fashion, do you praise that person both privately and publicly? When someone acts in a way that’s negative or inappropriate, do you address it or let it slide? If your team sees you tolerate bad behavior, you’re effectively spoiling the culture you want to create.

But if you deal directly with negativity and other problems initiating the tough conversations that certain situations demand, then you send a clear message about what flies (and what doesn’t fly) in your workplace. That might include owning and acknowledging your own missteps to set an example for your team.

Six Tips for Establishing and Reinforcing a Positive Culture

Ready to invest in your practice’s vital culture? Here are six tips to help you do just that.

1. Write down your vision.
   
   Write out a concrete vision of your practice’s culture. Become clear about what you want it to be. What values do you want your team to internalize? How should they show up in your staff’s behavior? What would an outside observer notice about the culture?
   
   
2. Celebrate victories that align with your core values.
   
   Highlight great behavior; celebrate successes. This reinforces the values you want your team to hold. For example, you might send an email telling about a particular victory or highlight it at a meeting. Over time, small steps of praise and celebration like this accumulate to establish your culture.
   
   
3. Look for small stories that symbolize deeper meaning.
   
   In addition to highlighting victories, look for small occurrences that symbolize the deeper values you want your team to absorb. For example, say Carol came in on Saturday to check on a patient who had a poor reaction to a medication. Because you want that same degree of caring and diligence to be a core value, you’ll publicly thank Carol for it. You’ll ask her how it went and what she learned, then share those insights with your whole team.
   
   
4. Intentionally make the hard decision.
   
   Making the hard decision might mean ending an alliance with another practice that doesn’t fit with the direction and mission of your own. It might mean publicly accepting responsibility for a poor decision or shutting down a failed project. Your team needs to see you model your culture, too. They’re watching closely–even if you don’t realize it.
   
   
5. Start with recruitment.
   
   Emphasize your values and culture in your hiring, selection, and orientation of new team members. Build into your hiring process checks for the personality and values that will directly align with the culture you want. When you bring on a new hire, make sure you communicate the values of your practice–not only with a ten-minute talk but by having multiple people share stories to make those values “real” in their minds.
   
   
6. Cull your low performers.
   
   If you want high performance and personal responsibility to be integral parts of your culture, then cull your low performers now. Every medical practice has them: team members who are just getting by (and everyone knows it). If you don’t deal with their poor performance, you’re telling the others that weak behavior is acceptable.
   
   Your high performers find having deadweight on the team demotivating. Why should they work hard when others just slide by? For this reason, it’s especially crucial to cull your low performers quickly, replacing them with more productive people.

Positive culture doesn’t just build morale; it’s a matter of your bottom line. When your practice boasts a positive work environment, employee retention will improve–because great people want to continue working in a great environment. That in turn improves your turnover rate and your overall profitability.

Build a culture that will grow your practice.

Looking for more great tips on how to build your medical practice the right way? Download a copy of our book Grow Your Medical Practice and Get Your File Back.