Find and Keep the Right Employees

From the College” recently introduced the idea of tapping into your employees’ values as a way to build and maintain a high-functioning, successful, and loyal staff. This process is part of a larger management cycle—the Five Rs of physician leadership. Simply put, the Five Rs are designed to help physician leaders move from managing managers to coaching leaders. The Five Rs are recruitment, realization, recognition, redirection, and retention.

G. Eric Allenbaugh writes, “Coaching is defined as an ongoing face-to-face process on influencing behavior by which the manager and employee collaborate to assist in achieving: increased job knowledge; improved skills in carrying out job responsibilities; higher level of job satisfaction; a stronger, more positive working relationship; and opportunities for personal and professional growth.”¹

As a physician leader, the coaching approach to management will help you tap into the values of the staff that help run your business. Because coaching establishes a two-way relationship, where both parties are contributing, valued, and viewed as assets, this type of leadership style will help you establish the best-case scenario for your employees, your department or practice, and yourself.

Let’s take a look at two of the Five Rs and examine how a coach would approach them.

Recruitment

Whether you inherited your staff or are building one from scratch, you will eventually need to attract new employees to your practice or department. Depending on growth and turnover, this is a step with which you will become very familiar. Filling a vacancy can be a time-consuming and frustrating task for any leader. Knowing where to look for qualified candidates, how to narrow the pool, and what to ask in the interview will help make the process easier.

Looking for Candidates: There are many ways to recruit employees, but it is important to note that the word “recruiting” is a verb, and finding the right match takes action—looking for candidates is much more than casting bait and waiting.

One of the top places to search for candidates is on the Internet. Posting your job opening and reviewing résumés posted online will give you a large number of candidates to consider. Consider going outside of your own Web site to post openings and search résumés; go to sites that offer these services, and give great consideration to those that specifically advertise jobs in health care, because this will help you when you begin to narrow the candidate pool.