Questions: What is the point?

Jun 13, 2010

Editor's note: The Coaches Corner column appears regularly on the DrBicuspid.com advice and opinion page, Second Opinion.

We mentioned previously that the best questions create awareness and responsibility in order to improve performance and learning. If this is the point of your questions, then you are on track to being the best office manager ever in your office.

Most office managers manage work through people. The best office managers manage people through work. They ask questions of their employees that are curious about their employee's level of awareness and responsibilities toward their job accountabilities, not job descriptions. This is because job descriptions change, but job accountabilities don't. The challenge is to connect your employees to the fact that they are working for the practice's benefit. If their efforts don't benefit the practice, even if exhausted by the end of the day, they are missing the point.

In your questioning, you want to shine a light on your employees' own awareness and responsibility toward their job's accountabilities. Do they know what they are accountable for? This often is a good place to begin your questions.

As office manager, you are dealing with short-term targets such as production per day, patient service, and staff cooperation. But you also need to make the point of asking better questions.

Often the target is to grow the practice. In fact, GROW is a useful acronym for your questions:

G stands for the overall long-term goal of your questions: to create awareness and responsibility in your staff.
R stands for reality. Until your different points of view about the reality of a situation or event are aligned, you get different opinions, and different opinions produce no results.
O stand for options -- different options or strategies to be considered in service to patient care. O also stands for being open to different courses of action in service to your "being" -- that is, who you have to be to ask these questions in the first place.
W stands for workability. For targets to be met, there has to be commitment and integrity alongside targets that are achievable and collectively shared.

Dan Kingsbury, D.D.S., life and dental coach, is a co-founder of the Dental Coaches Association, an organization of dentists who are professional coaches committed to bringing coaching to the dental profession. Learn more by visiting DentalCoachesAssociation.org.

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