Craig Allingham

American sports utilise the Huddle extensively: the action is interrupted by meetings of the participants to review and implement strategy. For example, in basketball there is the time out and in American football the quarterback calls a huddle pretty much before every play. In golf the player and caddie huddle all over the course. The business Huddle is an extension of this concept.

Key Points for Effective Huddles in the workplace:

• Meetings are short, no more than 15 mins
• Stand, don’t sit
• Timing is up to you – first thing, or later in the morning when all are in. eg. 11.45am
• Huddle is high priority
• Everyone must speak. Who first? Vary it.
• It is not an interrogation – it is a communication tool
• Honesty is critical
• Stick to facts not opinions
• Huddle time is NOT for problem solving. Identifying yes, but not for solving
• What to share:

• Project updates
• Client updates
• Wins – celebrated
• Roadblocks
• Individual priorities for the day
• What you achieved yesterday
• Review couple of team or company metrics

 Not all these are part of every huddle, but the list provides examples to get it flowing

• Problems identified are flagged for follow up meetings
• Discussions are shut down – this is reporting only
• Off site team members can join via skype – as it is NOT a discussion they can make their contribution and also hear from others

How do you know if Huddling is working for you? (Give it six months at least):

• Your KPI metrics will improve: check them
• Your team awareness of strategy and projects and how they fit together will improve
• Your leadership will improve as you have a clearer grasp of all the elements
• Stuff gets done on time, accurately and profitably

How did you feel arriving back to your work desk after the holiday break? Did the sight of it fill you with excitement for a clean start for the new year? Or were you confronted by the unfinished work of last year?

Client files waiting for discharge notes, letters to stakeholders, follow up calls, reports to insurers or a half completed file waiting for the most recent client encounter to be documented with all the accuracy a ten day break can generate.

I wise mentor once described to me the presence of ‘heart sink’ patients. These are the clients who when you see their name on the day list your heart sinks. I believe you can get the same lack of joy from a desk littered with unfinished and non-prioritised tasks.

To ensure you begin every year, month and week in a better frame of mind and clarity of purpose try this one sneaky trick – complete the paperwork as you work with the client. Simple but difficult, especially if your habit is to make cursory notes and fill in the details later. If you are an employee you are probably donating your private (unpaid) time to get this done. If you own the business you most certainly will be donating time that does not generate income. Neither is acceptable nor necessary.

For the details, I refer you to a post from 2010 (yes, you could have been doing it better for years). Click here for a short read that may gain you up to an extra one hour per working day.

Human Resource Management evolved from personnel departments which were previously called common sense. However the gradual  disappearance of common sense from modern life has allowed a new professional body to arise who are experts in managing humans for improved performance.

My experience working at the pointy end of sports science and medicine for twenty years brought me into contact with coaches who are masters of this dark art and other who were technically skilled in their sport but could not bring it out in their teams or athletes.

So in an effort to short cut your learning process in Human Resource (people) management here are five key points to take on board.

1. People generally don’t or won’t manage themselves. Never assume because a person (employee, partner, contractor, patient, referrer) is intelligent, conscious and cooperative that they will manage their efforts in any way to your advantage.  You will need to provide a structure and systems to ensure their performance is contributing to your goals as well as their own.
2. Hire attitude over talent. It is much easier to teach skills than it is to teach personality. When looking for staff be very clear on the skills you are seeking and once the base line for those has been met turn your attention to which remaining candidate possesses the right balance of values, aptitude, attitude and capacity to deliver within your organisation.
3. People don’t leave jobs, they leave people. The most common reason for loss of quality staff (the only ones you will miss) is some conflict or discomfort in the workplace. It may be a workmate or it might be you. Recognise the problem and if you can’t change the dynamic to the advantage of both parties one of them will leave. Be very clear who you want to keep and why.
4. Workers contribute to their maximum when they feel valued. Not when they are valued, but when they FEEL valued. If the first acknowledgement of value appears in an employees departing reference it is way too late. Shame on you. Take the greatest care not to be so busy with your own tasks and roles such that you don’t see and remark on the ordinary efforts your team puts in day after day. And if there is an extra-ordinary effort CELEBRATE it in front of everyone.
5. Money is rarely the strongest motivator for improved performance. There is no doubt money is important as we all need to meet our obligations, but  beyond a certain level more money won’t create engaged, motivated and high performance employees. A fair compensation package will bring adequate performance, but add some of Number 4 (above) and you will see a greater return from your human resources (people).

Across all professional disciplines that I have worked with (allied health, legal, finance, personal care) the common woe is how to manage the people in their business. How to recruit, train, manage, engage and dismiss the right people to ensure the business grows and the day to day worries are reduced. This is not easy, and it is not a skill business owners are trained in. But if you are interested in improving this area of your business I believe you will get great value from my workshop on herding cats. To find out if this workshop is scheduled soon go to www.redsok.com and check out the upcoming events column.

I was chatting with a respected, long term physio colleague recently and he pinned me with the question, ‘How long do you expect physios to stay?’ Meaning, what is a realistic expectation for professional staff turnover? I asked him some further questions and it seemed a more common problem with recent graduates (one, two or three years out of uni) and he told me he does exit interviews.

‘What do they reveal?, I asked. He indicated some move onto formal post-graduate study which necessitates leaving the area but the others seem to feel they have exhausted their learning opportunities at the current practice. One departing employee said, ‘I feel like I have learned all I can here, and need to move on.’  One reason she can move on easily is she had no ties to bind her geographically: no partner with a job nearby, no children in school or other family nearby.

We observed that recruiting staff a little further along their life journey provides some of these anchoring factors that aid retention, perhaps up to around 5 years as opposed to the 1-2 year expectation for the more recent graduates. I guess I felt that the curiosity and mobility of youth was a fact of life, probably not limited to physiotherapy and resiled myself to it being an unalterable tenet.

However, on further reflection this may not be the case, at least in all cases. Over the first year or so of being employed by an experienced colleague there is a steady knowledge transfer from senior to junior. This tends to be intense at first and gradually tapers as the lessons are passed on. There may reach a point of equilibrium where the teacher runs out of new material and the learner has the skills and knowledge close to that of the teacher; and being hungry for more, starts to look elsewhere.

What can be done to encourage a longer tenure in such a situation? Perhaps we need to be counter-intuitive and reverse the roles somewhat, helping the learner become the teacher and the teacher open their mind to the learner.

Lovely words – what does it mean?  I distinctly recall having talented employees who could have taught me much but my ego and inflexibility blinded me to this opportunity. They were ready and able to teach, but I was unready or unwilling to learn.

Developing talent is a wasted process if once developed it is not deployed where it can make the greatest contribution. In our mini-case-study, what may have eventuated if the physiotherapist who had filled her learning quota had been asked to take over the development of staff for a year or so? Including the principal. Not by re-teaching the same stuff, but by adding from her unique knowledge and experience base, by bringing in new information to the organisation, by developing leadership and development skills in her role and by being rewarded for this contribution.

Sure, she may still leave even after this extension of her role (and tenure), but she would be leaving a more enriched organisation behind and leave as a more accomplished practitioner and employee. She would also have contributed to the training of those who followed her.

As employers we often see how much we give to our teams and resent any feelings of not being repaid by output, loyalty or even simple thanks. Step back, stop giving for a while, and ask what you might receive if you realised everyone has something to teach. Have you ever asked your reception staff how they ‘read’ clients?  Asked them to explain how they manage to multitask with phones, computers, people, money, files, letters, reports and the rest? Or asked your cleaning staff how they know when they have done a good job? Or your professional staff what skills and knowledge they may have that can be adding value to the organisational goals or client outcomes? In order, these represent customer service skills, time/task management skills, self-managing team skills and self-knowledge/development skills.

The answers to such questions may surprise you (as much as being asked may surprise them!) and potentially restless staff may even stick around to see if you have learned anything from them and are prepared to put it into practice. Who knows, you may discover your eventual replacement and they may discover a career path.

I recall in my early days of practicing, I pretty much did every PD course available. Which was not difficult and probably only took three or four weekends per year. My how times have changed, you could fill every weekend now if you set your mind to it.

We are spoiled for choice with a huge range of professional development opportunities advertised every month. So how do we select what is most appropriate for each of us?

Do you go for new topics? Or base your selection on the presenter? Are some topics fashionable (think dry needling or fascial planes)? Each course involves significant outlay in terms of cash, time and energy so it makes sense to select wisely.

Your workmates or employers can offer guidance based on your current role or aspirations, but it is based on their opinion of what you need or what you can bring to the workplace. But is it the right fit for you?

Strategic Learning is a practice of aligning your professional development with a longer term strategy of where you want your career to go. Or at least to give you the tools to respond to career opportunities that may arise.

To be strategic, you must first have a strategy. To have a strategy you must have some overarching idea of where you and your career are going. The old ‘where do you see yourself in five years’ type of exercise. Or ten years. This is a difficult exercise to do on your own without input and challenging from a trusted mentor or panel of advisers.

I like the option of reverse engineering a strategy by starting with the end in mind, asking ‘What would be my ideal job at the time of my retirerement?’ and back track a strategic course from that end point. Like any good strategy it can be modified and adapted as the career landscape changes.

Once you have developed your strategy you can then evaluate PD opportunities based on how they align with your path. Do they add knowledge, skills, networks, contacts or connections to advance your strategy? When you see an event advertised ask yourself these three questions:

1.     Will this event contribute toward my long term professional pathway?
2.     Will this event deliver skills to improve my understanding or performance in my current role?
3.     Will this event enrich me as a person?

The event should get at least one tick, if it gets more than one it is starting to look like a good investment. Three ticks and it is a ‘must do’. If you are not certain from the advertisement you should contact the provider and seek further specific information to make a considered choice.

Still going ahead? Great, now there are two more questions –

1.     Can I afford to attend?
2.     Can I afford NOT to attend?

The first one relates to resources (money, time, logistics) and is a totally practical decision. The second is a more important consideration in terms of the cost of not pursuing your strategy. If you have a strategy and the event is well aligned you are retarding your plans if you don’t attend.

As a provider of professional development I have a vested interest in you as a potential client. In my experience the best teaching happens when the learner is truly engaged in the topic, the process and the long term outcomes of the knowledge exchange.

Think carefully when evaluating PD options. Understand your long term strategy not just short term needs. Plan your learning to align with where you want to arrive rather than where you starting from and you won’t go far wrong.

This was a question posed to me by a participant at a business workshop and my immediate response was, ‘Good Question’. This is a time honoured strategy to gain time to formulate a considered answer thus avoiding saying something like, ‘You wish,’ or ‘How do you mean?’

If a considered answer still remains elusive, the second strategy is to ask the questioner to clarify the question. Eventually however I had to respond.

Who decides if a client has been over-serviced?  The health professional or the client?  In the case where a third party is paying for the treatments, it is often that party making the call of ‘enough already’. But what about when the client is paying for their own treatment? Who decides when enough treatment is enough?

I am sure we have all had clients that proved difficult to discharge. Everytime we got close there was a relapse or new problem that necessitated extending the treatment plan. Then there are those patients with chronic, degenerative conditions that are never going to be cured. How many sessions are sufficient for a condition that is always going to need management?

And what is overservicing? Too many sessions over a short period of time? Or too many over a long period? When (if ever) do you say to a client, ‘That’s all. No more treatment for you’, even though they are prepared to pay for further sessions?

What if it wasn’t a medical service, let’s say I really love a particular restaurant or cafe and frequent it several times per week. Are they over-servicing me? Or am I simplyl meeting a need, paying a price and receiving what I consider to be fair value?

Does a cinema refuse admission if you have already seen the movie twice? Does your butcher say ‘No more, you have eaten enough meat already this week’? I don’t think so.

Are these purchases that meet needs such has hunger and relief of boredom any more or less valid than purchasing a service that fills a different need and does so at a price that represents good value?

The evidence-base theory of treatment would place this decision on the practitioner, who has the knowledge of what further benefits are likely with ongoing treatment. When the benefits dwindle, according to the evidence, we must then discontinue treatment lest we be operating fraudulently.

The customer focused practitioner would have access to the same evidence base, and upon reaching a point of diminishing returns would ask the client if they were receiving sufficient ongoing benefit to justify the ongoing cost. Perhaps the evidence isn’t measuring all the benefits that the client is perceiving, and even though the condition is no longer improving the process of treatment is meeting some other as yet unmeasured need.

Ah, if only it was that simple: if the client believes it is helping then it can’t be over servicing. Now into play comes the gray areas of fully informed consent, unequal power relationships, the concept of ‘the expert’, and self interest.

Continuing to offer treatment based on authority, fear, dependence, self-interest or mis-information is unethical and unprofessional.

Continuing to deliver treatment at the request of a fee paying client where clear professional boundaries are respected, full information about the limits of treatment are explained and acknowledged and where the client has the power to regulate and/or cease at any time can, in my mind, be optimal servicing.

At all times the benefit equation must fall on the side of the client. Repeated questioning regarding the perceived benefits of ongoing treatment, benefits that can be described in a logical, rational manner rather than emotional (I just like coming here), should ensure the level of service represents a value proposition for the client.

Alongside that process should be regular reviews where the practitioner and client document the treatment plan for the upcoming period and identify where the benefits are likely to appear.

The final test: if you can’t explain to a professional colleague why the client is attending, they probably shouldn’t be.