I am a dentist and I have an office manager (hired a little over half a year ago) who I feel does not 100% believe in the value of what we can do for our patients. The most egregious example was when a patient was in such pain and I would have even treated at cost and I told her to help the patient make the numbers work and that I just needed her to ask up front for just enough to cover some up front costs. I kid you not, I brought the patient to her and said to both of them that I would really want to work with her to get things to work, and all this employee did was take out a paper, point to two things on said paper, “this is how much it costs and this is what we can do for you”. That was it. word for word. I was flabbergasted.
I feel like she diagnoses the patient’s financial wallet and makes judgments about their situation and even said that patients would rather spend money on an iphone or other items than their dental health.
It’s her job to talk about money and I have never heard her ask a patient “how can we make this work?” or “okay, I understand that you cannot pay everything up front, but what can you do?”
I try to explain the rationale behind some treatments to her and why the patient needs it but at this point, she is too set in her ways. She doesn’t believe that many important swaths of the field, like orthodontics, etc. are worth the money. I need to put her on a performance improvement plan soon but I’m not sure how to say, “the biggest performance issues is that you do not believe in the value of dentistry”. If she believed 100% that patients NEED to be able to chew and eat and NEED to have their cavities treated, I think the office would do a lot better. I’ve never struggled with this kind of issue before.
Any advice?
I manage a similarly rigid employee. What I have found works for us is having a written approval authority matrix about alternatives that can be offered, and if additional approval is needed, who can approve. People are more conservative in their thinking when they aren’t sure what is specifically allowed (or required) - it makes sense to me, you don’t want to approve something and find out later it wasn’t OK. By documenting boundaries up front (including what is always acceptable and what is never acceptable, and what the middle ground looks like), my employee is empowered to know what they can do. They will still sometimes roll their eyes about something being requested, but so far they’ve been able to set their personal feelings aside to offer what I’ve asked them to.
I would respectfully ask you to consider whether you’ve been specific enough in your expectations with your employee to start formal performance plan stuff. My impression from your post is that you’ve said “be flexible” without being clear about what you want - and I can imagine that being a scary position for an office manager who is typically expected to care about the bottom line.
I could be off base, but I also get the impression that you, yourself, feel a little bit uncomfortable standing up for your prices. Sometimes being perceived as expensive (even if you’re comparatively not) can make for uncomfortable conversations with clients, but if your business is going to be successful (whatever that means to you), the line has to be drawn somewhere- and having a clear understanding of where that line is might help you as much as your own employee.