Improving Relationships At Work

Practical Practice Management A Division of Top Practices

Building working relationships with those we work with each day is very important.  Not only do these relationships make our work life better, but they also make the workplace better. 

A few years back we hired two new medical assistants at the same time, they were wonderful women who had worked together in another practice for about one year, so they knew each other well, which was helpful for them. What equally important was that we (those who have worked in our practice prior to our new hires) work at developing our relationships with them so we could function as a new team.

It takes a while to get to know each other, yet we are expected to work well together from the start. Understanding each other is important and developing open communication from the beginning can be a challenge. I have found that being honest from day one and…

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Being Effective

Practical Practice Management A Division of Top Practices

Peter Drucker has been called by many “The inventor of Modern Management.” He has written multiple books on the topic and believed it was the people working together that made the magic happen in organizations, no matter the size.

He found that successful people whether they were the business owners, managers or employees all followed many of the same basic foundational practices. He called people with these types of practices “Effective Executives” even if they were not actually “Executives” they did their jobs effectively.

• They asked, “What needs to be done,” not “what do I want to do.”
• They strived together to do what was right for the business.
• When they figured out what was right, they developed actions plans to get it done.
• They all took responsibility for the decisions they made collectively and individually.
• They also took responsibility for their communication to one another as they worked together.

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Silent Communication…

Known is a drop, Unknown is an Ocean

Silence is noisy until we become accustomed to it. In silence we can hear the sound of our own pulse and heartbeat, the flowing rhythms of our own blood in our veins, – and the rhythm of the Universe – in the inner ear. When we quiet the endless verbal chatter echoing through our language-filled brains, there is a quieter, more universal mode of communication and knowing waiting to be tapped…

~ T. Manekshaw

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8 Secrets of a Healthy Mind

Our Better Health

We would – of course – like any encounter with mental illness to be as brief as possible

and, most importantly, to be isolated and singular. But the reality is that for many

of us, the illness will threaten to return for visits throughout our lives. It will be

a condition to which we will be permanently susceptible. So the challenge isn’t to learn

to survive only a one-off crisis; it’s to set in place a framework that can help us

to manage our fragility over the long-term. Some of the following moves, practical and

psychological, suggest themselves:

Acknowledgement

Being ready for a return of the illness will help us to calibrate our expectations and

render us appropriately patient and unfrightened in the face of relapses. We fell ill over

many years – our whole childhood might have been the incubating laboratory – and it will

therefore take us an…

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Want To Develop Talent? Get Out Of The Way!

THE UPWARDS LEADER

In the battle for talent, many leaders look externally for getting talent that aligns with the goals (at the least) and the culture (at best).

Unfortunately, according to employee surveys, many leave because leadership has failed to recognize the talent they possess and opt to take their skills elsewhere where they are appreciated.

In fact, a study from 15Five shows that of the top ten reasons employees leave, seven are attributable to poor leadership that hampers development and recognition of an employees efforts and talent.

Among those factors, the reasons that talent doesn’t develop is that leaders get in the way more than anything else. Here are the common reasons a leader may be hindering their peoples’ ability to develop:

Micromanagement. Whether from the basis of perfectionism or not knowing how to properly develop people to the next level of performance, micromanaging always create diminishing returns among employees. They start…

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How To Align Your Leadership

THE UPWARDS LEADER

In a study conducted by Leadership IQ in the last year revealed that only 29% of employees see their leaders as aligned with their organizations’ values.

That leaves an enormous majority – 71% – of leaders are not aligned with the organization they claim to support and represent.

Why is there such a disconnect in leadership across the board? And how can leaders correct the plague of misalignment to get their organization synchronized?

There are a myriad of reasons why leaders don’t willingly comply with their company’s core values and mission, and some of the most common are below:

• Authority Position – these leaders feel above the law as they assume (and usually manipulate the system so) that no one will challenge their authority
• Higher Earnings – there are certain leaders whose salary and stock options are the goal, and all else is secondary
• “Peter Principle” – when a leader…

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How To Create Accountability In Your Leadership Team

THE UPWARDS LEADER

An employee is terminated but when their colleagues go to human resources to shed light on leadership improprieties, they are informed that there were other issues at hand and quickly dismissed.

A new president takes the helm at the company, and spends the first year making significant impact, plenty of allies and great results. Then in the second year, they abuse their influence, trust and power in such a way that those who hear of the change in the leader’s stripes are under their spell and ignore the concerns, or at least minimize them.

Executive leadership hear about the temperament of a particular leader in their organization, but tell everyone that’s just how that person is and it’s not a big deal. To the executives the leader gets great results but to the employees in the know, the leader is abusive and plays favorites.

These three scenarios all have the…

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How to Be the Master of Yourself

*Positive Provocations*

One who understands others has knowledge; One who understands himself has wisdom. Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self requires strength. ~ Tao Te Ching

I believe that most of us have far more control over our lives than we realize, because we will always have control over our reaction to any given situation. There is great power in that realization.

We need to keep our focus on understanding ourselves as opposed to trying to control and understand the actions of others. Using force to try to change the behavior of another is never the best way. So what are we to do when another person acts in a way that distresses us? The answer is always the same: be the master of yourself.

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How to Release Your Hidden Inner Hero

*Positive Provocations*

“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.” ~ Christopher Reeve

I have always loved movies. Especially the ones that inspire you, motivate you, and encourage you to be a better human being. It’s this time of the year usually that these “hero” movies come out.

One of the great things about these movies is that the hero always manages to lift up from life’s troubles. While the rest of us mere mortals would curl up in a dark corner, the hero commits fully to the journey ahead and finds a way to restore the world’s balance.

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Rewriting the Mind – We Are What We Think

*Positive Provocations*

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” ~ Buddha

In order to rewrite the mind positively we need to understand its composition. The mind is composed of three parts, the conscious, the subconscious and the superconscious.

The conscious mind is the part we are aware of – the part that does the thinking, worrying, planning and creating. It is a tiny part of the structure; it is the subconscious that is the looming bulwark, a massive entity with incredible powers and potentials. Its unique characteristic is that it can create anything that we command it to create, by virtue of the thoughts we think.

If you believe that you cannot achieve something, if you believe that you cannot have something, the subconscious will create conditions, so that your beliefs are proved. To transform your life…

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