Mastering The Skill of Managing A Team in Your Private Practice

There are many ways that you can outsource in your private practice and there are some general guidelines to follow when you start looking for and interviewing your ideal candidate but one question still remains …

How should you go about managing the people you bring onto your team or hire for specific projects?

As a private practitioner, you will need to get in the habit of owning your position as the entrepreneur and visionary of your business. Managing subcontractors and freelancers does not have to be overwhelming, especially with these basic tips…

Prepare

Depending on the role you have hired for, there may be certain items to prepare to ensure that their onboarding is seamless. It is always a good idea to have any files or documents that your subcontractor may require organized and ready to share. A simple Google Drive or DropBox link will be sufficient.

Some of the documents you may need to prepare could include any policies or procedures that your new team member will need to be familiar with to do their job. It is also a good idea to have a collection of your brand assets including brand colours, logos, approved headshots and stock images to be shared with a graphic or web designer, or even a social media manager.

Another important part of preparing to onboard a new team member is to have any passwords they will require readily available. I would suggest using a program such as LastPass or Dashlane to securely store your passwords and make only the ones that are pertinent to the freelancer available to them. You can also choose to hide the password when sharing it through these programs which means that the recipient can only copy or auto-fill the password (using a browser plug-in) without actually having access to it.

Where ever possible, map out the tasks that your new team member will be required to complete and develop workflows and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to make training go more smoothly. While freelancers will have the necessary skills to complete the tasks you assign them, they may not be familiar with any of the nuanced requirements in your industry or the particular details of how your business performs certain tasks so it is important to have these procedures and guidelines documented.

Delegate

As a private practitioner, you are likely used to being involved in every aspect of your business but it is important to ensure that you are delegating effectively. Take some time to review all of the tasks that you complete in a day, week or month and determine which tasks only you can do.

Once you have determined what only you can do (hint: this will likely be anything client facing such as therapy sessions or consultation calls), approach your team to see if they have the capacity or knowledge to take some of the administrative, marketing or accounting tasks off your plate.

This is where having documented workflows and procedures will be incredibly important. Providing these training resources and guidelines will help with the learning curve of your team member starting a new-to-them task.

Finally, it may be a good idea to get familiar with a project management tool such as Asana, ClickUp or Monday.com. These web-based programs allow you to input, manage and assign tasks to yourself and your team. You are also able to add due dates or set a task as recurring if applicable. Each program is slightly different so try a few to see what works best for you as the business owner. Many offer free plans so it is easy to complete a test run before implementing one system or another.

Communicate

Next, you will need to determine how you will communicate with your team or subcontractors. Many subcontractors will have preferences for how and when they communicate with their clients to support their own business boundaries so it is important to respect those guidelines. This could include specific office hours or not being available for unscheduled phone calls.

Be sure to determine which channels you will use for communication from the beginning of your time together. Knowing if you need to communicate via email, through a project management program or an instant messaging service such as Slack, WhatsApp or Voxer will be an important step to ensuring that no details get missed or lost.

You may also determine that you require regular meetings with your team member. This will depend on the needs of your business but be sure to communicate with your subcontractors to get progress or planning meetings on both of your calendars well in advance.

Are you planning to outsource tasks in your private practice? If you are feeling unsure about where to start, check out our Scale Your Practice program designed to help you go deeper in your private practice.