Do You Suffer From Corporate Obesity?

I want to share with you a syndrome that I found. It’s called organizational or corporate obesity. It can happen in large corporations in health systems as well as small practices. There are a lot of symptoms that go along with this. Some of the most common are:  employees that are silent for fear of retribution for what they’re saying, those that are overly loud about their opinion and overwhelm everybody, an employee that has some talent but is not really sharing that talent, those that complain a lot, those that send e-mails out and end up blind carbon copying a bunch of people because they want to make sure they cover their hynie, lack of work on projects, ones that aren’t going anywhere, or a drop in revenue. All these things can be symptoms of organizational obesity. We all deal with obesity. What you need to do is get fit again. I’m going to share some tips with you about how to get over that organizational obesity and become fit once again. Then you can focus on giving the highest level of care you can give, focus on outstanding behavior for employees, and outstanding experiences for your patients versus day to day frustrations that bring you down.

First of all take a look at all the different levels in your organization. See if there is a dictatorial manner that might be going on. That sort of dictatorship can be very belittling, especially for talented employees that you want to keep and nurture and grow.

You want to look for employees that have informal power, whether it’s deserved or not deserved.  Most of the time it’s not deserved. Maybe they create some fear from the other employees not being excepted or not belonging. What you want to do is turn that around. One of the best ways to turn that around is to take a look at your leadership style and see whether or not it’s a leader/follower sort of situation or whether it’s leader/leader. That means you’re giving your employees some sort of latitude in terms of making decisions when there’s issues going on. That concept has actually been around a while. The first time I heard about it was in a book called, “Turn This Ship Around.” It’s actually a great book if you’re ever looking for some additional reading about turning an organization around. It’s more than just empowering your employees and letting them make some decisions along the way. It’s really letting them take ownership for a project or for a responsibility. It can be hard as the leader to do this because ultimately the buck stops with you. If you let some of that decision-making power go to those that are subordinate to you or underneath you, you’re the one that suffers the consequences if they make the wrong decisions. But try to do some of that and really be a leader and demonstrate you want them to grow and talk to them about their issues and goals. Don’t avoid the problem, but hit it head on so-to-speak. Embrace that problem and figure out the solution together. It may a bit altruistic. Sometimes it’s just easier to tell people what to do. But in the long run you’re going to find that you free up so much more of your time. You create happier employees. They become some of the most loyal employees you could ever have. I used to feel like I had to develop a big systems person.

My thought was to create the system and then let them sort of tweak it. It’s like halfway giving them some responsibility. That way I knew I had control over it. It has taken me a really long time to get used to actually welcoming the opinions of others and admitting I don’t know it all. The people at the front line probably have some great ideas about how to run things, and they’re doing it each and every day. They can come up with some ideas that are actually better than ours. Once I came to grips with that and I started to release some of that a little bit at a time, the rewards have been innumerable. I can’t tell you how uplifting it is to know that if I’m not there or if a situation comes up, I know that I have capable people there who can handle it. I don’t need to cringe when I hear them answering the phone or cringe when I hear them having an interaction with a patient who might be a bit riled up. Emotions run high with weight loss and surgery.

I encourage you to take a look at some of those things and put that into place. See how it helps your organization and employees blossom, becoming more participatory, and enjoy their job much better. It can be a total game-changer and a life-changer for you and your employees. It’s a win-win for everybody. We do site visits at our practice and it’s so enlightening and fun to bring people in, engage our staff, and look at the processes that we have. We learn things and they learn things. It’s really an awesome experience. Sometimes I travel to a practice. It’s a fresh set of eyes taking a look at the process in a non-threatening way. It can be very helpful. Our goal is to help every practice thrive.

If you’re ever interested in something like that, reach out to me: [email protected]

I would love to have a conversation with you and help you get to where it is you want to go. If you want to turn a ship that’s going of course around, I would love to help with that. I’ve done that not with just weight loss offices, but with general surgery offices as well. My focus is really with medical and surgical weight loss practices. The principles can be very similar. It really ends up being a big team effort because that’s how it’s going to be successful. Reach out to me if you need any help with anything. I hope this served you well. I think I just heard my hubby come in so I’m going to go savor the day. You guys have a great evening or day. Take care. Bye!