Lauren Farasati :: The Gifted Practice

Does your team have a taskmaster?

If life inside your practice is feeling a little chaotic, it may be because the team has a thousand things to do and no system for making sure those things get done. And you’re probably waking up at night worried about what’s slipping through the cracks.

The problem is “unsupervised tasks” – tasks that run around with no system to control them. The solution has three steps and they’re all simple:

1. Hold Monday morning staff meetings with everyone who supports you. These meetings have only one purpose – to prepare you for upcoming appointments. Pass out copies of the calendar for the next two weeks. For each appointment on the calendar, identify: what needs to happen, by whom and by when.
2. Appoint a “taskmaster”. This would be your practice manager, if you have one; otherwise it’s your assistant or para-planner. It shouldn’t be you. The taskmaster’s job is to capture all the identified tasks in a system. That system might be your CRM program, Outlook, an Excel spreadsheet or even a binder with hand written pages. They all can work – as long as the system allows you identify and retrieve tasks by client, by person responsible, by status and by due date.
3. It’s the role of the taskmaster to follow-up with team members so that you have what you need 48 hours prior to every appointment.

For those who don’t have a good system for task management, I’ve attached our super simple Excel spreadsheet. To retrieve tasks by any of the above criteria, simply pull down the arrows next to column headings to automatically filter the list. (If your team needs any help with this template, give us a call.)

Here’s to calm practices, happy teams, and well-served clients!

This article was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 6:27 am.
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