This year’s RANZCO Practice Managers’ conference got off to a roaring start with the keynote speaker address by Tracey Spicer, Australian journalist and news presenter. These days, Tracey is best known for her ‘femoir’, The Good Girl Stripped Bare, and being an advocate for change with the #MeToo movement. Her sharing of personal struggles, calling out workplace harassment and ways to change workplace culture, including the need for robust bystander training, struck a chord with many. This, followed by the ‘speed dating’ interactive session, ensured there was plenty of discussion and networking during the morning break.
David Wenban from the Australian Health Industry Group presented, in his usual engaging style, on HR, legal issues, and how managers will need to evolve to meet the needs of the workforce of the future. Key messages were to often “do something earlier” and that while technology can create more efficiencies, practices will continue to need people with good customer service skills, so spend more time on hiring people as, “You cannot buy attitude and personality!”
Day two kicked off with an informative presentation by Marion McKay on Managing our time; our stressors and our leadership – gaining a balance. Marion shared tips on ways to deal with people experiencing problems by using Stephen Covey’s circle of concern of influence tool, taken from his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which distinguishes between proactive people and reactive people. Proactive people “focus on what they can do and can influence”, whereas reactive people “focus their energy on things beyond their control.” Marion said, “People don’t communicate well enough. As managers we should be asking the team, ‘what are the ways we can invest more in you?’”
Other topics covered during the conference included KPIs and benchmarking, business planning, risk evolution in practice and mastering customer experience. Donna Glenn presented the findings from the Employment Benchmarking Survey of Delegate data. Unfortunately, out of the 152 Practice Manager delegates present (the largest attendance at RANZCO PM conferences to date), Donna had only had 10 respondents. While the data was useful, a larger return would have meant more meaningful data could have been derived from the results. New Zealanders gave feedback that not all practices could access the requested data, that some data related to Medicare codes and that future surveys should be made more New Zealand-friendly.
The overriding theme of the conference was leadership and the challenges we face, with a focus on risk and compliance issues. These included work health & safety and managing difficult conversations. Katherine Wagner’s presentation on day three on Effective Communication contained valuable tools on how to put ‘action’ into our listening by adopting a listening mindset, showing attentiveness, using open questions, paraphrasing and reflecting. There were some good take home tips on understanding that challenging conversations are inevitable and necessary, ways of managing our emotions when dealing with difficult situations, being compassionate but “hard on the problem”, reflecting, celebrating when we get it right, and the importance of self-care.
