How to Reduce Key Person Risk in your Practice

As a practice owner, you never want to fall into the trap of relying too much on any key player – including yourself.

If the practice and team are too dependent on you as a practice owner, you’ll probably find yourself struggling to take time off without fielding a million phone calls...

Putting out fires at work all day instead of focusing on the big picture for your business...

Feeling like you’re peddling faster and faster just to stay afloat...

Saying things like “it’s quicker and easier for me to just do it myself” instead of delegating...

Sound familiar?

Key person risk can also fall on other team members – which is going to create massive headaches all round should they ever decide to exit the practice.

In a lot of ways, key person risk is like co-dependency. And this is the last thing you need when you’re trying to grow and scale a practice that can withstand disruptions and not rely on you.

So, let’s explore some lessons you can implement and reduce key person risk in your practice now.

Living Job Descriptions and SOP’s

Perhaps the most important factor in reducing key person risk, is clear documentation of who does what, and how.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) are worth their weight in gold when you need to delegate tasks or onboard a new hire. They could be a short video tutorial or written instructions, but what’s important is that anyone with the same skill set could easily replicate the task at hand.

And, this is crucial, they need to be updated regularly. There’s nothing more frustrating than when the instructions are there but “we haven’t done it like that in years, only Jane knew method and she’s on leave for weeks.”

Using a document like a Living Job Description is also highly effective – each team member has their own list of roles and responsibilities that they constantly update as their roles adapt. Ideally, every single listed task should have its own SOP too.

This is incredibly useful for when team members take time off or move onto a different job. You have a clear list of every task they performed and can divide it up as necessary.

Once more, I’d encourage you to update these regularly – it’s extremely common for a role to expand to cover more than initially intended and outgrow the initial job description.

Upskilling, Training, and Development

Unless you want your practice to remain static and stagnant, you need to be growing and developing your team. I’ve long said that the most successful practices are also excellent training organisations.

Now, does this mean that you hire unqualified, unskilled workers and bear the responsibility of turning them into competent practice staff? No, not at all.

What I mean by that, is that our industry is constantly changing and evolving. We live in a time where we have greater access than ever to online courses, seminars, e-books, and membership-based communities.

By investing in education, coaching, and training for your team, you’ll be able to create a multi-skilled, diverse team who are trained in numerous areas and have overlapping abilities.

This has the dual effect of allowing your team members to cover multiple tasks and responsibilities, but also developing them as individuals which is a powerful aspect of staff retention.

Whether it’s sales training, marketing, social media and content creation, bookkeeping, managerial skills, different clinical operations – you can curate some powerful skill sets for your practice and your team’s benefit.

Regular Updates on Ongoing Projects and Initiatives

There is all manner of meeting rhythms, from daily huddles to weekly operations meetings to monthly planning days – whatever your preference may be, it’s crucial to have your team come together and get on the same page about what everyone is working on.

This rings especially true if you have multiple people across several different tasks on the same project – it’s important that your team know who is doing what, and when. This gives everyone visibility, the chance to ask questions, and even offer to help and bring new skills to projects.

Simply put, it’s only beneficial. Trust me, if a team member has a family emergency and needs to take leave, or you have a key player resign, you’ll be grateful that there’s clear and open communication flow.

So, those are some quick and easy ways to begin reducing key person risk in your practice ASAP.

Whether it’s scaling, leveraging more freedom for yourself, or simply wanting to risk-proof your practice – it’s better to prevent than be left scrambling for a solution.

All the best,

Dr Jesse Green.