Getting your first Manager role is an exciting and intimidating achievement. On the one end, your hard work and practice loyalty has finally paid off and resulted in the practice owner trusting that you can help manage the practice success. On the other end, you have to learn new skills and retrain your focus to ensure the practice succeeds and the staff is happy.

Below are optical resources to help develop the skillset required for the first-time manager.

5 Optical Resources To Develop A Great First-time Manager

Communicate Effectively

An effective manager knows how to communicate with their staff. For the optometric practice to succeed, you must know how to deliver information that will help the teams’ ability to do their job.

But, communication isn’t all about talking. As the manager, you also need to learn how to listen so you can identify potential problems and resolve issues.

Set Practice Goals

Goals and timelines help outline practice direction and motivate your staff to complete a task. When creating goals, use the SMART method to ensure the objective is communicated clearly and is achievable.

Reward Accomplishments

Whether a person on your team single-handedly completed one of your practice goals, or they went above and beyond to help a patient, rewarding your staffs’ achievements can increase your teams’ productivity, improve team collaboration, and decrease employee turnover.

For tips on how you can reward your staff’s accomplishments, check out these posts:

• Infographic: Reward Optical Practice Employees Without Spending a Dime
• Getting Creative with Compensation Perks

Offer Growth Opportunities

One of your responsibilities as a manager is to ensure employee satisfaction and continued success in the role. However, endlessly working on the same task day-after-day can lead to employee burn-out. To help eliminate the possibilities of employee burn-out and foster success, you need to challenge your staff to improve their skills and learn other talents that will contribute to the advancement of the optometric practice.

Training your team to learn a new skill will be rewarding for the practice and the staff member. It could also help take more off your plate so you can focus on the overall team, and not on individual tasks. One way to help your staff diversify their skillset is to use online courses. Online courses are great because individuals can learn at their own pace.

Learn to Delegate

As a manager, your focus shifts from your individual contributions to the success of the team as a whole. To shift focus to the team, you need to learn how to delegate tasks effectively.

To delegate effectively, you must:

• Let go of individual tasks
• Learn to prioritize
• Pick people with the right skillset (or the ability to learn new skills)
• Communicate clearly
• Trust the team

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