It is not a priority!

Written by: S.Apone

I’d like to take a moment to consider the phrase it’s not a priority.

Being a practice with more than one site, it can be difficult to manage teams who are split geographically, and it can be even more of a challenge as a PM. You’re the go-to person when something goes wrong, the one who can solve the problems, and the one who doesn’t flap, right?

The truth is that this isn’t always the case. We as PMs are as capable as the next person of getting into a strop about our workload and sometimes, when for the fourth time that day you’re met with a question about a dodgy printer, you might snap and grumble something about not getting a moments peace, but we must, as the leaders of our teams take a step back at times and consider the consequences of our words.

Recently, a supervisor at one of our sites was telling me that she had been upset by the response of a senior manager when she, the supervisor, required some assistance.

To give a bit of background, the supervisor was trying to organise transport of covid vaccines and the accompanying stock to one of our sites. She had called the surgery holding the vaccine and asked if she could drive over and collect the jabs ready for a clinic the following morning. The only thing she asked of the manager was whether the stock was ready to collect. The manager, who was undoubtedly busy had snapped back that it wasn’t a priority, and the supervisor was, to my mind at least, understandably put out by this reply. No matter how busy the manager was, it was not a kind reply. The supervisor had spent the day working her socks off cancelling clinics for a GP off sick, covered on reception for someone on annual leave and had come in the previous evening well after hours because of a problem with the alarm, and now she was being told that something that is actually pretty important was not a priority.

If those at the top can’t see why this is a problem, then I would ask you to consider what I believe to be the single most important piece of advice I have ever been given as a manager. Imagine at all times that your staff are wearing signs around their necks, each of which read ‘make me feel important’. I guarantee that if you employ this tactic at work, you will have a happier team, who are never made to feel small or insignificant.

The NHS are losing staff in their thousands, and we need to be mindful of the way we treat our people if we want to keep them. The phrase its not a priority does nothing more than make a member of staff feel like their stress is unimportant to you as their manager. It is not impossible for a comment like this to become the proverbial straw that broke the camels back, the final blow that makes an employee consider their options and decide whether or not they want to continue to work for you.

It's a lonely place at the top, made lonelier if you can’t retain a good team of people around you. You are much less likely to achieve this if you do not guard your words closely. Think about the impact that words barked in frustration can have on the people who are on the ground. Receptionists in particular who are the backbone of our industry should always be spoken to with kindness and gratitude. I’m not saying that you cannot reprimand your team when things go wrong, because for us all a part of management is monitoring performance, but we can do this with kindness as well.

I do not believe that people do a bad job on purpose; I believe that in general, if you train people correctly and give them the tools, they need to perform their roles then they will do their work without much interference. I also believe that if you are good to your team, they will do even more. They will go above and beyond because they know that their work isn’t going unnoticed. It’s a simple message, but one that we should all try and remember. Be kind to your team, because you have no idea what anyone is going through, and it may be that your harsh reprimand or comment becomes the thing that finally tips them over the edge. It may be that comment that causes them to take less pride in their work, or even start the hunt for a new job and new managers who will treat them better.

The supervisor I referred to earlier is a work horse, and whilst I will not name her here, I would like to dedicate this blog to her. It’s a good job that when she was called at 9pm on a Friday night by the cleaners who were struggling to set the alarm she didn’t respond with it’s not a priority otherwise the senior manager would have found herself having to drive for an hour to sort it out

The wellbeing of our teams should always be our priority because without them, we would be out of the job.