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I'm a physician and founder of a private practice which I founded 10 years ago, straight out of residency. Didn't know a thing about running a business or managing people. Despite the stupid/goofy management mistakes I've made, we've been blessed, and our practice has grown to five clinicians and 30+ employees.
I regret to say I only recently discovered MT. Wow.
As a clinician, I can definitely say that Mike and Mark's behavior-based practices are well-grounded in clinical medicine: they've formalized (and simplified) how most people are wired, into a concrete operational model. Awesome.
I wish I'd known how to manage people the MT way as a resident and young physician. It's one thing to lead a team of residents, interns, and med students in a hospital setting -- all graduate-degreed, generation X, high-powered Ds and Cs, and everyone had (more or less) the same job description as me. Learning to be a good boss for people with different personalities, education, cultures, ages, etc. has been an adventure.
Physicians get so little formal training in business and leadership. If MT podcasts were part of med school (not to mention health MBA programs), US health care would be revolutionized in terms of effective care delivery. Seriously.
I think that could be said of many fields
My educational background is plant and soil science, and my career path has been in ornamental horticulture, leading to my current job as operations manager for a large wholesale greenhouse/nursery business. Nothing in my education prepared me for managing people. It's all been OJT over the years, and I am also very, very thankful that I found MT 3 years ago.
So many people start off with technical degrees. I'm not in any way equating my BS to being a physician. But the similarity is that neither of us was prepared in school for management, and that could be said of so many people. My children include a software engineer, an Army officer, and an electrician all of whom are in positions managing people. I can't remember a single advisor in my college days who said to me "Oh, by the way. You might be a manager someday. You might want to learn something about that." I guess they thought we'd all spend 40 years working in a greenhouse potting plants. :)
So again, thanks Manager Tools!!!!
MT in residency?
Funny, I was thinking the same thing last week. I was wondering how the 10 years since residency would have been different had I been using MT (and CT, too). I certainly made a lot of mistakes, and for the most part, I didn't understand why they were mistakes.
Recently my secretary took another job; a good opportunity for her, and I was sorry to see her go. I immediately started listening to the podcasts about hiring. The interview creation tool just went live and I used it to create my interview, since I had never done this before (really helpful by the way). I told the practice manager I wanted final approval over who would be hired, which didn't seem very surprising. Then I explained that I wanted to interview as many candidates as possible and his eyes kind of glazed over. Over the following couple weeks, I realized that he was interested only in getting a warm body to answer the phone. Then, the real shocker: I knew more about the importance of hiring than the practice manager did, and this was only because I had been listening to the MT podcasts!
Kind of odd: I got degrees in medicine and biochemistry, but learned more about hiring in a few hours of MT podcasts than my office manager did in his 4 years of undergraduate. Not to mention his years of professional experience. Go figure.
So, to Mike and Mark, and everyone else at MT/CT: you all rock, and I salute you! Many thanks.