What Does it Mean when the Thrill is Gone?

There is a difference between being comfortable and being in apathy.

It is very comfortable to have a smooth running organization when you have a team that knows what to do and does it. It is comfortable to have this group take care of your business and make it expand, and all you have to do is take care of the team. It is comfortable when the staff will actually handle the discipline problems of other staff members and not give it to you to handle. It is, of course, very comfortable to have a consistent flow of new business into your company and not have to worry about it week to week.

What is apathy?

Perhaps apathy is excuses -- thinking that things can’t change, considering that “this is pretty good” and “I just want everybody to be happy,” but recognizing that they are not. Apathy can be present when there are situations going on in the office that aren’t going well and you choose to ignore it and hope it will go away. Apathy can be mere excuses and explanations as to why a situation or problem exists.

Statistic rationalization is definitely a derogatory term. Sometimes, as a business owner, we can fall into such apathy that we don’t actually use any tools to evaluate whether the practice is expanding or not. We wait until the accountant reconciles the books and tells us whether we did well or poorly. That’s truly apathy.

Apathy can also be a lack of planning, the “just come to work and see what happens” attitude. Some business owners at one point in time used to keep a “to-do” list, now they don’t even bother. They just wait until they come into the office and one of the staff members gives them the first order of the day, in other words, they take orders from their staff. That’s truly apathy.

Some practice owners are doing all right and they are making good money, but they are not taking care of their staff. They may have lack of emotion or caring or a general apathy towards their staff. Whatever your financial goals are, you probably need to triple them, because it’s important to take care of the team that takes care of you. When you recognize what good staff members can do for your organization and you actually exchange with them for that good work, it tells those staff members how much you truly care about them.

When you are “reasonable” about why a statistic cannot go up and accept excuses for low statistics, you as a business owner go more and more into apathy. And so does your team. But on the other hand, improving the employees’ ability to handle their jobs well, giving the staff real, obtainable production demands and getting them to achieve these targets regardless of the “excuses” is certainly not apathy. It is called being causative or making things happen as an executive.

Many owners are not satisfied in some way about the volume of new business coming into their company, but most are not doing anything about it. Now that’s truly apathy! Sometimes we look around at other business that are doing well and blame them for our lack of success. That is slightly better than apathy – at least there is some emotion, but the business owner still hasn’t done anything about it.

What we are talking about here, plain and simple, is how to shift from being the effect to being causative over your business. In other words, in regards to new business, instead of “look at me and recognize how hard it is for me to get new business,” you can shift to “I know how to drive new business in the door.” One is apathy and the other is causative.

If you don’t have a plan to drive some business in the door, if you don’t have a solution for this problem and you haven’t had a solution for years, then most likely you are not very causative over this area. Most likely you’re in apathy about this area of your company.

Perhaps you consider it is comfortable if you are making good money and you’re not working a whole lot. But if you’re doing well and you’re staff is not, something should change.

A good executive cares enough about what’s going on and cares about his group. I am not implying that you don’t care about your staff, that you don’t feel that they are important. I am sure you recognize that they are. Unfortunately, you can feel alone sometimes in the running of your business because you make all the decisions in the practice. You may have a team that works with you that’s really not a team but a group of robots that take orders from you all day long. Well that type of management style would certainly make me or any other business owner feel like, “why should I take such good care of these guys when they can’t seem to fight their way out of a paper bag?”

One way in which you can take care of your group is to show them how they can take care of you. The way you do that is by managing with statistics and not with emotion. Set good, acceptable, agreed-upon targets and work with your staff through whatever barriers that may come up in order to achieve that end. You can move from being apathetic apathy about certain areas of your practice to being more causative over it.

Imagine the confidence that it will give you and your team to know that there is a long term future with your company. Think of the reduction in the amount of worry that you may do if you know and can predict your expansion.  Now you are at cause.