How Medical Aesthetic Leaders Build Powerful Teams
A business’s success requires more than a leader’s clear vision– it needs a capable team to bring it to life. As their companies scale, great medical aesthetic leaders are able to transition their businesses from being “founder-led” to being “vision-led.” How? By relying on their motivated, engaged, and competent teams.
Of course, building a powerful team requires skillful leadership. In this article, we’ve compiled team building strategies from Skytale’s Physician Advisor, Dr. Gretchen Frieling, MD. She shared the story of her own successful leadership accent in medical aesthetics with Skytale founder Ben Hernandez on the Skytale Insights podcast.
Dr. Frieling transitioned from full time injector to business leader and CEO of her successful brands, GFaceMD, GFace Academy, The Soyier Skin Collection, and FACEit Virtual/Live. In the process, she built a team she trusted to treat her clients, carry out her vision, and provide their expertise as she developed as a leader.
Here are her strategies for bringing her team along with her as she grew her medical aesthetic practices and brands.
Listen to the full conversation here.
Building, Motivating, and Engaging Teams: Medical Aesthetic Leaders
Hire in Groups or Classes
In her practice, Dr. Frieling found that hiring and training injectors in groups or “classes” created stronger relationships and brand loyalty. Compared to one-at-a-time hires, she found that small cohorts created stronger bonds through the training process, continued to support one another, and had a heightened respect for the brand.
It’s an unconventional approach to hiring that won’t work for every position, but it just may be a powerful way to improve retention, morale, and relationships among injectors–especially in the face of high turnover in medical aesthetics.
Protect Your Brand to Reduce Turnover
Great injectors and providers require an upfront investment of time and training before they start to contribute to a practice’s bottom line. Dr. Frieling’s estimate for this time period is about one year. As a new practice owner, she found that turnover was high at the dreaded one-year mark. Providers were moving to other practices just at the time they were supposed to be ready to help the practice grow.
Dr. Frieling learned to double-down at this critical time to make sure her providers had what they needed to succeed (and stay). Through intention, empathy, goal setting, expressed gratitude, continued training, and transparent bonus structure (more below), she worked to understand and motivate her employees. This focus on retention has helped her build the loyal and competent team that’s contributed to her success.
Empower Your People
A primary tenet of Dr. Frieling’s retention strategy was giving her employees ownership of responsibilities beyond their injector roles. Once they’ve learned to inject and are building up their patient-base, she helps them pursue passions in other areas of the business. Some take on mentorship roles, plan events, or take part in her medical director program.
This investment in her team’s long term career goals and a commitment to their growth is a win-win. Injectors are building a powerful business skillset, staying busy, and receiving holistic professional development. In turn, Dr. Frieling is building an even more capable team, as well as fiercely loyal employees.
Build Structure and Transparency Around Incentives
A bonus structure that is clear, compelling, and transparent is a powerful way to motivate employees. Not only can employees get rewarded for their achievement, reviewing overall performance also gives leaders the opportunity to communicate about how employees contribute to the business. Everyone’s in it together.
A structure like this requires tracking, measuring, and reporting metrics. Meeting monthly with teams about these goals gives the entire company understanding and buy-in about the practice’s growth and success. Tracking growth is satisfying to both individual providers as well as the team.
Pass the Torch
There’s an inflection point for every doctor-owner when they step away from fulltime medical care and into their role as a leader. It can’t come until the right team is in place and prepared to fill your role. But even then, it requires thoughtful conversations with patients to make the handoff more seamless.
How do providers retain their loyal patients when they step away from medical care? Once again, it comes down to relationships, transparency, and trust. Knowing you’ve got the right providers can help you pass along that genuine trust to your patients.
Become a Leader in Medical Aesthetics with Skytale Group
From relationship building to communication to systems, your company culture requires strategic intention. Our management consulting team works with medical aesthetic practice leaders to improve culture, retention, hiring processes, and more. Reach out to learn more about building your team with Skytale Group.
