Chiropractic Marketing: Hiring The Right Staff For Your Practice

Chiropractic Marketing

A chiropractor friend of mine was complaining about how hard it was managing his staff. He was “sick of having to explain things over and over,” and he “was sick of having to think for them.” I was recently reading about a sociologist named Amitai Etzioni and his description of organisational control. In summary, he described that despite the size of your business, there are essentially three methods of controlling your staff members: coercive, utilitarian, and normative control.

Coercive control is where you point a gun at someone and tell him or her to do what you want. The method is the least effective method because it only works for long as you keep pointing the gun at them.

Utilitarian control is the method where you pay people to do what you want. This is the method on which most practices still rely.  The weakness of the utilitarian system is that your money buys labour but it doesn’t buy loyalty or goodwill.

Normative control is the method where you and your employees have a system of shared values to direct behaviour.  This is what induces people to devote themselves to a cause. No practice can expect to rely exclusively on normative control.  But it is possible. Outside of chiropractic, businesses like GE, The Body Shop and Virgin are examples of companies that have developed shared values that employees feel passionate about.

If your goal is to have a practice that runs smoothly, with as few headaches and stresses as possible, normative control is the way to go.

The reason why is because a large chunk of your practice growth depends on your “soft skills,” your ability to relate with and connect with your patients. But this extends beyond just you the chiropractor. It includes your CA’s, your massage therapists etc. So practices need staff members who can instinctively act the right way, without instructions from you, and who feel inspired to share their best ideas with you.  That calls for emotional commitment.  You can’t get it by pointing a gun.  You can’t buy it no matter how much you pay.

Without doubt, the most effective leaders in chiropractic in the twenty-first century will be the ones that learn how to use shared values to harness the emotional energy of their employees, patients and communities at large. 

So how do you establish normative control?

• Get clear on your practice vision
• Define your values
• Hire people on their energy, enthusiasm and how much they match your values.

These terms have become cliche and are thrown around without understanding the impact a mismatch can have on an oragnisation, and in particular in a profession like chiropractic. But hiring the wrong staff can cause conflict, low morale and lost productivity, ultimately leading to a considerable drop in practice profit. Hudson Highland group, the global recruitment company, reports that  one wrong hire can easily lead to losses in the tens of thousands of dollars. Hence, the old adage, "hire slow, fire fast…"

Chiropractic marketing extends beyond your advertising, your sales training and your procedures and beyond you. It includes your people; their unspoken passion, spirit and vision speak clearer than any sales message.