How Important is Personality to the TC Role?

A request that I have had doctors make of me in the past is to give my opinion on whether or not a TC has the right “personality” for the job. While, to a point, personality is important, it is hardly at the top of my list when evaluating whether or not the TC role is a good fit for the person.

The main reason that I don’t consider the personality to be that important is that virtually all of the TCs that I have met – and, for that matter, virtually all of the other staff that I have met as well – are friendly, outgoing, and pleasant to talk to. So assuming that your Treatment Coordinator is friendly, outgoing, and pleasant, they have the right personality for the job. What are the other factors that make a highly effective TC? I visited this topic some time ago, but due to much additional experience with TCs since then, it is a good time for a second look. Here are the things that I suggest are most important:

• Leadership within the team. This person is the key to the success of your practice, because sales – or, in your case, new patients – are the lifeblood of any business. Put another way, if your TC does not convert visitors to new patients, the rest of your team members will not have a job. For these reasons it is important to have a a leader in this role; someone that the other teams members respect, get along with well, and perhaps go to for informal advice.
• Leadership with visiting families. As with the doctor, new patient visitors want the TC to be in charge and to instruct them on what to do. The best TCs that I have observed are comfortable in this role of advisor; their sentences begin with “I suggest”, “I recommend” and “why don’t we”,  not “what do you think?” and “what would you like to do next?”.
• Good business acumen. This means that the person has the ability to be both patient-focused and business-focused. Being friendly and personable is a requirement for the job, yes, but so is having the skills needed to steer the decision process to “yes”. A TC can be delightful in consultations and still have a poor conversion rate, if good people skills aren’t complemented by the skills needed to close new business.
• A desire to win. The best-performing TCs that I have worked with are preoccupied with their conversion rate, because they understand that this is the key measure of job performance and they want to perform at the top of their game. And they work at improving it daily.
• A desire to learn. The top TCs do not look at their role as simply a job or a paycheck. To them this is a calling, and for that reason, they are always looking for better ways to add value to their role in the practice and to their role with visiting families. This is also why those who get the best results with me are often already performing well before I get involved.

You may have noticed that I didn’t list experience as a factor. That is not by accident. During a training session last week, a TC showed me a quote last week that I was familiar with from my days in the business world, and I will share it with you here: “An inexperienced employee who is motivated to learn has ten times the value of an experienced one who is not”. While experience is desirable, everyone can benefit from learning new ways to do things. Being willing to learn those new things is the key to both personal and practice growth.