One of the things I learned over 17 years of school governance is the art of delegation, as seen in other people who worked in the school system who were extraordinarily good at delegation.
Delegation is the ability to empower members of your team to work within their job role, not to check up on them all the time or to criticise, or to modify what they do, but to give them the chance to fly. The essence of a delegation culture is:
“Ask for forgiveness, not permission”.
I've tried my best to replicate this type of culture throughout The Campbell Clinic, and it seems that we have at least got part of it right, and this is our ability to scale (we're currently growing as an organisation by 34% in the half year).
And so, as part of this process, into my inbox arrived a set of CPD videos to watch, or at least the links thereof into a platform that we use within the clinic.
I clicked it open, and I'd been assigned to 25 courses.
I looked at the timings for those courses, and it's at least 14 hours of video courses that have to be done (it says by the 30th of September).
You can add to this the fact that my sedation CPD for 5 years is now due, which is at least 12 to 15 hours of CPD to prove that I'm still fit for sedating patients.
I also have an hour of CBCT to do.
I make this all close to 30 hours, and therefore if I was working at a normal week of 7.5 hours a day, that would be 4 days of the working week just spent on mandatory training and CPD.
And so as soon as I see that my temperature rises and I start to moan and whinge and b**ch about the fact that mandatory training is terrible and it's rubbish and we shouldn't have to do it and I'm not any better after I've done it and it's all a load of s**t.
And then I realised that all of this has been curated for me by Louise, who is an extraordinary compliance manager at The Campbell Clinic.
She creates everybody's CPC and CPD requirements, and she lines them all up and makes sure everybody is where they should be, to be able to look after patients to the best of their ability both clinically and legally.
She does this as a delegated task from the clinical director through our clinical directorship group, and the clinical director is me.
And so, I need to stop myself and have a long chat about the fact that I'm completely spoiled.
If I didn't have a Louise, it would be me that would be collating all of this across the board for all the people here.
I don't have to do that, but I know that it is done extraordinarily well. I don't have to check up on it; all I have to do is make sure I do my CPD as an example to everybody else, so we all do it, and collectively, not only are we all compliant, but we're all fantastic.
Time to check my privileges, time to be less spoiled.
Blog Post Number - 4604