Should Business Owners Provide Mentoring to Their Physio Teams?
As a clinic owner, your role is multifaceted, spanning operations, patient care, and staff development. A critical question arises: should you also be the one mentoring your team of physiotherapists? While the instinct to guide your staff might be strong, doing so can have challenges. This blog explores the reasons why outsourcing mentoring can be a smart solution and how business owners can still foster strong relationships with their team.
1. The Best Mentor Isn’t Always the Business Owner
Being a great physiotherapist doesn’t automatically make someone a great mentor. Running a clinic requires a different skill set from mentoring, and as business owners take on more operational and strategic roles, they naturally spend less time with patients. Over time, this shift can distance owners from the hands-on clinical expertise needed to provide high-quality mentoring.
A mentor requires not only clinical knowledge but also an ability to coach, give feedback, and support professional growth. Owners may find that, due to their new focus on business operations, they are no longer the best person to fulfil this role. Instead, a mentor, who remains deeply embedded in the clinical field, may provide more relevant, up-to-date guidance to team members.
2. Bottlenecking Growth: Why Owners Mentoring Their Own Staff Can Limit Scaling
When business owners are heavily involved in mentoring, it can create a bottleneck that stifles clinic growth. Mentoring is a time-consuming process, involving one-on-one sessions, goal setting, and feedback. If the owner is responsible for mentoring the entire team, they may not have time to focus on other critical business tasks such as expanding services, managing finances, or developing new marketing strategies.
As the clinic grows and the team expands, this becomes even more problematic. Owners cannot scale their clinic efficiently if they are spending significant time mentoring staff. Outsourcing mentoring rees up the owner’s time, allowing them to focus on activities that drive the clinic forward, such as strategic planning and business development.
3. Specialised Support
In some clinics who employ staff across a range of specialities, from pelvic health to musculoskeletal physiotherapy. The reality is that its unlikely that a single person can offer high-level mentorship across all these domains. For example, an owner with a musculoskeletal background will probably not have the expertise needed to guide a pelvic health physiotherapist effectively.
In this scenario, sourcing clinical mentoring elsewhere is really the only option. Without the ability to offer mentoring, specialised staff may feel unsupported, leading to job dissatisfaction and even staff turnover.
4. Maintaining Staff Connection Without Overloading Yourself
One concern clinic owners often have is the desire to maintain a close connection with their team. Physiotherapists, like many professionals, value face time with leadership. It helps them feel recognised and valued within the clinic. However, this doesn’t mean that the owner must act as the primary mentor to fulfil this need.
A structured system of regular check-ins, such as quarterly or bi-monthly catchups, can provide that essential 1:1 time with staff. These sessions can focus on the overall employee experience, job satisfaction, and professional goals, without getting into the detailed clinical mentoring. This way, owners still build relationships with their team, ensuring staff feel appreciated and heard, while leaving the clinical mentorship to specialised professionals.
Conclusion
While it may seem tempting and often routine for business owners to mentor their team directly, doing so can create challenges, especially as clinics grow their staffing numbers. Owners may risk bottlenecking their clinic’s growth and stretching themselves too thin.
Outsourcing mentoring (to either an in-house skilled mentor or an external mentor), can allow clinics to provide staff with specialised, high-quality guidance while freeing up the owner to focus on strategic growth.
Importantly, business owners can still maintain meaningful connections with their staff through regular check-ins, ensuring that team members feel valued and supported without the owner having to take on the full mentoring responsibility.
A balanced approach ensures that both the clinic and the staff can grow and succeed in tandem.