Planning for Career Success

Chapter 8


Planning for Career Success



Themes to Consider



image Set goals and make their achievement a reality.


image Explain the role of rules in the workplace and the effects they can have.


image Understand your responsibilities under HIPAA.


image Create quality documentation that serves the patient indefinitely.



Setting Goals and Planning Actions



Goals are dreams with deadlines.


—Napoleon Hill




Learning Objectives for Setting Goals and Planning Actions




Has anyone ever asked you “What do you want out of life?” Have you ever asked yourself that? Stop and think about how it would make you feel if someone you respect asked you that question.


Now think about this: How does the question, coming from someone important to you, make you feel? Does the question scare you to death? Would you try to change the subject? Or is the question exhilarating? Does it send you off into a breathless conversation?


Whether you are planning your work day or whether you are planning your life, setting goals for your career and then choosing and executing the specific actions that go with them will put you on the fast track to success.



Why Goal-Setting Is Important


Imagine playing a game of basketball without a basket. Your team would be missing its goal. As part of a health care team, your goal is to improve the health of the patient. Whether you are directly providing care or whether you provide support to help someone else provide direct care, you are part of a team aiming toward the same goal. When you don’t have a goal, you are aimless because there is no target. Goal-setting in the workplace is important to accomplishing the overall mission of the health care team you work with. If you are doing something unrelated to the mission of the team, you are pulling the team down.


Goals are also important in the context of your life beyond work as well. If you can achieve goals that are related to your health, finances, personal growth, family, social life, and spiritual life, they will also enhance the success of your career goals. When you lack goals, you will not achieve much because you do not have a direction or a destination to pursue.



If you don’t know where you’re going,


any road will get you there.


—George Harrison


Goals give you purpose; they get work done and they clarify your values and give you a sense of meaning.



Levels of Goals


Goals can be set at many different levels. All of your daily goals should support your long-term aspirations. If you had a long-term goal, for instance, of getting promoted at work, you would want some short-term goals to get you there. These might include obtaining a specialty certification, contributing to problem-solving at work, understanding your supervisor’s challenges, or developing a broader skill set. In this way, your daily short-term goals—such as helping with the day-to-day operations while studying for certification at night—contribute not only to your ultimate professional goal, but your health care team’s mission as well.


A complete hierarchy of your goal system, therefore, includes daily, short-term, and long-term goals that are all internally consistent and support one another (Figure 8-1).


image
FIGURE 8-1 Goal levels.


How to Set Goals


At work, many of your goals are set for you. Let’s say you are a dental assistant and you are assigned to rearrange and organize the dental lab. As you accept this goal, it is important to know why you are doing this. In your mind, establish what rearranging the dental lab does for the dental practice. Does it make things more efficient? Does it create more space for the dentist to do other lab work? Does it ultimately improve patient care? The first step in setting any goal is to look imaginatively at your motivation. What do you want? What needs to be done that will improve your work or your life?



image Journaling 8-1


Consider a time when you accomplished a goal. What was the goal, and how did you achieve it? Did you write it down or keep it in your head? When you achieved it, how did it make you feel?



Visualizing and Feeling the Outcome


Once you have settled on a goal, your chances of achieving it are vastly improved by how vividly you can “see and feel” the result. If you can imagine reaching your goal, you have taken the first step toward fully realizing it. You will know where you want to go and get some ideas about how to get there.


Let’s say you are a health information technologist in charge of assisting a surgical practice’s move to paperless record keeping. You currently work with more than 4000 patient records, which are taking up a massive amount of cabinet space. First, visualize the entire cabinet space cleared and the cabinets removed. Then, you could feel how freeing it is to have more space and to have the ability to access records at the touch of a finger. Once you feel how great it is to have a paperless office, you will be ready to tackle the next step to accomplish this task. If the outcome feels positive and looks achievable, the steps will follow with greater ease.



image Journaling 8-2


Think about your career as a health professional. Record what inspired you to pursue this goal. What action steps did you take to pursue your goal? Would you have done anything differently in the way you went about achieving this goal? What has been easier, and what has been more difficult? If you had planned differently or visualized more vividly, could any of the more difficult aspects been made easier?



Writing the Goal and the Action Steps


Once you have a positive and specific goal in mind, it is important that you write it down. Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said that people should strive to be a “meaningful specific” rather than a “wandering generality.” Writing down goals encourages you to state them with great specificity and detail.


Enhance this visualization by writing out what the overall goal looks like once accomplished in the present tense. “I weigh 130 pounds.” Imagine how fantastic this will be for you, how great you will look, or how much more energy you will have.


Avoid making negative goals. For example, wanting to lose 20 pounds is a negative goal. Instead, state it positively: ”My goal is to weigh 130 pounds.” As you execute a plan, you move toward a positive goal instead of away from something that is negative. When you write down a goal positively and in detail, you take the first step toward accomplishing the goal.




Next Actions


Achieving goals is a matter of knowing what to do next. Let’s go back to your goal of earning a promotion. You have already established some intermediate goals to make your long-term goal more attainable. Let’s say you want to obtain a specialty certification as well as increase your skills set and understand your supervisor’s challenges better. To get started on the advanced certification, buy a review book or research the requirements. There might be additional preparation guidelines and resources on the Web site. Sign up for a review course or talk to a colleague who has already achieved the certification.


Next, schedule these activities. Let’s say you want to talk to Mary Alice about her experience in getting the certification because you want to find out how she prepared for the exam. You want to know what a difference it has made in her career. Schedule lunch with Mary Alice on Tuesday. Do the same with all the actions you have selected to help you achieve your goal.




Review


As a final phase, you must review your goals at regular intervals to sustain them. Planning is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing process.


Every week, maybe on a Sunday night, review your current top 10 goals. Are they still what you want? Are you making progress? Do you see a clear path of achievement through the next actions you have selected? Are the next actions on your calendar for the coming week?


Finally, schedule periodic reviews that are more intensive than usual. People change over time, especially those whose lives are progressing because they are achieving their goals. Over time, some of your goals will lose their appeal as others emerge. Box 8-1 lists tips for achieving a goal.



Box 8-1   Tips for Achieving a Goal





Your Goal Binder


The key to goal achievement is to make it a persistent, methodical pursuit. The smartest way to stay on track in pursuing your goals is to keep a written record of where you’ve been, what you’ve done, and what you want to do next. Studies show that only 3% of Americans have written goals. So, logging your goals and the steps you will take to achieve them will put you far ahead of the game. The goal binder described in Box 8-2 outlines a system for keeping on track.



Box 8-2   Creating and Using your Goal Binder




image Brainstorm a list of 100 goals you would like to achieve in your life. Generate the list as fast as you can.


image Divide a three-ring binder into the following sections:



image Write each of the 100 goals you developed on a separate piece of paper and insert them into the appropriate section of the binder.


image Subdivide each goal into short-term goals you will have to achieve to make the long-term goal a reality.


image Write a “next action” for each short-term or long-term goal.


image Pick 10 goals to achieve first.


image Schedule the “next action” steps for these goals. As soon as you complete one “next action,” create and schedule the next one until you finally achieve the goal. Some goals might require hundreds of next actions.


image Review your goal binder regularly.


image Once a week, review the goals you are currently working on to make sure you are taking actions to move them forward.


image As you achieve each goal, replace it with another, so you are always working on 10 goals at a time.


image Every 3 months, review your entire goal binder, being especially open to opportunities that may have arisen for you to speed up a goal that was in the background.


image Schedule an annual goal-setting session, perhaps during a vacation when you are relaxed and have the time. Reevaluate all your goals, deleting those that you no longer want to work on, and add new goals that have become important to you.



image What If?


What if you were suddenly making twice as much money? How would that change your goals?


What if you had two more children? How would that change your goals?


What if you made a commitment to a new religion or philosophy? How would that change your goals?


Only unimaginative people never raise their sights. Successful people are always imagining wonderful new futures. If you are successful, that means you are achieving your goals, like completing your health care education and getting a new job and career. As you grow, your goals will get more daring and exciting. Really, there is no limit to what you can become.



The only thing that has to be finished by next Tuesday is next Monday.


—Jennifer Yane



Case Study 8-1   Looking for a Lift


Joe started out as a firefighter and eventually became certified as an EMT. When he was 43, he retired from the St. Louis Fire Department and took a full-time job as an EMT with the Green Ambulance Service. He did that for a few years until he was injured and was out for almost 6 months on short-term disability, causing Joe to become unmotivated personally and professionally.


One day, he attended a motivational workshop because his sister bought him a pass for his birthday. To his surprise, Joe found the speaker very motivating. The speaker said that anybody could live a fulfilling, challenging life and that goal-setting and achievement was the way to get it. Joe went home and wrote down his positive and specific goals—everything he could think of that he wanted. He came up with 85 goals spread across six dimensions of his life. He wrote each goal on a 3 x 5 card and put them in a recipe box.


Joe created a to-do list. It was a modest list that allowed for all the unexpected calls he would get in the ambulance service. One of the goals for the day was to get all his work done, and he made a separate list for that. Another goal involved gaining paramedic certification. He had done some work toward his intermediate EMS certification, but he never sustained his effort.


Joe liked this goal achievement methodology. He latched onto it, and it started to pay dividends. Pursuing goals gave him direction and energy. Even his supervisor noticed his sudden enthusiasm for his work.


Several months later, Joe had his paramedic certification. Why not pursue a leadership role? Joe knew he could be the kind of leader the other EMTs could look up to, so he brainstormed a list of new goals and what he needed to do to achieve them. “There is nothing I can’t do,” he thought to himself.




Down a Dark Road


Ivana stopped attending her career college where she enrolled to become a medical assistant. Her counselor called her many times and tried to help her with her problems, but she stopped taking the calls just before the phone company canceled her service.


Ivana had lots of problems. First of all, she was working nights at a nursing home to cover her living expenses and pay for school. It was too much for her, and she slept through her first class more than once. She had also hoped that the job would help improve her English, since Russian was her native language. Unfortunately, there were few opportunities for interactions with the sleeping patients or the busy staff. Finally, she hoped her 1990 Oldsmobile would last a little longer, but it didn’t, making it hard for her to get to work and impossible for her to get to school.


Soon, her difficulties with English caused her to lose her job at the nursing home. Some family members complained they could not understand Ivana, and the supervisor let her go. She did not know what to do.




image Experiential Exercises





image Cross Currents with other Soft Skills






Following Rules and Regulations



It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.


—T. S. Eliot




Learning Objectives for Following Rules and Regulations




Imagine it’s your first day of work in a hospital’s postsurgical unit. You walk in on time, feeling nervous, but a little excited too. At first you just stand and watch the staff running around. Occasionally someone rushes into a patient’s room, but others just stand looking around. No one is talking to you, and you’re not sure who’s in charge. Eventually, you see one guy slip behind the desk at the nurses’ station, so you walk up and introduce yourself.


“Hi, I’m Carly,” you say. “What can I do to help?”


He shrugs and says, “I have no idea.”


You turn and ask someone else, and this time the only response you get is, “How should I know? Figure it out for yourself! That’s what I do every single day.”


People want to know what the rules are. New employees are especially eager to learn the rules, both written and unwritten, so they fit in and have a sense of knowing what they are doing and how best to do it. Most importantly, rules in health care facilities help patients get the most efficient care and understand how things will work.


A good set of rules should strike a balance between a rigid environment and complete chaos. Workplaces that are too strict lack creativity and individual initiative. Workplaces without rules feel chaotic and anxiety-provoking.



Rules in Health Care


Health care is among the most highly regulated of all industries. Rules govern how health care is delivered, how patients and employees are treated, and how health care is paid for. Much of your education has involved learning the rules associated with your particular health care profession, whether they have been universal precautions, Medicare forms, sterilization techniques, or handling medications.




Policies and Procedures


Every health care facility has some form of a policy manual or its virtual equivalent. These detailed rule books cover everything that is important in the smooth, correct, and legal operation of the facility. Large health care organizations likely have an institutional approach to policies and procedures, with established committees and even employees dedicated to creating policies and procedures, publicizing them, and developing the training solutions necessary to implement them.


The implementation of laws and regulations requires policies and training. New employees must be trained in all types of rules, ranging from procedures to safety and ethics issues. New regulations demand site-wide training, and refresher training is always needed. Policies and procedures are constantly being evaluated and improved to strengthen best practices and better ways of achieving goals. These policies provide answers to questions like who gets seen first in the emergency room. How can the identity of new babies be made certain? What obligations are satisfied by the patient discharge process? How can infectious diseases be better controlled? What dental materials should be used? What happens when a patient misses an appointment? For health care professionals, following the rules of policies is a huge and continuous undertaking.



Types of Rules


A rule is simply a guideline to follow. They can be written or unwritten and still carry the same force for compliance. Some rules are mandatory: “No smoking.” Others are not as compelling: “Please use the revolving doors on windy days.” Rules also vary in the ways they are communicated.



Written Rules


Written rules take time to work out, often by committees or experts, either inside or outside the facility. Usually, written rules that come from outside have been adopted from organizations that set standards, such as Universal Precautions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or evacuation instructions from the local fire marshall.


Internal written rules are often born of hard lessons learned. How is adequate staffing to be ensured, and how does that affect schedules, holidays, and other expectations? What parking regulations balance convenience with handling the flow of traffic and access to the facility? Is there a need for a written dress code to prevent inappropriate dress? Every employee must be sensitive to the need for new written rules when procedures change, operations are inefficient, or behavior expectations need to be clarified.



Signs


People are likely to follow directions on signs. People want to know what to do, and they are often eager to see a sign that answers, clearly and concisely, basic questions about what to do.



image What If?


What if you went somewhere and felt frustrated that there was no sign to explain what to do? What sign would you want posted?


The most ineffective signs are those that bark an order with no rationale: “Children Not Allowed.” Signs are much more likely to gain compliance when they offer details or reasons and make an effort to anticipate concerns: “Children Under 16 Not Allowed Because No Lifeguard on Duty.”


Like most written rules, signs appear when it seems necessary to make rules clear to everyone, even those that appeal to common sense, especially when safety is an issue. Signs are so important to safety that international signs have been developed to identify exits, prohibit smoking, and warn of wet floors. Other signs may be unique to a particular facility, governing where lab specimens are to be submitted, how payments are handled, and where to check in. The need for signs, to warn or explain, should be constantly evaluated and improved.



Unwritten Rules


Unwritten rules are interesting because they may carry the force of written rules, but you have to figure out what they are. You do this by observing, asking, and experimenting.


Every workplace has a culture, and the culture is made up of mostly unwritten rules that address such issues as how formal or informal the workplace is, the amount of socialization, the hierarchy and how familiar co-workers are with each other. Are you being micromanaged, or are you expected to take the initiative? New employees have to work hard to gain an understanding of the culture and its unwritten rules.



image Journaling 8-3


How would you describe the culture at work? List the unwritten rules that govern your culture.

Related posts:

  1. Being Easy to Deal With
  2. Dealing with Others
  3. Managing Your Emotions
  4. Building Personal Emotional Strengths

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Apr 8, 2017 | Posted by in MEDICAL ASSISSTANT | Comments Off on Planning for Career Success

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