Optometrists Need To Wear Many Hats To Succeed As Entrepreneurs
After publishing a post entitled “The Double-edged Sword Of Technology in Eye Care and The Increased Reliance On Skilled Staff”, I received an email from a friend who follows my blog and often sends me comments. He read the post and wanted to add a comment. We later had a great time chatting and exchanging experiences and lessons that the pandemic has taught us as well as ideas and insights on how to build resilient teams that can deliver great services and ways to relaunch after a crisis. Being both aviation enthusiasts we spent some time talking about the TOP GUN movie sequel and he even reminded me of a great leadership quote from the first movie by Tom (Viper) Skerritt: “A good pilot is compelled to always evaluate what’s happened, so he can apply what he’s learned.”
What happened in the pandemic taught us a lot of things that we can apply for years to come. Among the salient things we’ve learned is that as eye care professionals we need to wear many hats to succeed in business as entrepreneurs and practice owners. The Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) is one of those hats that my friend liked in my post. However, he added and emphasized another important hat that we should be wearing during and after the pandemic which is the Chief Project Officer (CPO).
The CPO has a lot in common with the CSO but his role is even more critical in eye care as a result of the pandemic and the digital divide that has been revealed. Just like the CSO, the CPO reports directly to the CEO however he has hands-on achieving strategic business objectives through projects, ensures meeting business goals, balances risk with rewards, linking projects with the business strategy, drives efficiencies and linkages between projects, oversees and control all changes to project scope, strives toward achieving execution excellence.
The role of the CPO is particularly effective in midsized and large companies. As practice owners, we may not need to hire a CPO but we should acknowledge that every organization needs projects to generate value and keep its business alive. We may not have five or more projects going on at any given time but learning a few skills that a CPO has can help us in many situations. Like the pandemic for example and the need to launch telemedicine.