Dr. Joseph J. Capista says
there are definite qualities that separate a
leader and a manager, and
the two positions can’t be
confused.
“You have to understand
the manager is not the
leader, and there can only
really be one leader in the
company,” says the president, founder and owner of
Williamsburg Dental, which
employs about 50 people.
Capista says that one main
difference is that as the
leader, you have to have a
vision for the business and
you have to display the qualities of a leader to get
employees to follow that
vision.
Smart Business spoke with
Capista about how to communicate a vision and how
controlling your thoughts is
important to getting buy-in
for your vision.
Q. What are the keys to
communicating a vision?
That’s where the manager
comes in to play and the
partners to a degree.
So many times my manager
will come in to me and say,
‘We are going to have to say
this because of that.’ I say,
‘Well, is that the truth? We’re
going to say the truth. This is
what we have to do and bear
the consequence of it.’
She knows that there is
integrity and honesty in what
we do. Because of that, she
knows where we want to
take the practice, and she
has the pulse on delivering.
If you said to me, ‘(Does)
everyone in the practice
have the same vision?’ I don’t think they do. I’m not
sure that they could because
of the various levels of
requirements for the different jobs.
So, the person that is sterilizing instruments still has to
have the vision that we are
here for quality, we are here
for people, we are here to
serve.
So, they may have a more
basic vision than the vision
that the partners may have
or I may have or the manager may have. But, on an
ongoing basis, we have
meetings by us as owners and by the manager
to convey what we’re
trying to do here.
Our vision of where
we want to end up has
to be conveyed from
the top to the bottom
through the way we
behave, the way we
talk, the way our managers convey the
things we are talking
about.
