As an office manager you have to handle a wide variety of responsibilities while on the job on a daily basis.
Some responsibilities include organizing meetings, ordering office supplies, handling patient complaints and queries, and allocating tasks and assignments to other employees.
To manage an office successfully, you need to have specific skills and traits that will help you to handle everything in a correct and timely manner. This is where interpersonal skills come in handy.
Interpersonal skills are also known as people skills, and are based on one’s emotional intelligence.
They can incorporate the way that people communicate with others both in verbal and nonverbal ways, and how they socialize with others around them.
It is important that you are able to get along with other employees and patients, and that you are able to communicate effectively between everyone on a consistent basis.
Here we discuss the importance of interpersonal skills for an office manager so that you can excel in your job and run a successful dental office.
They Lead to Effective Communication
The most important part of interpersonal skills is that they lead to effective communication within the dental office as a whole.
Interpersonal skills allow you to have strong relationships with other employees within the dental office, which can lead to an increased exchange of thoughts and ideas about the workplace.
They also allow you to communicate effectively with your patients, so that you can properly address any questions, concerns, or thoughts that they may have when they come in for their appointments and procedures.
They Foster Better Conflict Management
As an office manager, you need to be able to resolve conflicts that may arrive within the dental office.
Even if your dental office has effective processes and procedures in place that are strictly followed, you are bound to have conflicts arise at some point.
Interpersonal skills allow you to actively listen to both sides of an issue, think logically about the situation at hand, and to creatively come up with the best solution to the problem.
They Allow You to Be an Active Listener
Since you have to be in constant communication with other dental team members as well as with patients as an office manager, you need to be an active listener while this is happening.
Dental employees need to feel comfortable talking to you about their thoughts and concerns, so that you can implement new changes to make the dental office more efficient.
Patients also need to feel comfortable speaking to you about their thoughts and concerns so you can make sure that the dental team is providing them with the highest quality patient care.
Both of these scenarios require active listening so that you can fully understand what needs to be changed or completed, and can properly delegate what needs to be done.
They Build Trust
When you have good interpersonal skills and are able to communicate well with others, trust is built between you and other people.
When you are an office manager, it is crucial that the other employees within the dental office trust you, and that the patients do too.
A lack of transparency between you, other dental team members, and patients will lead to a poorly-run dental office.
When you have good social skills and are able to communicate verbally and nonverbally to everyone, people will trust you and what you have to say.
They Make You an Efficient Leader
To be an efficient and effective leader, you have to have strong interpersonal skills that you utilize in the office on a daily basis.
Interpersonal skills allow strong relationships to form between you, other dental employees, and patients, while also building trust with those other people.
These relationships and the trust that is built within those relationships allows you to be an efficient leader, because you can connect with the people that you are leading.
These interpersonal skills allow you to be more inspiring and motivating for the dental employees, which will lead to an effective and successful dental office as a whole.
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