Will Humphreys shares how to train PTs to resign professionally. Ask them to notify leadership as soon as they're thinking about leaving, request more than one month's notice, and set expectations during hiring. This gives you time to recruit and train their replacement instead of scrambling last minute.
Chapters
This is a very special technique that you can do, not just with pts that you bring in, but it is also what you can do with your current team, which is that you can train your pts on how to quit. And this was a big thing that I realized through coaching years ago that whenever we bring someone on, it is so useful to set expectation as to when that agreement ends, how you can do it in a powerful way. So traditionally, what happens when someone wants to resign, they usually wait to the last minute and then tell you, if you're lucky, four weeks, right? That's the standard way of it going. It's up to us as owners to train our pts. It was a game changer for me when I would sit down on the first interview, and if it looked like it was going to be a fit, I would say, listen, my goal is to make sure that you get your next job, whether it's with me or somebody else. My goal is to progress you. I'm committed to you, not just to my company. So, listen, if at any point something happens down the road, maybe this isn't a fit. Maybe you have another job opportunity in a different state. Maybe you're. You're just wanting to be done with PT altogether. Here's the thing I want from you. I want you to tell me, as soon as you even start. Start thinking about it, to tell me it won't scare me. I am committed to helping you find your best fit in that solution. And it gives me time to not just serve you, but to grow on my end. And one thing I always tell my employees, guys, this is something I want you to share as much as you can, is I tell them if there's a surprise on either end of that relationship, then someone's dropped something. If I hire you and you show up on your first day and you're like, wow, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. Then I made a mistake in that recruiting process. Maybe I oversold them or whatever. But on their end, if they just dropped the bomb that I'm quitting on a Friday night and I had no idea that was coming, that's on their end. They dropped it. They really surprised us. So for us to train people, a, it's not just okay, it's expected for you to tell me, B, whenever you leave, if you can give me more than a month's notice, that is huge for us. For example, if sometimes urgent things happen and there's nothing you can do. I had one PT who just didn't show up one day at all. And she didn't respond to any of my texts. It was really a dire situation. She was like one of two pts in a rural clinic. It took us a week to find out that the night before she didn't show up. Both of her parents were killed in a car accident at the same time. What do you do? You drop everything and you go. You can't avoid that. But everything else we can avoid. What we do is we train them on how to turn in a notice, what to bring up, when to bring it up. And the answer is simple. Bring up everything as soon as humanly possible, and that way we're not scared. When I started doing that, I had pts let me know two, three, or even four months in advance that they were leaving. And guess what that does for me as a recruiter? It gives me the bandwidth and the ability to create the story so that the transition is smoother. In most cases, I had another PT I can just bring in. In the best case is that they even train that new pt. There's like a two week overlap where that PT is like, let me introduce you to my patients. Let me show you what I did. And again, most PTs are willing to do that if we just teach them how to.
