We are nearing the end of our series on “consistency” and we are going to shift gears to topics very soon. We’ll finish out the year talking about the building blocks for your future and I’m going to give you a different way to think about your practice than you have ever heard before. That I promise you.
Before we do that. I want to emphasize to you how your focus on consistency really can’t ever go away. I use the sports analogies but we can pick any analogy for life, the seasons of the year, the planting of the crops, kids in school.
The point is everything follows a set progression that absolutely must be consistent every single time.
We joke about the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. However, it is just as insane to NOT do the same thing over and over again WHEN IT WORKS and delivers you the result you want.
Of course, there are always a multitude of variables in everything in life and in all of the examples I just listed out. Inside of those variables are where winners are made because if you stick to your consistent approach to winning and you learn to manage the variables then you will never falter on your objectives.
This isn’t the week where I point out all the ways even the best Doctors and Teams lose their focus, stop doing things that work, or worse yet resist common sense actions.
The good news about ANY and ALL outcomes is that there is always a reason; there is a way that you can unravel the reality and determine what caused it.
If you’ve taken anything away from the past several weeks and our discussion about the broad components within your practice that require rock solid discipline and constant belief that consistency matters – it should be these three…
1st – Success is often predictable, it just needs to be executed routinely.
2nd – Usually it is the small nuances that are missed that would have taken you over the top.
3rd – Outcomes can be reversed engineered by looking at the cause and effect.
Case in point, often Doctors look back at a day or week or month and wonder why their numbers aren’t satisfactory. They get frustrated or even upset with their team. Yet, when you go backwards and look… there was no way possible to get to their daily goal because there wasn’t enough dentistry either diagnosed or in some cases in existence to get them there.
Most of the time it is never a lack of treatment opportunity that is the problem (not always, but usually). Instead it is a diagnostic or a communication or a belief or commitment or an execution problem.
And always it is a consistency problem that eats away at the opportunity and performance of the practice. Therefore, the results that you desire do not come true because your actions aren’t aligning closely enough with the decisions you have made for the goals that you want to achieve.
Of course, I’m making a general statement here. Only you can assess the implication and reality of my comments from the past several weeks to see how they line up to your practice.
One more quick example… let’s say it is reversed and we have plenty of diagnosis and every day there is 2, 3, 4, 5 even 10 times as much dentistry as we need to be able to reach our daily goal and build a valuable schedule in the future. Then the problem must be case acceptance. So, we find out that when the treatment is presented it is still done with a tooth or quadrant at a time and insurance is always mentioned first.
In other words, we destroyed the vision in the back and broken down the comprehensive treatment planning. We are back to where we started and nothing else matters.
Don’t read too far into it, of course there is different approach for different doctors and practices. My bigger point is: there is always a reason why the result is what it is.
Think of a math problem. The answer on the right side of the equation is there because of what is on the left side. This is the same in life, in business, in dentistry.
This is what you should have taken away from the last several weeks and this is why your commitment to consistency is so important. You know what to do – it’s about doing it over and over again with your own practice success system.
Which is a very long way to get to the point of today’s Report… the next step in your consistency puzzle is CONSISTENT Management and Leadership of yourself, your team, your patients, and your practice as a business.
Yes, I’m talking about things as simple as sticking to your routine on productive Huddles, on closing out your day, knowing everything that happened, ensuring every patient is accounted for.
I’m talking about dedicated time for training, reviewing goals, and assessing progress as a team and also as individuals.
All of these things matter. Your success system for keeping everyone, including you, focused and accountable for everything we have been talking about. If you want to increase consistency you have to have a method, structure, and approach to do so.
And don’t think that if you have a small team you are out of the woods on this. There are as many inconsistencies in a few people as there are in many people because everything still has to be done. Of course, you multiply complexity when you multiply people (whether team, doctors, or patients).
However, Management and Leadership goes far deeper than just these “meetings” and it goes into the culture, the morale, the attitude, the personal development philosophy… whether you read books or do anything other than just show up, see the patients in the schedule, punch the clock, collect a paycheck and ‘do the dentistry.’
If your practice is set-up in such a way that all that is done is ‘see the patients’ and ‘do the dentistry’ then you are missing the boat on what really matters and what drives results the most.
I like to call it: practicing on purpose. That means every day with every patient your main and primary objective through relationships is to accomplish something, to help your patients on their pathway to health, and fulfilling the purpose and mission of your practice.
Deliver on that and you’ll have more dentistry to do than you have time to do it.
Management of this business is not just about bookkeeping and bills. The management that matters is that which improves performance, that cultivates potential, that stays focused on the principles, and that lead to the consistency that will give you the results you want. And you know what, it is not ever going to be completely easy or without stress if you are trying to do anything worthwhile.
Nearly every task (other than diagnosing and dentistry), can be delegated to others within your business – what can’t be delegated is the development of the business and that means the people.
For today, I’m asking you to self-reflect on the management and leadership consistency in your practice. Where are you sufficiently developing your team and where do you need to spend more time? You can’t afford to be negligent on these high level responsibilities that make everything else possible.
As they say, it starts at the top. Would you want any other person having more influence and control on your life, outcomes, practice, principles, and clinical philosophy – than you.
Of course not. Therefore, the more consistent you are (especially with the leadership of your team and management structure of your business), the more you will drive results and ensure consistency on everything else.
