Autumn is in the air, so it’s time to grab a bowl of snacks, unleash the marching bands and mascots, and get ready to enjoy the show – because it’s my favorite season for my favorite sport…
And no, I’m not talking about college football. The field of dreams that matters most to me and the success of my doctors is the sport of “Team Dentistry.”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve begun building the right mindset in order to improve your strategy of engagement and effectiveness with your Team with the goal of building better players. Today, we are going to bring it all together and go even further down the field in our discussion from calling the plays to scoring the touchdowns. After all, the Game of Dentistry is the ultimate Team Sport.
There is only one way to win long-term, in a sustainable fashion that keeps the burden of growth and responsibility off of you, and that is through playing Dentistry like a Team Sport. Where everyone knows their position, understands their role, shows up because they want to win, and takes care of other team members like family.
You may not be such a touchy, feely, emotional type of person or you might be (and either way is okay), but you don’t have to change who you are to embrace the team approach. It’s an all-hands-on-deck activity that involves attracting, keeping, and nurturing the very best quality team members possible.
Now, to have amazing Team Members, you first have to be able to hire and screen them properly. Of course, you may be in a situation where you already have an amazing and complete team without the need to hire anyone. But my guess is, given the challenges affecting dentistry today, it probably won’t be very long before you have to fire up the recruiting process again.
Either way, what I’m about to share with you applies to the people you have now and the people you want to be hiring in the future.
Let’s go through the seven key elements to getting the best team members that will fit with your culture, your existing team, and your practice philosophy to ensure their successful contribution, all while ensuring you’ve created a satisfying position for them.
KEY #1. Get totally clear about the role itself.
You must begin with clarity of what you are hiring for – the specific skills, tasks, responsibilities, and talents you want and need this person to have.
Going back to each of your current positions and doing this without thinking about who is currently doing it, will show you whether or not you have people in the right positions or people who need to be further developed.
Clarity about each role is critical.
KEY #2. Describe the WHO you want to hire.
You want to then describe, in as much detail as possible, the characteristics and personality of the person who will be in this position.
This is where most people go to the internet and run some psychobabble test (by the way did you know that psychobabble was a real word?), instead of just using common sense first. It’s easy to identify what a person is good at, but not so easy to actually identify personality and character.
You have to know what the position requires before you hire some random person to do it.
KEY #3. Clearly define success.
You now want to lay out what a successful outcome is for this position (and in fact, EVERY position in your practice). What defines success during a day and with each patient, week to week and month to month?
This way, when you are interviewing and screening Team Members (or later on, assessing and evaluating performance), you can have a discussion not based on feelings, but on reality.
The reason most team members don’t meet or exceed your expectations isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s that they don’t even know what those expectations are. They can’t read your mind, nor can you read theirs. So clearly define what success looks like so they have a clear target to aim for.
KEY #4. Advertise SPECIFICALLY for the person you want.
Too many help-wanted ads blend together into a long line of same-old-same-old, cookie-cutter technical positions. They don’t promise the opportunity of an exciting personality-driven career, something that gets the right person interested and makes the wrong person look somewhere else.
You’ll want to create a compelling, engaging, positive, and very specific ad around what YOU are looking for – which also makes clear exactly what you are NOT looking for.
This ad can be online or in the newspaper or at a school or just word of mouth through the Team. Our favorite way to hire is to ask our A-Team Members (the ones we love the most), to attract and find another person just like them. (It’s no different than A-Patients bringing in more A-Patients.)
KEY #5. Give each new hire a test run first.
Run prospective Team Members through some type of actual “dry run” experience. Use questions, situations, and tasks to put them in the heat of the moment so you can figure out how they will respond. This will reveal if they mesh with the current team, and if they work well under pressure.
The bottom line is that you MUST find out their real personalities, the person they’ll be when they show up each day, not the personality they put on when doing an interview. Make sure to ask hard questions about accountability, goals, work ethic, and habits.
You can tell a lot about someone by just doing this because guess what? People will be honest. Most people have no choice but to be honest, however, they are simply never even asked.
KEY #6. Trust your gut.
You have good instincts when it comes to people. But you just usually talk yourself out of them.
It’s a good idea for each Team Member to interview every new hire and then to talk openly about it. Unless you have more than 15 people in your office, you are all going to have to live with them, just like a family, so it just makes good sense to get everyone’s input. Plus, there is no way your entire team’s consensus will be wrong.
This is the final step that most people ignore and deny. Don’t. Otherwise, you will be living with the consequences, which are a lot harder to undo than to never do the right thing from the very beginning.
Remember everything I have written here can be applied to your existing team members.
If you want to take your team development very seriously then you have to have a plan, a specific approach. You need a system for it… and fortunately, I’ve created a brand new 4-Hour Masterclass training that will allow you to unlock breakthrough levels of leadership, achievement, autonomy, independence, and prosperity. The live seats are completely sold out, but you can secure the on-demand replay to watch at your convenience.
Get The Masterclass On-Demand Recording (Plus all of the bonuses)…
And last but not least…
Key #7: Recognize that bringing them onboard is only the beginning.
What I want to challenge you to do is make sure you have a specific on-boarding process for all of your new Team Members.
It should include not only what they need to learn from their own positional responsibilities and training on the clinical skill side of their “job,” but also you must have some way to indoctrinate them into your way of thinking, with your philosophy of patient care, and your practice culture. Everything from language to certain circumstances or situations on how you want things to be answered or addressed.
If you do this for all of your new Team Members, you will be setting them up for success and you will be earning their trust, their loyalty, and their dedication all along the way.
One More Thing…
Finally, because I’m in a giving mood, I want to share one final point as coach before we all exit the locker room to hit the playing field.
You must ask yourself “What is my current approach to team member development?”
- How will I continue to assess their performance?
- How will I continue to train them to improve?
- How will I continue to inspire and motivate them?
- How will I continue to lead them to grow my practice?
- How will I continue to get to know them and help them in their own lives?
How many Sports teams do you think there are who do not have all of these questions dialed in as a critical and essential part of their team’s operations and success plan? And while you might have answers to some or even all of these, the real question is this:
“Are my strategies and approach planned, scheduled, structured, and most importantly effective?”
You really have to grasp this 100% and never let it go, especially if your current team members have been with you for a very long time.
Every single day, I have Doctors complain about their team’s performance or they say they need training, or they are frustrated with someone or something… and I always ask the question “What are you doing about it?”
When I talk with Doctors who would prefer to never have to deal with this part of their business, I have to remind them whose business, vision, goals, and wealth-building practice this is… it’s the doctor’s, of course. The person who makes the most money carries the most responsibility.
Take this Weekly Report seriously because it holds the ultimate secret formula to ensure you win every game with every patient every day in your business. The best news of all, unlike other athletes and sports teams, you compete against yourself.
That means that if you choose to, you can always control the outcome.
Take Back Control Over Your Future and Start Practicing Dentistry on Your Own Terms…
My 4-hour Masterclass will reveal the simple shifts guaranteed to empower your team, accelerate growth, and unleash your practice’s potential for limitless prosperity.
The live seats are completely sold out, but you can secure the on-demand replay to watch at your convenience.
Don’t forget, you’ll also receive a bonus one-on-one Implementation Session with me to help execute on everything you learned.
Get The Masterclass On-Demand Recording (Plus all of the bonuses)…
