Let’s dive straight into this week’s Report by stating the most obvious thing about your business: your people are your greatest investment in size and value – period.
Of course, you have your skills, your time, and your relationships with patients. None the less, month after month, the amount of time, effort, and money you put into your team is the largest. It should also be your greatest in returns not just with profit and growth but also with peace of mind and predictability.
Here’s another obvious fact (that I have stated since I first sank my teeth into dentistry nearly two decades ago to help doctors to build better, more profitable, and lifestyle aligned practices), creating a team-driven and systems-run practice certainly doesn’t happen overnight… because we are dealing with people.
The challenge with dentistry is it is rare to find a practice that has a culture, plan, process, environment, and financial strategy to grow team members to become career players.
This reality breeds the two worst things for your practice: turnover or the alternative complacency – both lead to stagnant growth and plateaued results.
Flip a coin. Neither are any good for your long term investment, stability, and profitability of your practice; not to mention your patient relationships.
So, the solution is simple, just like I say that we “build better patients” with the right experience. The same goes for your team. You want to have a process to grow your team, individually and collectively as a group.
When they grow, your practice grows. So, how do you deliberately and consistently grow your people so they become more valuable to you? By them becoming more valuable to themselves, to each other, and to your patients.
The most important commitment you can make in order to grow your team is to be proactive, not reactive.
Doctors complain all the time about certain frustrations but at the end of the day it’s the chicken and the egg, the cause and the effect, the after-the-fact complaint where the damage has been done.
Instead of meticulous training, clarity on expectations, disciplined structure, routine schedule, and ongoing development, we wait until something goes wrong.
Now, I can’t emphasize this enough (as much as it might be hard to take or even agree with), but the team is a mirror image of the doctor. In their attitude, their focus, their follow-through, etc.
Today, I promised action and strategy, beyond just ways of thinking and mindset, about how to develop and grow you people.
There’s a lot in what you’ve already read… don’t miss it.
Next, I want to share the five simple exercises that you can actually do with your team. These are behaviors that should be ingrained in your culture and put into systematic structure so that you stay proactive.
The first point I want to make is a reality check for you. That is you must understand why your team members are here in the first place…
To earn money, to have a job (as much as I hate to say those three letters out loud), to be valued, to contribute, to feel appreciated, and do something worthy with their lives.
Still, at the end of the day, they are exchanging a day of their lives for money and while we have to make it about more than that, you do need to understand this and respect it.
However, you can’t bribe someone solely with money to stay or to do a good job or to keep getting better – but – you have to realize that the more their ROLE (not job) in your practice contributes to and benefits their overall life outside the practice, the more they will value what they do.
The best thing you can do to show them how much you value them is for you to lead by example and to not treat them as though the money they get for being there should be good enough and they shouldn’t expect anything else.
When I see teams and doctors have any type of contentious relationship it is often unspoken. You can feel the resentment on both sides and both are feeling exactly the same way just looking at it selfishly from their own perspectives.
If you want it to be about more than just money to them – then they have to be about more than just money to you; and not just visibly but intrinsically.
Now, the action step is to sit down with every team member and make sure you understand what their goals are, why they work, and what matters most to them. If you are really good you can help them attach significance to the work they do.
This is absolutely no different than what you or someone on the team should be doing with your patients… goal setting and expectations clearly defined.
Which brings me to the next one. Both individually and as a team you must collaboratively set clear expectations, define success specific to these expectations, and the responsibilities that are attached to them. They have to know what a victory looks like, feels like, adds up to, etc.
Aside from lack of acknowledgement and appreciation, the biggest complaint from team members we get is their lack of clarity on who does what and what exactly is expected.
You ask how can this be. Well, the game plan hasn’t been intentionally organized and discussed to establish ownership roles.
Next up, is very simple and yet usually either completely neglected or done so poorly it actually becomes detrimental.
I’m talking about providing feedback. Ideally, it is routine feedback with each individual and the team as a whole with everyone willing to listen.
Every doctor wants their people to take more initiative and have more accountability but there is nothing to base it on because there is no system in place. While initiative should be automatic, when someone thinks they are already doing everything they are supposed to, rarely would they attempt to do anything more, better, faster.
Feedback is the key to helping your people to improve. Most people want to do well, they want feedback, and they want to make you proud – and that’s a bigger motivator than making you money, by the way – another hard lesson to grasp.
Okay, so we have a foundation in place and how do you build upon a foundation? You go to work building upwards, which requires time for meetings and trainings.
Once again, I hear both team and doctors complain about “trainings” or not knowing this or not being competent at that. I think, ‘my goodness, for the amount of time necessary to stop what you are doing and dedicate time to development, you would save yourself all of the inconvenience, inefficiencies, and ineffectiveness caused by not doing this.’
Most practices have “meetings” but they are the same old rehash of old news with nothing actually being worked on or they are so short that nothing gets accomplished. And we wonder why we are living a groundhog day month after month – well, it’s because nothing has changed, improved, been focused upon, or worked on.
One of my favorite questions to ask a team is for them to write down the top three items they want to learn and/or improve on and then work together as a group to get it done.
They always have things they want to get better at or add to their skillsets. It is quite amazing what you’ll hear if you just ask. It is the equivalent of an undervalued asset losing money and opportunity.
Ultimately, it’s your responsibility to give them ways to become more valuable to themselves, to each other, to your patients, and to you.
These are four very useful exercises to help you grow your people and they will love you for it (or they will prove to be people that are only showing up for that three letter word and that’s simply unacceptable for you or your goals).
One last piece of tough love: it is much easier for a team member (or doctor) to bring people down than it is to lift people up. You must have zero tolerance for bad attitudes and influences – your people, let alone your patients, are too valuable to let that exist.
Yes, I know, I promised five. The last one gets a Weekly Report all to itself… next week.
