Hygienists make up a huge component of a dental practice’s atmosphere and productivity. You should be devoting plenty of time to understanding their motivations as well as your own. Even better, you should actively consider how best to support them.

Supporting New Hygienists

One obvious instance of support a dentist can provide occurs with the dental hygienist who is fresh out of school. Hiring someone new to the field confers pros and cons. The biggest upside is that you can mold them to your preferences. But in that upside lies a heavy burden: You must be willing to guide their learning and influence their patient care.

A hygienist who is very new to either your practice or dentistry itself needs plenty of time to become oriented. You can support them by seeing all of their patients for a while and completing an extremely thorough exam. This will ensure both the hygienist and patient get the most out of the experience.

Take steps like:

1. Ensure all deposits that can be removed are removed.
2. Observe the gingiva and determine if prophylaxis has caused as little trauma as possible.
3. Measure pocket depths to calibrate the hygienists readings to yours.
4. Look closely for decay and provide an opportunity for the hygienist to feel the signs of disease that you do.
5. Check for wear or breakdown and teach both patient and hygienist how to see it.
6. Carry out an oral cancer exam and clarify what is cause for concern.
7. Point out what draws your attention on an x-ray.
8. Finally, make any diagnostics you offer into a learning experience for both the patient and the hygienist.

Once you feel comfortable that your hygienist is appropriately skilled, you must open lines of communication surrounding who handles what responsibilities.

How do you bring new hygienists into your practice culture? Please let me know! 

How you help patients become healthier in your practice is a big question. That’s even more true when the role of your hygienists is unclear. The best method of serving patients well can become hazy due to procedural problems that have nothing much to do with care.

Hygienists in the Dental Practice

For example, there is some confusion over the relationship between the insurance company, dentist, and hygienist. Essentially, what level of care are hygienists allowed to handle and why? This brings up multiple concerns such as their ability to diagnose, who the patient wants to hear recommendations from, and how a periodic exam is charged.

The only way to figure out the right answers to these areas of interest is to take a hard look at your individual dental practice. There is no one perfect solution, no size fits all. You have to decide what is appropriate based on your relationship to hygienists on your team as well as their skill and knowledge levels.

Who Does What?

Clarity is a great motivator. When people understand their purpose, they are better able to carry it out well. The only way you can have clarity around the role of hygienists that will then seep over to them is to separate the expectations you feel bound by from what you actually think is best.

Taking the time to consider the big picture of your practice can go a long way. You can only maximize all the personnel resources at your disposal, including a hygienist’s communication skills, technical knowledge, personal perspective, and time, if you know why you’ve hired them in the first place.

First, determine where a hygienist’s value fits into your practice. What clinical service is your best and what behavioral service is your best? Most importantly: Who provides these services and why?

Where do hygienists fit into your dental practice? Give me a shout in the comments below!

Dentists can feel like they have to do everything and decide everything in the dental practice. After all those years of training, hard work, and practice, it’s no surprise we take the lead.

But even only five years into practicing, doing everything and always being the expert can get pretty exhausting. You may want to provide exceptional care, but you can’t be everywhere at once. That’s when it’s time to start taking on more of a mentorship role with your team members.

Leaning On Your Hygienists and Assistants

If you’ve developed a positive, collaborative practice culture, you’ll likely be surprised by how many of the people you employ jump at the opportunity to learn more and embrace more responsibilities. Some might seem hesitant, but likely this stems not from disinterest but from not wanting to disappoint or threaten their position by messing up.

You actually can’t and shouldn’t do it all. First and foremost, rely on your team to fill in some of the gaps of kindness/emotion/consideration that you may not be able to fill as easily if your schedule is packed. Even if you can’t hear about the patient’s life story, someone on the team should be making an effort to get to know them more personally.

Hygienists and assistants can be trained for many specialties you might not even be aware they are allowed to perform. They can handle impressions, facebows, photographs, sealants, whitening, and oral hygiene instructions and make lucia jigs, quicksplints, and provisionals.

That’s no small amount of tasks. Think of all the time you could save by entrusting more to team members who may already feel complacent in their work. You’ll end up fostering a more engaged working environment.

How do you lean on your dental assistants and hygienists? We’d love to know your tips and tricks!

Leadership shouldn’t be a happy accident or something you fall into simply by virtue of becoming a dentist. It should be an acknowledged responsibility that you treat with genuine seriousness.

Of course, your instincts shouldn’t necessarily be ignored, but can they always be trusted? As the dentist, you are by default a leader. In reality, you should understand your role in shaping your practice’s vision as well as fostering growth for the entire team.

The hardest part about navigating the nebulous realm of leadership is clarifying and meeting the duties ascribed to your role. For dentists, you are actually fulfilling four different roles, all of which are important for general morale and success.

4 Roles of the Dental Leader

Follow the leader has real meaning in a professional space. One of your primary roles is that of the vision initiator. You have to be bold, verbal, and engaged in your vision to help your team attain the same values. You need to be fully present, especially when your practice is new or developing. The future depends on how you see it.

You will also become the educator in your practice, if you haven’t already. You must guide patients and team members toward your expectations for care. They can’t identify with your vision if you don’t yourself have the skills to state it clearly.

Your third role is that of the vision facilitator. At some point, your team and practice will be fully imbued with the tangible effects of your vision. You have to make the effort to prevent that vision from stalling through team building and careful hiring.

Finally, you must embrace your role as a mentor. This may be more challenging if you have a very strong personality, as it can make people embrace your vision even if they don’t appreciate the philosophy. What you want is a sort of vision immortality, so that even if you leave the practice, your vision and leadership live on.

There is a distinct difference between team versus staff. Teams work together toward a shared goal while staff are a group of people who happen to work under the same management. Team members work side by side, whereas staff members work in the same space.

If you are wondering how you might transition from having a staff to working within a team, you might consider engaging with your staff to learn each person’s communication style.

Communication Can Make Your Staff Into a Team

At Pankey, we focus on four communication styles: expressive, driver, analytic and amiable. However, people are multifaceted, so they almost never exhibit just one style but instead have a mix of styles. It is this mix that makes us fascinating and gives us individuality.

Teams are made up of people who develop meaningful relationships that initially center on shared work goals. These relationships form when people get to know one another. Taking the time to go through a communication styles exercise with your team allows them to deepen their knowledge of each other. It has the added benefit of helping to identify the strengths of each person.

The Pankey team shares some similarities with practice teams. We spend most of our time working together to serve others. For us, it is the doctors who attend our courses. For you, it is your patients. In both situations the team works together but focuses on someone outside the team.

Although there is no “best” communication style, our team has found that certain styles are more conducive to certain situations. Also, in challenging situations it is often best to pair people who share the same style.

Despite the fact that there are no hard and fast rules and everyone should be treated as an individual, I’ve also noticed that there are certain predictable behaviors based on the communication styles. Our team feels that the knowledge we share about our communication styles helps us work together and serve our community better.

Exceptional service is more than just a set of benchmarks we strive to reach in the dental practice daily. It’s a philosophy that steers the ship, drives everyone on the team to seek greatness. As such, it can’t be a mandate handed down to your team. It has to go deeper than that.

There are three things you can do that will enable your team to embrace and embody exceptional service. Remember, it must be natural to them, instead of forced, if the impression they give is to come across as genuine.

3 Steps to Truly Exceptional Service

1. Be a Good Role Model

This may seem too simple to work, but it’s like magic. Model exceptional service and your team will inevitably follow suit. Set an example that also sets the tone for your dental practice as a whole. Go out of your way to surprise patients with how good your service can be.

It’s easy to expect greatness from others while not putting the same pressure on yourself. Walk the talk. Live an unbridled excitement for patient care that’s completely clear of resentment toward their demands or needs.
Choose quality and excellence in every way you can, whether that be in your stationary, your lab, or even the drinks you have in the waiting room.

2. Hire People Who Go the Extra Mile

During your hiring process, make an effort to find team members who inherently want to go above and beyond. They should have a personality intent on always taking success to the next level. It’s not as difficult to sense this in an interview as you might think.

Ask the interviewee what they consider an exceptional doctor’s office experience. Go even further and ask them to talk about their own experience providing care beyond expectations. Then, ask why they did this. Use your own intuition to decide what their story means about them.

3. Reward Exceptional Actions

No dentist is an island, which is why you’re always hearing about the importance of your team. It’s a lesson we all need to be reminded of throughout the years as we grow complacent, things change, or new challenges arise that reveal cracks in our team’s capabilities.

Your Team is Key to Exceptional Service

Because exceeding expectations is an intangible thing, you can’t easily make it an actual practice policy. It’s not a rule, it’s a goal. If you want to make delivering exceptional service part of your practice brand, it needs to be an aim shared by all of the people on your team. They must genuinely enjoy delivering exceptional care. It must be the attitude that drives them.

But like anything, your intention to mandate exceptional service can backfire. This will leave you frustrated and your patients confused. A great analogy of this is an experience my husband and I had purchasing a car. The salesman insisted on taking us to a repair place nearby, despite the fact that we knew where it was. He told us he couldn’t get a ’10’ on the sale otherwise. As it turned out, this task was necessary to fit the quality control expectations of his superiors.

Exceptional Service Can’t Be a Mandate

This transparency wasn’t a good thing. It made it sound like our salesman was more worried about his performance review than our needs. The exact same problem can happen in the dental office. It’s why you don’t want to make exceptional service a strict rule. It has to be genuinely wanted by your team.

So how do you develop a practice culture that makes this happen? It all comes down to three key factors that will encourage your team to embody a true passion for patient care …

Check out Part 2 of this series soon!

Do you feel reticent about having someone other than you use the facebow? 

A Spatial Reference Point Story

Recently over the holidays as I was “channel surfing” I came across the movie Apollo 13. This is one of those movies that no matter how many times I have watched it, I just have to stop and watch it one more time. Every time I do, I can’t help but get misty-eyed when it gets to the part when the crew make it back to Earth safely (SPOILER ALERT … But you probably read this in the history books anyway).

For me, there is one super exciting moment in the film when Astronaut James Lovell (aka Tom Hanks) has to find a reference point to correct their descent back to Earth from space or burn up on re-entry. Since he cannot use his on-board computers, he lines up his spaceship with the Earth in his window.

“Keep the Earth in the window!” A spatial reference point! Too much correction and their spaceship burns up on re-entry. Too little and they skip off the Earth’s atmosphere.

Make Your Facebow Process Simpler

In our dental offices, the facebow is used to give us a spatial reference point for mounting diagnostic or working models of our patient’s dentition. This is done onto an articulator that approximates the realities of our patient. Sure, you might be able to mount casts arbitrarily, but is your accuracy reproducible? The facebow is a simple tool in our armamentarium to make our life easier.

The question remains, “Is this a task that the dentist must perform?” In my office when we create exquisite dental mountings, I delegate this task to my awesome dental assistants.  With a little training they can do this immediately and the procedure only takes a few minutes.

This involvement is a great way for them to demonstrate their knowledge. It paves the way for more opportunities to open conversations about the Dentist’s Care, Skill, and Judgement. They become your chairside cheerleader and highlight your expertise. They will also express how a critical bite registration record or protrusive record performed by the dentist will only enhance the outcome of treatment.  

Information gathered through the use of a facebow makes our dentistry more predictable. It distinguishes you and your team as a highly trained dental practice.

Don’t burn up on re-entry or skip off into space. Glide effortlessly into beautiful predictable dentistry by using your facebow. Keep your Earth in the window!

There are four cornerstones of dentistry that determine a balance essential for true success. In Part 1 of this series, I discussed Clinical Services and Patient Care, which have an external focus on patients. They guide how you and your standards are viewed by your community and presented to them.

Now, I’ll dive into Team Participation and Practice Growth and Development. These two cornerstones have an internal focus that shape quality of life and internal direction.

All four of the interrelated cornerstones will impact success in dentistry, especially if one is out of balance with the others. Use them to identify your current reality, vision for the future, and action plan.

Cornerstones of Dentistry: Team Participation and Practice Growth and Development

Team Participation

Team participation is a tacit feature of all dental practices. Team members have a huge impact on the practice atmosphere, as well as the collective success of patient care. Individually, the level and quality of team participation must be cultivated and supported based on your practice vision.

You can seek out and hire team members who are passionate and keen on raising the practice up. You can also determine standards for teamwork built on healthy expectations, the fair exchange of ideas, and support of insights. You can design a culture that enables different opinions to thrive in light of shared values. You can share the ups and downs, as well as the pride and purpose, of working together.

Practice Growth & Development

You have the ultimate say in defining and instituting a standard for growth. In your practice, you create and have responsibility for meeting goals related to finances, size of patient base, size of practice team, and your schedule.

Your personal and professional growth is your decision. You can seek out opportunities that fit your educational desires and sense of monetary value. It’s not helpful to compare yourself to other practices, because their goals and how they achieve them will not be the same. The ‘return on investment’ for CE and other professional development can only be gauged by you.

Dr. MacDonald continues Know Your Patient

What is always attractive to quality individuals is the same thing that is attractive to quality patients and the rest of the people in your life. Building strong relationships with your team will have a direct influence on developing good relationships with patients, but first you have to demonstrate attractive leadership qualities.

Delivering Relationship-Based Leadership

To me, the following statements are a safe place to start for attracting and sustaining talented team members:

1. You, the leader, believe they are important and their role is important and valuable to you.
2. You view each person as unique, valuable, and worthy of your respect.
3. They perceive the opportunity for growth and development (both skills and income).
4. They are given the authority to make decisions and have responsibility for their part of the practice.
5. They are on a team that can count on one another because they trust each other.

There are many more important aspects, but you get the idea. Your team is an extension of you. A caring high trust relationship between the dentist and their team that is observed and experienced by the patient will help the patient build trust with both. In fact, it is probably the key to the patient trusting you.

Belief & Trust

When we refer a patient to one of the specialists or technicians on our interdisciplinary team, it is made with confidence and conviction. That is possible because we know the doctor or technician and their team very well. We believe in their clinical skills, their integrity, and how they manage our patients.

This is the result of intentionally selecting each specialist and developing a relationship with them and their team. In that process, we have developed a protocol that outlines what we can expect from one another and what each of us is responsible for. We spend time together individually and as teams. They know how much we respect and value what they do. They express the same in return.

Knowing your patient is a model for the nature of your work and how to approach all of the key relationships in living out your WHY. Practicing this way makes dentistry much more rewarding and enjoyable. Enjoying all of the people in my practice world is what I want and how I want to experience my career. Thank you Dr. Pankey and all who have brought this to life for me and for many!