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!

Our team – the people that form the basis of our dental practices – often have a few key expectations about our behavior post dental CE course. While we’re away, they flit through daydreams of the turmoil soon to inhabit their lives, wondering what fresh torment will arrive in the form of a drastic change to the way things are run.

Disrupting the status quo is fine and dandy if you understand the passion behind it, but this is not the case for most dental staff. We dentists get impassioned by our new learning and rush to implement it, forgetting our team is many steps behind us in the motivation department.

3 Things Your Team Has to Deal With After You Complete Dental CE

1. Tons of New Materials to Buy

You arrive home from a weekend of intense clinical discussions where you were surrounded by advancements in materials and technology. These ‘shiny new things’ may very well improve how you practice, but in your excitement to order them you forget to explain the ‘why’ to your staff.

Your staff now has to learn a whole new set of instructions and all new inventory control. They also have to deal with the possibility that you’ll try the materials and realize you’re not really going to use them. To you, this was useful experimentation. To them, it was a hectic couple of work weeks.

2. Changing Everything but the Kitchen Sink

Beyond the materials and tech, you also imbibed a heavy dose of alternate thought processes and clinical techniques. Your staff expects a variety of potential changes: how to answer the phone, new patient scheduling, chairside assistance, and on and on. This creates a lot of stress.

3. All Bets Are Off

Sometimes, the expectation of change is taken to the extreme. A common ‘myth’ in dentistry is that of the dentist who called and fired their entire staff from a CE course. This may or may not have actually happened and is unlikely in most cases. Still, it exemplifies the upset caused by your return. From your staff’s perspective, it’s more work and adjustments for them. If they don’t understand that these change will be better for them, patients, and the office, they see it all as another load on their shoulders.

There is a way to avoid this problem. When you complete a CE course, you should set aside time to share what you learned with your team. Share your excitement so they feel it too. Many times dentists start enforcing the implementations without an explanation. This hinders their staff’s ability to successfully apply what was learned.

As always in dentistry, come up with a system that makes your communication more effective.

How do you motivate your staff to enjoy and appreciate change? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

One pattern I’ve noticed lately in calls with my clients is that many dentists and their teams are frustrated about training new hires. Adding a unique personality to an already cohesive group can seem like mixing oil and water at first. When a new team member is brought into your dental practice, there needs to a consistent plan in place to avoid or manage problems as they arise.

 Starting the Conversation on Training New Hires

The frustration I’ve come across is consistently based on new hires not catching on, not doing things the ‘right way,’ and not doing things as fast as dentists would like. The seasoned team members are irritated and everyone is annoyed by the amount of work it takes to train.

One of the conversations I have with my doctors is about understanding the difference between exposing a new team member to a task or philosophy and having them actually learn it in the way they are most suited to. I ask:

1. At what point would you say they’ve started to have a certain level of competency where they can do the task?
2. At what point would you say this team member has mastered what it is you want them to do?

The hope is that you bring a team member on board, they watch what’s going on, you show them a few times, and they will automatically and miraculously have a high level of mastery. But this is not the case for most people.

Pay Attention to Individual Learning Styles

There are many different learning styles that can affect how a person takes in and processes information. Some people want to read about it, some need to watch it five times, and others have more hesitation about how fast they get it.

Acknowledging different learning styles is a huge component to successful individualized training. You have to understand how different people will become effective and learn what you want them to.

3 Steps of Dental Practice New Hiring Training

I like to look at the training process as a continuum:

1. What was the first exposure and have they been exposed to how you actually want to have the task done?
2. What will it take for them to have a measurable level of competency? Is there a training checklist in place? Who is responsible for helping this team member learn?
3. What would it look like if and when they ever attain a level of mastery to the point where they could be responsible for teaching another person?

Bonus Tip: Most people really struggle with only oral types of instruction. Having things in writing and experiential learning are both helpful.

Most importantly, it’s crucial to enact the basic training continuum: exposure, competency, and mastery.

You have to have an actionable plan and you need to know who is accountable for it. If you’ve been unsuccessfully training a new team member, this process has a high level of predictable success, assuming you’ve hired well to start with.

What tasks do you find new hires struggle with the most in your dental practice? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!

(Link to Getting Team embers to ‘Pull On the Rope’ Part 1)

Questions That Will Improve Team Engagement

Employees in a dental practice need to feel valued on multiple levels to do their best work.

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the importance of team engagement and how it affects a business’ success. Below, I dive into the fundamental needs that can change your team’s satisfaction with their day-to-day employment.

Understanding the 4 Team Needs That Will Change Your Practice

Wagner and Harter’s 12 elements from “12: The Elements of Great Managing” are divided into four categories based on the concept of a triangle and Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. The first two have to do with basic needs, the next four with individual. If those are met, the next four have to do with teamwork and the final elements are related to growth.

Basic Needs

Example: The first element that must have ‘yes’ as an answer is, ‘I know what is expected of me at work.’

This is the most important category. When people know what’s expected of them, their basic needs are met and it’s easier to move on to their individual needs.

Individual Needs

Example: Element four is, ‘In the last 7 days, I have received praise for doing good work.’

This is about recognition for team members that do good work. You must make sure they’re in an environment where that type of response is supported.

Teamwork Needs

The next need is teamwork. I find it interesting that Gallup asks about best friends. Certainly something I see with my own team is that when team members are actively engaged in relationships with each other, they come to work engaged because of those friendships. They don’t call in sick because they want to spend time with their friends at work.

Another example: Element seven is, ‘At work, my opinion seems to count.’

I’m a fantastic micromanager and I always think I have the best ideas. The more I’ve given up on that, the more I’ve noticed my team members are happier with what they’re doing.

Growth Needs

And lastly, growth.

Example: The final element is, ‘In the last year, I have had opportunities to learn and grow.’

Employees need to feel challenged in their tasks, not bored or stuck in stasis.

My encouragement is to look through the Gallup Q12 Index questions and consider whether you have had similar conversations with your team members individually. Ultimately, if your team members can respond affirmatively to these questions in your practice, then I’m sure you will discover that they are ‘pulling on the rope.’

How do you help your employees have a more fulfilling work experience? Please leave your thoughts in the comments!

3 Types of Team Members Who Make or Break Success

Keeping team members engaged throughout the year is a struggle if you don’t have a communication-based framework in place.

During a recent course I received many questions about how I get my team members engaged. This left me reflecting on lessons I’ve learned over the years from research by the Gallup organization.

Read on to learn what causes disengagement and how you can avoid the downfalls of a disgruntled team in your practice.

The 3 Types of Team Members

In the book, “12: The Elements of Great Managing,” Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter use research from Gallup to describe the three types of team members that exist in corporate America. I believe these types are applicable to dentistry as well:

1. Engaged: They have the magical ingredient of passion.
2. Not Engaged: Pretty much checked out. They put in time but there’s no energy in their work.
3. Actively Disengaged: They’re not only unhappy, they actually undermine what engaged team members try to accomplish.

How Engagement Determines Business Success

What the authors found is that the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is quite different in highly productive corporations versus average corporate America.

Engaged team members in average corporate America were 30% versus 63% in highly productive organizations. Similarly, not engaged was 29% in the highly productive versus 50% in the average. Most shockingly, the actively disengaged employees were more than twice as high in the average corporate office: 8% versus 20%.

This had me thinking of the analogy of a 10 person bicycle. Three people are pedaling really hard at the front. Five people have their hands on the handlebars but their feet are up in the air and they’re not pedaling. Then there are two people way in the back who are actively holding onto the break. This either means a stalling ride or one that could be much faster if everyone were like the first three.

The 12 questions in the book and their corresponding need categories are useful for sussing out what matters most to promote engagement. They show us what can we do about low morale in our dental offices.

Look for Part 2 of this blog series next week where I’ll outline the four team needs that will change your practice.

What do you do when you notice team members are disengaged? Comment below with your thoughts!

(Link to Getting Team Members to ‘Pull On the Rope’ Part 2)