PATIENCE & APPRECIATION FOR PATIENTS…AND TEAM

Has anyone else noticed how people seem to be more on edge than ever before? This is not just in politics, where it has become worse than ever before, but in everyday life as well. Frustration with circumstances out of our control, and the need to find others to blame, seem to wind the springs of our reactive selves to the point that otherwise benign situations illicit out of proportion responses and, often times, regret over our actions.

Dr Howie Gurr, a clinical psychologist who has worked with Smile Potential for many years, frequently tells the following story. Imagine that you are the last to board an elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. Being the last to enter, you turn to face the closing door and you are barely able to move because the elevator is packed so full. As the elevator begins to ascend and the numbers of the floors are rising you feel the most annoying sensation of being repeatedly hit on the back of your leg with a hard object. It is not painful, but it is uncomfortable and the repetition is torturous. You cannot wait for the elevator to reach the observation deck so that the doors will open and you can turn and give the person who has been hitting you a piece of your mind. The door opens, you quickly turn and find, to your likely disappointment, that the person behind you was a frail, old, blind woman with her cane held out in front of her. You experience both frustration over not being able to vent, and disappointment in yourself that you might have taken an action that you surely would have regretted.

What is the reason that we are so quick to come to conclusions? One reason is that we may not be actively listening, but rather thinking of our response before we hear an explanation. When we jump to conclusions and react so quickly, it usually lacks consideration. Patience enables us to make the initial assumption that others intentions are good. When we assume that others are well intended it gives us the perspective to not feel compelled to shoot the messenger, but to consider and discuss the message constructively. Assuming good intentions demonstrates a level of trust, which is the foundation of a great team.

How does this apply to our dental practices. Each and every day we are faced with patients who exhibit some form of belligerence in our offices. It may be impatience or nastiness in the reception room. It may be passive aggressiveness when they are seated, or refusal to follow recommendations. We may unfortunately tend to dismiss these patients as being mean, unfriendly, or unappreciative. The truth is that these patients are anxious or fearful, and their fear has taken hold of their ability to act in a kind or welcoming manner. If we can break down the barriers that illicit the anxiety, we can create a far better experience for these patients and we will, in turn, receive a far better response from them, and, likely, more appreciation. We must develop the mindfulness to show more compassion for the challenges of others. Be more empathic.

Similarly, we frequently become frustrated with members of our dental teams. Dentistry tends to be a stressful field for EVERYONE in the practice. As dentists, we often take for granted that team members should be able to read our minds and anticipate our needs innately. The truth of the matter is that every one of us are different. We think differently, we act differently, we speak differently and we interact differently. The expectation that anyone can know how we got to this point in our professional lives through extra-sensory perception is totally unreasonable. In order to create work relationships that are as perfect as possible, we must provide more training than we ever plan for, give more clarity in expectations than we have ever considered, and show as much compassion and understanding as we have ever shown before. Since it is unlikely that we will consistently accomplish all three of these concepts, then we must show patience in questioning whether there is an understanding of expectations. We must show a willingness to constantly supplement training and offer support, and assume that our team’s intentions are good, then  show effusive and constant appreciation for effort and even incremental improvement. Frequent positive reinforcement and appreciation create greater receptiveness to occasional constructive commentary.

 I recently asked numerous dental team members to consider the adjectives that they would use to describe the best boss or teacher that they ever had. The adjectives that were mentioned most often were appreciative, encouraging, inspiring, kind, positive, calm, supportive, fair, decisive, smart and visionary. Isn’t it interesting that few of those qualities have anything to do with intellect? More than two-thirds are emotional qualities. None of those who I questioned listed negative emotions such as anger or impatience. Negative emotions may prompt instant action but they don’t inspire people in the long run. Negative energy takes a considerable toll on people in a dental practice.

Regular expression of positive energy can transform a practice in a very short time. Who is the CEO (Chief Energy Officer) of your practice? Who is constantly giving encouragement to the team and pumping them up? Who is heaping praise and appreciation on the members of the team and raising their perception of worth to the practice? Who is giving the team a sense of optimism and a sense of fulfilled purpose day in and day out? No one ever said that it has to be the doctor, but it is essential for a practice to have a strong CEO if it is going to be successful.

November is a perfect time to embark on a culture of appreciation and positive energy in your practices. Use the spirit of this Thanksgiving month to thank your patients, your vendors, and anyone else that you do business with. But most importantly, direct and focus the most sincere and heartfelt appreciation to the members of your team who directly control the success that you achieve in your practices.

If you would like to find out more about the process of appreciating your team and creating the most positive culture, please contact us. Send us an email at coaching@smilepotential.com or call us at 516-599-0214.

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 WHY COACHING?  

If you are reading this, you are a dentist, a dental professional, or a team member in a dental practice. You have achieved a relative degree of success, but undoubtedly, you want more.

How do dentists get better at what they do? How do they become more productive? How do they make more money? How do they lower their level of stress? How do they become more fulfilled?

There is a traditional pedagogical view that we go to school, we study, we practice, we learn and then we go out into the dental world and make our way on our own. Many believe that as professionals, we are capable of managing our own improvement. It sounds great in theory.

It turns out that there are numerous problems with navigating this path. There are numerous challenges to achieving greater success on your own. Often times you don’t recognize the issues that are standing in your way of increased production and greater success, and if you do, you lack the experience to develop strategies and systems to overcome them. The result is that somewhere along the way, you stop improving and you settle for what you have, conceding that “this is the best it will be”. We see it all the time and it breeds complacency. Coaching breaks this cycle.

Henry Ford said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” But the world continues to change at warp speed. Dentistry is constantly changing. The patients we care for, and how they respond, are changing more and more with each passing day. Thus, to change your success, you must meet the challenge of change and similarly change the way you practice.

When it comes to change, the small things matter. When we coach dental practices, we do not make drastic changes in the way dentistry is performed. We do recommend numerous small changes in methods that improve the standard of care and the ways that the dentists and teams communicate the value of care to their patients. That ultimately leads to increased patient acceptance of care, ease of providing this increased care, less stress and greater fulfillment. The practices that we coach experience tremendous growth that exceeds what non-coached practices are seeing during these challenging times.

Many practices that were strong prior to COVID, have not been able to sustain steep growth following the initial surge from reopening a year ago.  One of the major reasons for this has been team turnover and failure to attract, or retain, strong team members. When the doctors and remaining team are working beyond capacity, they are faced with inadequate time to train new team members and pre-existent systems are diluted, which erodes efficiency and increases stress. This leads to burnout and further attrition of team.

Our coaching program provides support and guidance to help you and your practice get through tough times. We help you create clarity on what is important and then prioritize tasks and skills geared towards reaching your practice potential. When you go it alone, you often have to learn from mistakes. Because we have now worked with over 130 practices, we have encountered most common, and uncommon, challenges in practices and we have helped practices overcome them without experiencing “trial and error”.

In the course of your typical days it is difficult to objectively evaluate what is working, and steering you to be successful, and what is derailing your progress. One of the greatest things that we do in working with a practice is identifying what is being done well, cheerlead for the team for their successes, and then identify opportunities for improvement. Coaching gives you and your team a fresh perspective and leads to growth.

A major emphasis of our program has been derived from an almost unanimous response of doctors and team members for wanting improved communication. The departmentalization in offices leads to barriers in communication. Learning to overcome these barriers and improving communication among the team, and with patients, enables far greater harmony and success with far less stress and conflict. Practices with better communication tend to attract the best team members and do not lose them. Patients seem to respond to practices with a stable team by accepting more treatment due to increased confidence and trust.

We subscribe to the principle that whatever you do is worth measuring and we embrace the use of analytics to help practices make minor adjustments in systems to help them achieve more with less effort. This enables working smarter and not having to work harder. If you speak to the doctors who we work with, you will find that they cannot believe their increases in production seem to occur with less effort and stress than they envisioned. This helps them develop a better work-life balance and they become less resentful of working in their practices. When we feel stressed and overwhelmed it is impossible to focus and we tend to waste more time with no productive outcome. Coaching definitely helps to reduce the level of stress in your practice.

Much of the reduced stress comes from building accountability among your team. It starts with the doctor in helping to develop improved leadership skills and team empowerment. We find that our coaching program gives team members more intrinsic motivation to take on new challenges. This prevents the tremendous amount of disengagement we are seeing in so many practices that we observe. A disengaged team cannot be productive and more responsibility falls on the doctor. Our program shifts much of this responsibility off the doctor’s shoulders as the practice becomes team-driven.

The results of coaching are improved patient care, increased production, increased income, lowered stress, and more enjoyment. Ultimate success in dentistry is not easy to achieve without support. It demands perseverance and patience. Coaching helps provide guidance and support for the steps that need to be taken to reach your potential.

For any doctor desiring greater success, coaching is an important engagement to consider. It should be an important part of your professional life, because it can provide support, encouragement and motivation, as well as tools, skills and strategies for growth. Just like highly successful athletes, everyone needs a coach who can help guide them and provide more focused direction on their journey. Consider having Smile Potential as your coach to help you smile more and reach your potential. That’s your Smile Potential.

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PENNY-WISE, CROWN-FOOLISH

Dental practices are not the only entities suffering from a lack of abundance of suitable potential employees.  The dental lab industry has also been hit by an exodus of trained technicians and a shortage of workers to take their places.  Increased busyness in the labs from dental practices picking up their productivity has also meant that many technicians new to the field have been inadequately trained on the need for the absolute perfection needed for fit and function of the crowns and prosthetics they are creating.  The result is that dentists are increasingly finding that their lab cases are delayed or not meeting their standards for fit.  This, then, requires longer delivery appointments, and it results in frequent remakes, reappointments and eroded patient confidence.

Time is money.  The biggest expense to any practice, other than team compensation is lost production time.  We normally think of this in terms of cancellations and broken appointments.  We ask offices to track open appointment time each month and calculate the impact on the practice.  If we assume that a doctor is producing $600 per hour and a hygienist is producing $150 per hour, then just eight one-hour open appointments for each of them during a month could cost the practice as much as $6,000 in lost production, the equivalent of an entire wasted day of office time.

What often goes unnoticed is the lost production time, and increased work, that can be attributed to compensating for delayed deliveries, or less than adequate crown fit.  During a recent practice observation I saw that crown deliveries were being scheduled for as much as an hour.  The scheduling coordinator said this was made necessary by the increased time it had been taking to adjust crowns to make them fit.  Delivery of a crown should never take more than a half hour.  If a crown is taking more than 10 minutes to adjust to make it fit, it probably should have been remade.  With digital impressioning and workflow, there is no reason that a properly fitting crown cannot be seated in a minimum amount of time.  When we are taking an hour to cement a crown on a daily basis, the doctor described above has lost as much as $5,000 production in a month.  Even worse, is having to reschedule patients because a crown does not fit.  The doctor mentioned above recalled that seven crowns had needed to be re-impressioned, and deliveries rescheduled, in recent weeks.  This amounts to an additional $4,000-5,000 in lost production.

I find it disturbing when I hear that a doctor is seeking a new lab and is deciding primarily based on price.  The difference in cost of digitally produced crowns (even actual impressions are converted to digital flow by the labs when they scan the impressions) is minimal, generally ranging from $99-129, The difference is far less than the cost of lost production time caused by poor fit.  The decision on which lab to use should be exclusively based on the quality of the work and the fit of the crowns.  My suggestion is to contact the doctors in your community who have the best reputation, or local prosthodontists, to find out which labs they use successfully, and begin your search with those recommendations.  The additional cost will be more than off-set by the savings in experiencing less lost productive time.  Don’t be “Penny wise and Crown foolish.

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LESSONS I LEARNED FROM MY DAD…

ABOUT MANAGING A DENTAL PRACTICE…AND LIFE

My Dad was an incredibly humble and quiet gentleman, who possessed a strong voice when it came to his lifelong passions. He was a very proud veteran of the Korean War and channeled his experiences into a long career of political writing, speech writing for local and national candidates, and campaign management, even into his 90’s. His other lifelong passions were golf, baseball, model aviation, and caring for his loved ones. For 18 years, from 2002 until 2020, my dad woke up every hour, on the hour, every single night, to care for my mom who had a severe medical condition that required around-the-clock care.

One of the most profound experiences of my life was delivering my Dad’s eulogy. Because so many people have a fear of public speaking, it is said that many people have a greater fear of delivering a eulogy than being in the casket. For me, the opportunity was an absolute privilege, and I found great comfort in the experience. In closing my Dad’s eulogy I summarized the three most important lessons that I learned from him throughout my life.

The first was something he taught me when I was learning to play golf, “Keep your head down”. This is one of the greatest challenges when learning the golf swing, but it was far more profound for the rest of my life. It was also my Dad’s way of telling me to always work hard. It inspired me through my years in school and during my entire career. When you keep your head down, and to the grind, you achieve far more than picking your head up to watch others do the work. In my dental practice it meant spending time working “on my practice”, and not just working in it.

The second lesson was about hitting a baseball. When I had trouble hitting curve balls in my early years playing ball, my Dad repeatedly told me “Don’t step in the bucket”. When you “step in the bucket” you have given up on maintaining the position necessary to hit a pitch that tails away from you. This lesson when applied to my life was to never give up and maintain a posture that enables you to consistently succeed. For me that meant attending as much continuing education as I could to become as masterful as possible in performing oral surgery, endodontics and implantology. Never stop attending continuing education and always seek knowledge to advance your career…and never give up.

The bonus lesson from my Dad came from delivering his eulogy. It was an incredible experience to speak lovingly and with pride about the great impact my Dad had on me and so many others who he touched throughout his lifetime. It was easy to speak eloquently about such a wonderful man. It was so easy that’ll afterwards, it made me think about why I had not told him those things enough while he was alive. So the last lesson is that you should not wait until it’s too late to tell someone how much you love them, or how much you appreciate them. Because when they’re gone, no matter how much you cry or shout, they won’t hear you anymore. Tell your family you love them everyday. Everyday, tell the members of your dental team that you appreciate them.

Dad, thank you for teaching me so much about managing my practice…and life. Come Father’s Day, I will miss you, but I will honor all that you taught me. I continue to “keep my head down”, “avoid stepping in the bucket” and “earning my playtime”.

HOW TO RETAIN YOUR TEAM

Many dental practices have lost vital team members during the last two years due to the pandemic and the collateral damage of the pandemic. Finding reasonable, skilled, personable new team members has been difficult for some practices. This is due, in part, to a depleted applicant pool. It is also a representation of the importance of culture on team retention.

In the 1991 John Grisham best-seller (and 1993 Tom Cruise movie), “The Firm”, there is a premise that in the law firm, Bendini, Lambert and Locke, “no-one leaves the firm…alive anyway”, and this is a sufficient incentive for Mitch McDeere, the central character, to stay and engage in money laundering against his better judgment.

We are often asked by doctors, “How do I get our team members to stay?”, and the question usually revolves about compensation. As long as team is paid fairly, the reason that team members either stay or leave a position is because of how they feel about their employment in the practice, not about the money. When team members leave because of pay, it is because they have not had much satisfaction in their job, or an attachment to the practice. When team members feel loyal to a practice, they turn down positions that offer them more money, or if their earning potential is so great, they approach you and explain that they received a very generous offer, but they really don’t want to leave, and they ask, “Is there anything that you can do to help me stay?”

As long as your team members are paid fairly, the most important factor in retaining good team members is to shower them with praise and appreciation. Catch them doing things right and find creative ways to show your appreciation. Sometimes little things like a gift card to Starbucks or a nail salon can go a long way in proving that you are appreciative.

Incentive programs reinforce the hard work of your team. All tasks are worthy of measurement. All measured processes are worthy of acknowledgement. An incentive program which clearly defines the parameters necessary to earn a bonus will serve as a very strong motivator for performance beyond what is expected of your team. Smile Potential has an outstanding team-wide bonus system that clearly defines what is required, and it generously rewards exceptional performance without adversely affecting compensation percentages. If you would like a detailed explanation of the Smile Potential Incentive Bonus System, please send an email to coaching@smilepotential.com.

The last factor in retaining team is the creation of loyalty to the team, and not just to the doctor. Creative and regular activities designed around team-building and reinforcing the relationship of the team go a long way in keeping your team together for much longer periods of time. The longevity of a team, as a group, and not just individuals, goes a long way in practice consistency and patient confidence and loyalty.

After reading this E-newsletter, make your next interaction with the members of your team members a compliment or just say “Thank you” to them for something they’ve done…and make this a habit. Mastering appreciation and demonstrating “thanks” will make it that you do not have to become proficient in writing ads for Indeed or interviewing candidates on a regular basis.

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