Episode 129: But They Were So Good In The Interview…

“You hired the most amazing person, and 30 days later they suck. What happened?” ~Dr. Victoria Peterson

In this episode of Investment Grade Practices, Dr. Victoria Peterson takes a deep dive into the common post-hire conundrum many dental practice owners face: Why do promising new hires sometimes fail to meet expectations shortly after joining the team? Drawing from the Tuckman stages of group development model, Dr. Peterson explores the stages of team development — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — and reveals how to navigate the “storming” phase to ensure new team members thrive. 

With practical tips on leadership and integrating new hires into seasoned teams, this episode will help you build a stronger, more cohesive workforce.

As you listen to this episode, we want you to think about the following questions:

• How can I better support new hires in my team during the “storming” phase?
• Am I providing the right balance of direction and support as team members move through the different stages of the Tuckman model?
• How can I apply positive reinforcement to boost confidence and integration within my team?

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Announcer: The Productive Dentist Academy podcast network.

[00:00:03] Victoria Peterson: If you’re clinically astute and you’re a perfectionist by nature, it can get in your way of training others when they come on board in your practice. So find a way to give grace without accepting sloppy work.

[00:00:16] Announcer: Welcome to Investment Grade Practices Podcast, where we believe private practice dentists deserve to get the lifestyle today while building an asset for tomorrow. Join your host, Victoria Peterson to design the practice of your dreams and secure your financial independence. Let’s get started.

[00:00:35] Victoria Peterson: Have you ever hired someone and like a month later went, “What happened, they were so good on the interview?” So you just hired the most amazing person and 30 days later. They suck and you’re wondering what happened? I did everything they said to do. We interviewed, we hired, we had two people in the room. Everybody in the team got involved. We thought we had a winner. They were so amazing on the interview, but then disappointing on the job. What happened? It’s a little thing called the Tuckman model. In the beginning, as you’re integrating new team members, that’s probably one of the most difficult things you can do, especially if you have a tenured season team, they’ve been working together two, three, four, five, 10 years together, and you introduce someone new. That’s incredibly intimidating. So two things have to happen. Number one, you need to understand the stages of change and team dynamics. Generally speaking, they are forming, norming, storming, and performing. So in the forming stage, you’re getting to know each other. It’s very polite, it’s very courteous, but it’s very superficial. You immediately go into the storming stage. So I’m forming, then I’m storming before I get to norming. So I form, I like you, you like me. First days are great, and then the storm hits. Somewhere between three days, three weeks, three months, you’re going to say, “Well, that’s not who I thought they were,” and you start to notice. I find it ironic that it’s always the third assistant that turn over. Like you’ve got a lead assistant. She finally figured out how to get along with the second assistant but if you’re expanded beyond that to a third, that one never seems to stick and why is that? Because the new person doesn’t feel a way in and territories begin. So the senior team members are protecting turf and territory. The other person’s trying to be helpful. They’re not as skilled. They’re not as trained in your methodologies and they’re doomed for failure if you can’t get them through the storming phase, then you get to norming. Then you get to performing.

[00:02:34] Victoria Peterson: So let’s talk about this storming stage because you’ve. All been through it. It’s the reason you do not fire bad employees because you dread going back into the marketplace and hiring somebody else and going through the storm. So it actually has to get egregious. I have interviewed doctors for decades and you were heroes. You can do an appendectomy on a, on a missing root. I mean, you just go crazy with the dentistry but the two fears you have are losing a team member and losing a patient. Somebody saying something bad about you. So let’s get over that and get you prepared to form, storm, norm and perform because it’s going to happen every time. So in the storming phase, here’s how you can help smooth that along. When you hire in the new person, you go to the lead in that department and you say, “Victoria. We interviewed Janet. She’s terrific. Your role when she comes on is to make sure she is successful. So on the first day and for the first week, at the end of each day, I want you to check in with me and I want you to tell me one thing that Janet did really well that day. I don’t want to know about the mistakes unless, you know, somebody died. She’s going to make mistakes. Your job is to help her get over those hurdles. So at lunch and at the end of the day, I want you to quick check in and say, “Oh my gosh, Janet was really amazing. She picked up quickly on this or she [00:04:00] was really helpful with suction. She was really helpful taking out the trash. I liked her uniform.” I don’t care what you praise her with, but I want to hear something positive. I want you to point positive for that first week. In the second week, I want you to continue pointing positive and I want you to tell me by the end of the week, not anytime sooner, one thing that you think she can improve on.” So here we are at the two-week mark, she’s learning, she’s growing, she’s helping, you’re encouraging her, you’re making small corrections in the moment and at the end of the first two weeks, let me know what she’s doing well, where she’s progressing and where you feel she needs additional training. That way we got an understanding of what her skills are and her training needs that be in place, and we can start formalizing her training protocols a little bit more. If you don’t do that, a lot of times, dentistry is an exacting science. We are taught to look for the negative first. Going through dental school, going through assisting school, hygiene school, we pick up maladaptive behaviors because of our fear of failure. The stakes are so high. If you don’t get the rubber dam on there just right, you fail. Your career is lost. You’re learning intricate clinical skills, but the standard that we hold for ourselves of perfection can’t translate to what we expect in relationships and so if you’re clinically astute and you’re a perfectionist by nature, it can get in your way of training others when they come on board in your practice.

[00:05:32] Victoria Peterson: So find a way to give grace without accepting sloppy work. There’s a balance in this. That’s my tip for you today is to really understand that cycle of forming, norming, performing, and storming. It not only happens when you’re bringing on new employees, it happens every time you introduce a new procedure. “Hey, guess what? I just went to a conference and I bought this great whiz bang machine and we’re now going to do that,” and your team goes, “Oh no,” and then the resistance starts unless you’ve prepared your team to go through these cycles, right? They will wait you out and say, okay, three weeks from now, he’ll forget about it and send it back. You’re the leader. You get to choose, you get to set the standard of care, but you also are empowered to help lead change within your practice. So this simple formula of saying, “Hey guys, I went to a conference, our key characteristics are driving forces to stay on the leading edge of dentistry. You know how long it takes for us to get our crowns back from the lab. We’re now going to do milling technology. It has revolutionized in the last few years. It’s so much easier. We will be purchasing this and with that, I’m setting aside time and I’m bringing in a trainer. So I won’t be asking you to do things, you know, on the job training here. We’re going to go through the training together. So I not only budgeted for the equipment, I budgeted for the time for you to train, and I’m investing in trainers to come in and help us.” This is you stepping up as a leader and as an employer and helping them through this Tuckman model. So we’re forming, this is what we’re going to do. You’re going to step into training. The storming is going to begin. I like to bring an umbrella, you know, it can get quite rainy with the tears sometimes, and that’s okay and then you get to the norming and in norming, you would think that that’s like a cool place to be but another name for norming is the reluctant contributor. You’re like, “Wait a minute. They were really excited in the beginning. They all said they wanted it and then we got into this little bit of a disagreement. I know they know how to do it. We trained them on it by God, I spent a ton of money. Why aren’t they doing it?” It’s called confidence. So I may know intellectually how to do something, but until I have enough success and repetition, I’m going to be hesitant and that’s what the norming stage is all about. How do you help gently nudge your team into like, “Hey, you’ve got it. You can do this.” You have to get through the reluctant contributor stage because the next one is where all the reward is. That’s the peak performing.

[00:08:02] Victoria Peterson: If you remember, and you probably have to go back and watch it, the very first Karate Kid movie is the best example of that and Daniel San goes to a new neighborhood, gets his little butt kicked, and then he goes to Miyagi and says, “Teach me. You know, I need to learn karate so I can kick butt too,” and he’s like, “Okay, come back tomorrow. Wax on, wax off, paint. Wash the windows.” He’s like, “You’re not teaching me karate. You’re having me repair your house. This is ridiculous,’ and there’s like, Daniel San, wax on, wax off, right? So that was Daniel storming when he got really upset with his instructor. Sometimes you’re going to get upset with your coach. That’s okay. Sometimes your team members are going to get upset with you. That’s okay. As long as you know where you are in the process. You know how to respond to it. So in the beginning, when you’re really excited, when Daniel San was real excited, Miyagi was very detailed. He didn’t just say, “Slop the paint on there.” He was like, “Up and down and up and down. Wax on, left to right. Wax off, right to left.” Very detailed and specific. When team members are new, they love it. They’re like, “Oh my God, I got to wax. This was great. He let me paint.” The enthusiasm helps get them through the detail. If you’re not that detailed in the enthusiastic stage, you will rarely get an opportunity to come back and do it again because once they get out of that and into the storming phase and you come along and go, “Hey, wax on, wax off.” They’re like, “Of course I know how to do that.” This is where. The please and thank yous come in. So in the storming stage, it’s like, Oh, could you please, you know, help me with this? So in the beginning, it’s like, “Hey, Victoria, could you go in my office and look in the filing cabinet? There’s a filing cabinet with four drawers. I want you to look in the very top drawer. There’s only one filing cabinet with four drawers, and I want you to look in the top filing cabinet and about halfway through, it’s alphabetical, and halfway through, you’ll find the letter H and I want you to find health history in a folder. In the H folder in the top drawer of the file cabinet that has four drawers and when you bring me that folder that has health histories in it, please.” That’s what I’m talking about. Detailed. Enthusiastic beginners love that. When you’re in the storming stage, it’s like, “Hey, Victoria, could you please get the health history forms? Do you remember they’re in the top drawer?” Absolutely, but if you, you mix up high direction, high support, it’s kind of a, a balance here. So in the beginning it’s all high direction, then it’s still high direction with support. When you get to the third stage, the norming, the reluctant contribute, it’s all support. So remember in the movie when Daniel went to the tournament, he was like, the fans are there, the ring is there, and he’s like freaking out, like, “I don’t know if I want to do this.” He’s like, “Miyagi, what do I do?” And he’s like, “You go,” and he gave him a thumbs up, like, you’ve got this, I believe in you. He wasn’t standing on the outside of the ring going, “Daniel San, wax on, wax off.” Like, he had integrated the skills. So in the third stage, it’s high, high support, very low direction and that’s what it takes to get your reluctant contributors trusting themselves.

[00:11:12] Victoria Peterson: Sometimes you have to let them lean into your trust and belief in them. Like, nope, we’ve, we’ve gone over this 11 times now. It’s your shot and give them the opportunity. Then they hit peak performance. It’s been my experience as a leader that there are really only four decisions your teams can make. Let’s call them A, B, C, and D. Right? So an A decision is so epic, it’s going to be written up in dental journals across the land. Harvard Business Review might come and interview you because that was such an epic idea. It was this A, A plus idea. A D idea is like, duh, you’re going to have seen a mile away that, you know, using Gorilla Glue on a temporary crown was not going to work, right? So something that was just like, “Duh, we, we should have never made that call.” So A and D are the extremes. They’re rare. They happen in less than 2 percent of the time. So don’t be afraid to delegate to your team and show them confidence because most of the time they’re going to come in with a solid B or a high C sort of decision. So when you get to the point that you’ve trained your team and that 80 percent of the time they’re going to do it as well or better than you, it’s time to give them the thumbs up. You know, “Hey, go do that and bring it to me and I’ll check it,” you know, and then they’ll get to 90%. “Oh, man, you did a great job.” You know, I want to check your next two or three, but then I think you’ve got it. Once a team can do that task at 90 percent above, your risk as a clinician, your risk as an employer becomes very, very low because they’re on their way and they’re going to get better and better and that’s actually how we build skills. We start out as a learner. We’re very dependent on others, so the person that you interviewed that you loved, who now is a little bit lost, they’re probably somewhere in their learner cycle. So they start very dependent on others. You have to make sure that others are willing to contribute to their success. So, set the game up for them to be positively praised about the things they are doing well. They’re learning. It’s new. Then they come into becoming a subject matter expert. You walk them through the Tuckman model of, here’s our team, we’re forming this. “Hey, here’s Janet, she’s new. We love her. Let’s surround her. Let’s help her through,” and the storm. There’s a little more please and thank yous and gratitudes, but still high direction. Then we give them the thumbs up, “Man, you’re like 80%. I think you’ve got this. Try it a couple times on your own and check in with me.” Then you now have got your next peak performer on your team. Thanks so much for being a part of this series on employer branding. I hope that you have learned through the series. A few more proactive approaches to attacking the market and finding and building your best team. We love the new program that we’re launching, Dental TQ. I hope that you reach out to us at Productive Dentist Academy to find out more about how we can help you with employer branding, your recruiting playbook.

[00:14:07] Announcer: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Investment Grade Practices Podcast. If you find value in this episode, help us spread the word by passing it along to a dental friend, subscribe, and give us a like on iTunes or Spotify. Learn more about building your Investment Grade Practice at productivedentist.com today. The Productive Dentist Academy Podcast Network.