Episode 109 – Legendary Dental Leadership

“Leadership is a lifetime endeavor. It’s not something you just know. But there are a few keys to making it much easier.”
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What I’ve striven for most of my career is to develop a legacy of legendary leadership. In my opinion, legendary leadership is about training, supporting, and empowering your team to be totally supportive of you, and amazing patient advocates. And that’s really what I look at what I look at my team: they are the patient’s advocate to get dentistry done. I and the other doctors in the office just happen to be the ones who do the actual clinical work.

But my goal is to develop the teams’ leadership and the way that they work with me to empower them to take ownership, which allows us to become extremely productive.

Leadership is a lifetime endeavor, this is not something you just know. I’ve heard that leaders are born. I don’t really believe that. I think leaders can be formed, you just have to understand where you’re at. And as your vision grows, and your communication skills improve, you gain the ability to guide your team into that true patient advocacy.

Leadership is really about relationships. I’ve talked about this a lot; I didn’t used to know my team, I didn’t know that family names. I didn’t know any of that. But, but caring about people and understanding who you’re working with is a huge part of getting the team all on the same page.

Legendary leadership is the secret to becoming a really a productive dentist. So today, I want to talk more about this, including:

• What legendary leadership looks like
• Why it’s vital to a highly productive practice 
• 4 Keys to Legendary Leadership

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi, this is Dr. Bruce Baird with the Productive Dentist Podcast. And this is Episode 109. And hope you guys are doing good. I wanted to talk today about about something that is is super, super important in dentistry. And it’s one of the things that I think is probably one of the leading things that we’re missing in dentistry is you know, leadership. And we’ve never really been taught leadership. I don’t know if any of you had a leadership class in dental school, I’ve told you guys about my leadership skills, when I first got out of got out of the military and out of dental school, they were very lacking.

But really what I’ve discovered over the over the years is there a few keys to leadership that make it make it much easier. And what I what I want to talk about is is legendary leadership, where your team becomes somebody who is totally supportive of you, and an amazing patient advocate. And that’s really what I look at what I look at my team I look at, they are the patient’s advocate to get dentistry done. I just happened to be and other Doc’s in the office happened to be the ones who do the actual clinical work, the team with their leadership and with the way that they work with me, allow us to become extremely productive. But leadership, it’s a lifetime endeavor, this is not something you know, I’ve heard that leaders are born, I don’t really believe that I think leaders can be formed, they, you know, you just have to understand where you’re at.

And as your vision grows, and your communication skills improve, you gain the ability to guide your team into that true patient advocacy. You know, leadership is really about relationships. I’ve talked about it on previous episodes where I said, You know, I didn’t used to know my team, I didn’t know that family names. I didn’t know any of that. But, but caring about people and understanding who you’re working with. It’s a huge part of getting the team all on the same page.

It’s a secret to becoming a really a productive dentist, you know, and I see that there’s four main keys to this legendary leadership. One is to set clear expectations. And when I say clear expectations, I mean, exactly what it is that you want your team to do. Exactly what systems you want to use exactly how you want the phone to be answered exactly how patients are be brought back, you know, from the front to the back, exactly how we go over our financial arrangements, exactly how we go through and present treatment plans, that if we set up and we have expectations that are met, it’s usually because we haven’t put the expectations out there. We haven’t actually talked to our team about those things. And let me give you an example.

You hire somebody, they end up in the in the office and you’ve been doing recall a certain way. And all of a sudden you realize six months later, nine months later, you’re not doing recall the same way you used to why is that? Well, you hired that new person. They came in and started helping on recall or we’re doing recall and you never gave them clear expectations. So they go back to their previous experience in their previous life and their previous practice that they worked in. And that that’s that’s what becomes your new process. And I see that happen all the time. And it can be frustrating for the dentist. But setting those clear expectations, how do I want my provisionals made? How do I want my temporaries? Done? How do I want my, if you pack cord, how do I want the cord pack? If I want my lab cases checked in how, what is the system for that. So once the team understands those crystal clear expectations, then it gets down to trusting and verifying, you know, just trust that it’s being done.

But put it in your phone and verify it on a daily weekly basis. You know, I want to check these 10 systems in my office, put it down in your phone, and then just check that system just and that takes two, two minutes a day to do that over a period of the month that you’re working. And it just allows everything to stay on track the way that you want it to be on track. Now, another thing I would tell you is if you come up with a new idea or new way of doing things that becomes part of the conversation that you have in your team meetings. And although I make the ultimate decision, I bring it up in the team meeting. This is a new system that I’m really interested in trying. I want to get your guys’s opinions, what do you think? And you’ll get differing opinions and say, I’ll tell you what, let’s do this for the next 30 days, let’s be committed to it.

And then if we’re, if we feel like we’re doing well then let’s continue to do that. I can say that about you know, when we went to digital x rays back in 25 years ago, the team was like, Well, I don’t know, those things are hard, I’m not sure Well, I I threw away the the processor. So you know, burn your ships, I was ready to go ahead and let’s get this let this is what we’re going to do, period, that’s different than talking to the team and saying, Okay, what are your guys thoughts on this.

The other thing you have to do, number two, about becoming a legendary leader is to govern your emotions. And I’ve told you I was not very good at governing my emotions. I, I tended to be and I always have kind of a I don’t know the word volatile, but volatile might be at, I would let things build up. And as things built up, when something happened, then I would blow up. You know, it’s a build up to a blow up. And it’s really not something that’s going to be conducive to you being a productive dentist or having a fun place to work.

I always joke about God having that sense of humor and given me four daughters and me having to learn a little bit different way of communicating. But really, it is about relationships and communication. And so you have to govern your own emotions. Listen to upbeat music on the way in the office.

Start the day by saying a couple complimentary things to a couple of team members that you work with on a day to day basis, say thanks for yesterday, say you know in others, it just starts you off in the right way it starts you off into that mindset that we’re all in this together, and we’re gonna win this game together. The third thing is you’ve got to expect the unexpected. And when you don’t expect the unexpected, then that makes it very difficult to govern your emotions. So I know things are gonna go wrong during the day. I mean, I know that a patient’s not going to show up. I know that every once in a while a lab case isn’t there that shouldn’t be there. And usually, when that happens, I would blow up and you know, we need to do this. I can’t believe this. But the truth is it was my fault. wasn’t their fault. Why?

Because I quit looking at it. I quit checking What’s our system that we use for checking in lab cases? What is you know, I just look at every single aspect of the practice. And when I do that, it makes all the difference in the world again, trust but verify you you can hold people accountable. If you’re holding them accountable. You can’t hold them accountable if you if you’re not even talking about it if you’re not if you if you see the numbers in your practice going down and collections and you don’t start to evaluate that collection process and you don’t help them do better at it. These are all little things that you have to do. But expecting the unexpected. compressor goes down today. How do we deal with that? I mean, our vacuums, you know, whatever, expect the unexpected and have systems in place, you say, okay, we’re going to have to reschedule these folks, we have a, we have a direct line to whatever group you use to come in and help fix those things.

Have a backup, you know, do the things that you need to do to keep producing, I’m going to make an assumption that you’re probably doing a million dollars plus, well, that’s a million dollar business, you need to have backup plans, you need to expect the unexpected. And really the final, the final thing, in being a legendary leader, is the ability to be able to have Crucial Conversations. And crucial conversations are not those conversations, and that are any fun to have. There’s a great book called crucial conversations, I would recommend you read it. I have Crucial Conversations with my kids, especially when they were growing up. Now they, you know that they’re on their own, and they’re doing great. But my team, you know, there are times when you have to have crucial conversations, when you have to say, you know, Mary, I’m really concerned about x, y, z. And let me tell you why. You know, yeah, I’m, you know, I’m worried about our temporaries, because I’ve seen the last few that we’ve done, and they seem to be rough around the edges. Is there anything that I can do to help you because let me show you how I do it.

Attitude where somebody, you know, because you have different people, you know, there are folks out there that think they do everything. And there are folks out there that then don’t do everything, there’s there are people that, you know, you get in this interpersonal relationships in the office. And there’s usually one or two people that think that they’re carrying the load. The truth is, everyone should be carrying the load. And so there are times when I would talk to one of my team members and say, you know, I know you have this feeling that you’re doing everything.

And, you know, we need to find a way to get these other employees to work with you. And they’re like, Well, what do you mean, I, you know, so and so does this, and so and so does that. I said, Will you do me a favor? Will you do me a favor? I’m asking them a question. I go, Yeah, well, I said, Can you take that person? Can you help train them on exactly what it is that you want them to do?

Wow, that’s tough question. You know, and I’ve actually done that I had hygenist that was griping about one of the other hygienists. She doesn’t do this. She doesn’t do that. I said, Can you do me a favor, please? Would you mind working with that person, I want this person, I want every person in this office to be as good as you. In other words, by complimenting somebody, and then by giving them the ability to be able to help now you’re going to need to do it in a little bit different way. You know, you’re not going to be able to be irritated and upset, which is what you do daily. You’re upset, you feel like you’re doing everything. And that is not again, conducive. And what about that employee that just is not working out. That’s a crucial conversation.

Most dentists run the other direction from those Crucial Conversations. But you can’t keep someone on your team that is not playing at your level. We had a coach and Angela Solomon, she would she would go. She said you can’t plan our team if you can’t play at our level. And I think that that is extremely important. You can’t let people drag behind everybody has to be on that same page. And so those are the things that leadership means to me. There’s multiple areas to add, I look forward to getting questions, Bruce of productive dentist calm I hope this has been interesting for you. I look forward to next week. This week, we’re having our first PDA live event. Since last February or a year ago, February.

We have over 200 people attending it’s going to be it’s going to be an amazing week I am I’m just excited to get back up on stage and share the things that that we share on how to become more productive and and how to become a better leader and how to become a better communicator with your team. So and with your patients. So those are all the things that we love to do. Look forward to next week. Thank you guys.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the productive dentist podcast. If you found this episode helpful, make sure you subscribe, pass it along to a friend. Give us a Like on iTunes and Spotify or drop me an email at podcast@productivedentist.com Don’t forget to check out other podcasts from the Productive Dentist Academy of productivedentistpodcast.com. Join me again next week for another episode of the Productive Dentist Podcast.