Episode 112 – Legendary Dental Leadership

“When you can get outside of yourself and start focusing on others, you’ll notice your job satisfaction and communication with your team gets better.”

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve always liked making money. When I was 13 or 14 I had a job spraypainting house numbers on curbs. On the first day, I made $90. That was a lot of money in 1966! My entrepreneurial spirit and leadership abilities kicked in and I thought, what would be even more awesome than making all this money was if I had other people to do the work for me. So I hired some 4th graders. It was great; I would do sales and they would do the work of spray painting. I was on my way to living the dream. 

And then we started getting complaints. Apparently I wasn’t as good a leader as I thought. I hadn’t taught the 4th graders the proper way of painting and things spiraled down from there. 

My dad put a stop to that business pretty quickly, but that didn’t discourage me. 

Like I said, I’ve always had an affinity for entrepreneurial leadership, but for so many years, leadership to me was all about making money. And there are a lot of leaders out there who think that’s all leadership is: telling everyone what to do so you can all make money. But that’s not really what Legendary Leadership is about. You will lose people along the way if you only focus on the business, on how much you make. Truly Legendary Leadership is so much more. It’s about empowering people, focusing on them, and supporting them so you can all walk forward together, instead of you dragging or pushing them along. 

Join me today as I share more about what I mean by Legendary Leadership by looking back at some of what I’ve learned including:

• Real-life examples from Legendary Leaders 
• How legendary leaders motivate their team
• Pitfalls that chip away at Legendary Leadership

(see below for more)

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Bruce Baird 0:00
Did I take what I learned and took that into private practice? I thought I did. But the pressure of finance the pressure of having a team that was growing, all those pressures are the things that when you want to become a legendary leader, you want to get to know your team individually. You want to get to know everything about them. And and you want to be the example.

Hello, everyone, this is Dr. Bruce B. Baird and you’re listening to the Productive Dentist Podcast in this podcast, I will give you everything that I’ve learned over the last 40 years and dentistry working with 1000s of dentists. I’ll tell you it’s not that my way is the only way it’s just one that has worked extremely well for me and, and I’d love to share that with you. So you too can enjoy the choices in lifestyle. The Productivity allows more time for things you love, increased pay, better team relationships, and lowered stress. Let’s get into it with this week’s episode of the Productive Dentist Podcast.

Hi, this is Dr. Bruce Baird, with the Productive Dentist Podcast. We’re talking episode 112 today, and I wanted to share with you guys my thoughts on leadership and what it means to be what I would consider a legendary leader. I had, you know, I’ve had multiple opportunities and multiple times in my career, where I’ve had people that I looked up to as a leader. I guess starting out with my dad, you know, he was a he was a phenomenal leader, he was a flight commander of a helicopter called Southern airways. And he was one of the commanders that taught people to fly helicopters. And most of those kids were headed off to Vietnam back in the early early 60s, and all the way up till 1973. But my dad was a was a great leader, he had a lot of people that he was in charge of. He was the you know, instructor of the year multiple times. And so and you’re you look up to your dad, you know, it’s I looked up to him, and he did things his way, you know, and you guys have heard me talk talk about my dad, I mean, he was a great dad and coach my baseball team and was always around, you know, with pro basketball and that kind of stuff. But, you know, I began to hear things as I was growing up. And that, I don’t know, that put questions in my mind. And those questions came to the forefront when I got into leadership positions, you know, dad, and back in the day, they would all get together have drinks. And you know, it was almost having a group of friends around you that he surrounded himself with, or became friends with people that were were around him. And that’s kind of his was his boat on leadership. It was a very I don’t know, it was very hands on, you know, approach for me, you know, growing up, you know, he was very very you know, he worked all the time and he believed in work and everything else and I think that’s kind of what started my you know, not gonna say leadership initially, but that’s what started me working as a kid you know, I mean, I literally had jobs from the time I was Gosh, I don’t know I started a newspaper in my in my in my community or around my my neighborhood more more likely I’ve got a printing press for Christmas. So I started putting out information about the neighborhood what were the kids doing and what you know, all these different things and then I started picking peaches when I was you know, probably 12 years old 13 years old, and I just always had jobs I always liked to work I always like to make money and I I joke about often about my leadership skills and I may in the past have talked about this but I started a you know on the on the sidewalks, you know people would put a little number there your number of your house number so when you’re driving down the street, you would look on the sidewalk or look on the curb and see that and so I started my own business spray painting with stencils, the house number and I would charge $3 For for one side of the of the driveway and five we do both sides. To the driveway. And that was me. And I think the first day that I did this, and I went door to door, I was probably 13 years old, went door to door. And in my first day doing this, I made $90, which back in 1966, 67, 68, 90 bucks was a whole lot of money. That was like making, you know, making 1000 today. And so the next day, I went down another that a different street.

And I did really well did, you know, 80 or $90, the next day, and I thought, wow, you know, this is going to be, it’s going to be my new job. This is what I’m going to do the rest of my life, man, I’m making great money. This is awesome. And what ended up happening was because of my leadership skills, I thought, you know, this would be awesome. If I could hire some other people to do this for me. And, and so I did, I hired some fourth graders to go down the streets, I would do the sales, they would do the stencils. And then we got a complaint parently I was not as good a leader in teaching them what the way I wanted it and what was allowed and what was not allowed. It just got down to the, you know, how much money we were making. And my dad said, Okay, that’s it, no more of this. And I was like, oh, man, you know, but I made a bad I made a bad leadership decision. You know, I hired I hired more people to do it. But I’ve been that type of person. You know, I’ve always enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit and being being a legendary leader to me was, was making money.

But that really, that really is not what becoming a legendary leader is what become becoming a legendary leader. And, and after that experience, you know, I went went on and did things, you know, in college working, I worked at night 11 At night to seven in the morning. I’ve never been afraid of work and I’ve always out worked my my habits, my outwork my, my spending, if you will. So and those are the things that I look at. And I just go Wow, man, this is awesome. And, you know, in looking back, there were some things that I could have could have learned. Number one, when I was in the military, you know, I had, it was a kind of a nice situation. I had what I would call a legendary leader in in, in the military guy named Paul Cryer, he was a full colonel. And Paul understood that getting to know people and getting to understand him, he and I became what I would call great friends, as a young captain and a senior officer, we became great friends and and we were the ones who did a lot of the productivity in the office. And so what he taught me was, you work really hard, and you get to play hard, you get to be the one who does things that others don’t get to do. And, you know, most of the time you would go on temporary duty assignments, they call that TDY to go to education. And in the military, you get to go once a year to Walter Reed or to the Presidio of San Francisco and go take courses.

Well, I was extremely high producer in in our practice, or in our clinic 28 Chair claim. Because I was really only one of the few Doc’s that was actually doing work. The rest of them were all going to meetings and doing things that they do as officers and I was there as kind of the guy I just come back from Korea and so I’m doing all I’m doing a lot of dentistry I’m having, I’m having a ball doing dentistry, I’m learning from everyone else around me. But as a legendary leader, Paul was like a colonel Crowder was like, you know, Bruce, you know, I’ll beat you today. On this, I’m gonna see more patients in emergency patients to do than you are and I got no way that ain’t gonna happen. And so he would motivate me with challenges he would motivate me and then, you know, he would say, where do you want to go next month? I go, What do you mean he goes Elda is a great course out in San Fran, there’s something up in DC there’s a course here in you know, in Texas, that is great. So you pick it wherever you want to go is is you know is great with me why? Because I was productive. I was I built a great team of people around me. When we first started, he said, You’ve got to you’ve got these eight treatment rooms here. I’m gonna give you expanded duty assistance, which in the state of Texas, we have no expanded duty, but in the military, I had expanded duty I learned I learned all of these skills. But the most important skill I learned from from prior was getting to not be a personal friend, but when you See that person that these people that are working for you, it’s a smile. It’s a, you know, you’re amazing, you know, it’s just doing those things that we’ve talked about in the past and, and to me, as you go through that process, you start to, you start to get more leadership skills. Now this, remember this, I was learning this stuff prior to going into private practice, where everything changed, where I was the worst boss on the planet, and that I take what I learned and took that into private practice, I thought I did. But the pressure of finance, the pressure of

having a team that was growing, the all those pressures are the things that when you want to become a legendary leader, you want to get to know your team, individually, you want to get to know everything about them. And, and you want to be the example, I use that integrity talk all the time, because if you ever are out of integrity, your team just it’s like losing, you know, losing their direction, because they fully expect you to be a certain way. And I wasn’t that way I was, I was not good. It wasn’t that I did not have integrity. It said I was so stressed out and you know, with debt and with, you know, patients and not knowing how to run a business on my own. And those are the things that we’re going to be working on in the future is helping dentists helping young dentists learn what’s it like, what what are the things that I need to do in business, you know, to button up my business, and I’ve said this before, you know, when we talk about our, you know, our books and how we run our business, you have to understand it. And once you be able to understand it, you can get outside of yourself, and get into others and start helping others. And as soon as I did that, I started noticing that my leadership skills, or my my job satisfaction, my ability to be able to communicate with my own team got better. And it continued to get better and, and then over a period of time, you start to realize that these people are your family and in leadership, whether I’m leading a team to a certain result, you know, maybe a basketball coach, when I was coaching AAU ball, when I was teaching my team how to do things properly, the way that that I wanted to do them and the way that I wanted our patients to be treated. You know, as I trained that, then it started to become physiologic, it started to become something that became kind of standard in our business standard in our practice, and it grew and it got deeper and deeper and deeper. You know, we all felt together that we’re doing such a better job of taking care of patients than we did five years ago. And I really think that’s something to look at it.

Every year, I look back and I say are we taking better care of our patients than we did last year? Are we Am I taking Am I personally taking better care of my employees than I did last year. And so these are the things that if you’re looking at you know, it’s so much more fun, I love doing dentistry or my friends have told told you guys that I love doing dentistry on my friends, but I also love doing dentistry with my friends. And those are my that’s my team. And when you when you get to that point, all of a sudden you have a team and I’ve got examples of doctors that that I just absolutely love because their team is so engrained into what they do. I go back and I think about Pete Dawson. And you know, Pete was pretty, pretty adamant about the way he wanted to do things he was a my way or the highway kind of guy, kind of like my dad kind of like me early on. But what ended up happening was, you know, there was a place for everything and everything in this place if there wasn’t something that where it was supposed to be. And he would go back and retrain and re talk about that. So anyway, these are things that I want you to start thinking about we’re going to be talking about this legendary leadership and mentorship a lot in the next few podcasts so you know, send me questions, Bruce at productive dentist calm. We actually have face some openings in our in our workshop this year. I think we have about 15 spots left. And that is in. I’m sorry, it’s in February. It’s on the Yeah, it’s the 17th** through the 19th February and so really look forward to seeing you guys there. Give us a call and again send me questions to Bruce at productive dentist calm. Hope you guys have a great day and tell your friends about the podcast. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the productive dentist podcast.

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