Episode 114 – Hiring the Perfect Team

“There is no perfect team. But there are dedicated teams.” ~Dr. Bruce B. Baird

I used to think that all my problems could be fixed if I had the perfect people to make up my perfect team. Now that I’m wiser than I used to be, perfection is not something that I measure people on. 

What I measure people on is are they someone who is guided by the right things? Do they want to be the best at what they do? It’s so much more important to me that someone has the care and drive to be the best, than for them to be the image of perfection I have in my head. 

But it took me a while to learn that. I had a lot of failures in hiring. During my first 5-10 years – when I was the worst boss in the world – I had some really bad criteria. Were they really good looking? Great! They’re hired. As you can imagine, that didn’t work well.  

But let’s leave my bad boss days behind. I’ve had a lot of people tell me I had the perfect team. In some ways, that’s true. My team was fantastic! But they weren’t perfect. They were dedicated; they were the right people, in the right jobs, working with other people who shared their same care and dedication. 

Today, I’m going to share some of my perspective about dental teams and how I hired the right people, including: 

• What is the “right team”
• How I leveraged the power of my current team when hiring new team
• How to measure the true success of your team (and what the numbers don’t tell you)

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Dr. Bruce Baird 0:00
You can start with your core your core people that that are around you. Always staying in integrity when you say you’re going to do something, do it.

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 in 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 Dr. Bruce Baird with the productive dentist podcast and today we’re in Episode 114. And it is hiring the perfect team. Well, what is the perfect team? What does that mean? And there is no perfect team. There is a team that there’s a team that can be uncommon. Perfection is limited to, to a to a dream. You know, perfection is not something that is it’s not something that I measure people on is perfection. What I measure people on is Are they someone who is guided by the right things, who wants to be who wants to be the best at what they can possibly do. And you know, I had a lot of failures in hiring as the bad boss, you know, as the guy who for the first 1415 years was the worst boss in the world. I hired people. Oh my gosh, I had lots of criteria. If they were really good looking, I would hire him. I remember I hired one girl named Bambi. Yes, Bambi. And she lasted about a week until we caught her standing on the commode in our employee restroom, smoking pot and blowing it out the blowing it out the vent. You know, I was a real picker, you know, I picked some really interesting people. But the truth is probably 90% of the people I pick would have been part of a perfect team. I just never gave him I never gave him the chance of becoming a perfect team. So first of all, how do I go about hiring?

What was my way of hiring people and I’m going to shift past my bad boss days, okay, and I’m going to get into not that I was the best ever, but that the days when the practice started to really turn around. And what I did, it began it became something that when I would interview with somebody I would look at, they look at you in the eyes, do they? Do they smile and do they carry on a good conversation, if you’ve got somebody that’s staring down, that doesn’t relate well to people that may not be the person that I want to hire. Now I have people who are nice and friendly and smile. They’re not the outgoing gregarious person. But they’re very, very detail reading. And you can go through we’ve done the DI SC profiles on people try to match that up. That works. That works great. I love having that information. But it doesn’t make or break the perfect team. I also when we were hiring for people to come into the office, I did it a little bit differently. Because yes, I would interview them. But that would say let’s do a working interview. And I would have my team. The ones who let’s talk about my clinical team gay and summer and Shannon and Tamra. They were my treatment coordinators. They were the ones that were working with me day in and day out with patients. And I wanted them to take this new potential hire out to lunch and we would have several other of the treatment coordinators. I’ll take them out to lunch. We’re buying lunch, getting to know this person. Is this person, somebody who they could work with?

And I use a story about one of my hygienists not being real happy about a new hygenist that we had she doesn’t do it our way she didn’t do it this way and and did I think that this person had the potential to be part of a perfect team or part of a part of a an amazing team? I’d rather say that an amazing team better than perfect But did I think she had that skill? I do and and she was super good hygienists. She spoke really well. She smiled and patients seem to like her. But she, her systems weren’t the same that we had been doing. So I basically tasks and by hygenist, I said, Well, now I know you’re saying things about her because I hear it. I said, Will you do me a favor? Now remember, that’s a relationship question. That means an agreed upon course of action between two parties. And she said, Well, of course, I’ll do something I said. Can you? Can you help train her to be like you? Because I know you’re an amazing hygenist. And you do things a certain way? Could you do that for me? Or yeah, I guess, you know, another that caught her off guard? Yeah, I guess I could, yeah, you could. And and that was the way that I said, Okay, let’s, let’s see how you do. And all of a sudden, everything changed. And guess what? This new hygenist that we had, as a hire began producing very close to what this hygenist who was doing the training was doing within a matter of six weeks. Now, I could have just said, say this person was really good. But instead, I use that opportunity to say, you did an amazing job training. That was awesome. And isn’t it more rewarding and more fun, to help that person become better? And they were like, Yes, I understand. Exactly. Well, those are the lessons that I learned, oh, daily, I guess, you know, you’re, you know, you’re looking for for that daily that, you know, that solve all the day’s problems. And, you know, so I do like having my team involved in that hiring process, when we’re looking for the perfect team.

You know, there, there are some, you know, misguided tense tendencies that we have, as new practice owner, for instance, in regard to hiring, everybody wants to find somebody who has experience, you know, I want to find somebody who knows dentrix, we have dentrix, I want them to know dentrix To become their a dentrix. Guru, and I want to hire them, and they’re going to be the perfect employee. Well, I hate to tell you that, that I don’t much worry about that. Yes. I don’t mind having somebody come in that has experience, especially working with our software and those kinds of things, maybe that have done things in other offices. But you know, what, rarely did things that other offices do really attract too much attention for me, I would much rather teach and train that person how to do those things. And that could be anybody.

It could be somebody from Walmart, could be somebody from your bank, it could be somebody from that works at Yvette, that’s that’s where my, my team came from, you know, from Walmart from was it was a vet who worked at a vet veterinary office. You know, I want people who can relate to people, and who care about people. And so our tendency is we hire based on their previous skill set, which truthfully, probably was not the skill set that you wanted to train them. And so they bring in these new ideas and new thoughts. Now, that’s great, I love new ideas and new thoughts. But they have a tendency to do things the same way they have always done in the past, which may not be the most effective, it may not be the most productive, it may not be the most efficient way of doing it. And so I’m constantly, you can start with your core, your core people that that are around you. Always staying in integrity, when you say you’re going to do something, do it when you’re going to, we’re going to have training on Tuesday, don’t make it a bitch session, you know, we’re going to talk about how great the practice is, I’m going to you know, and a lot of people we talk about measuring success based on tools.

And I know that you have dental Intel out there, you’ve got all that you can pull all kinds of information now. But there’s more to it than just numbers. You know, I, I look at this. And I’ve told you guys this before, but I look at every year of everybody that is surrounded, you know all the people that are in the office that in the practice, top to bottom, I do my own evaluation, how can I help this person do better at what they’re doing? How could I help this person? How could I get this team of three to train our fourth chairside treatment coordinator? How can I get them to do that? And usually it’s just simply if we’re in great relationship, that I can simply ask that question if they trust me, if my team trusts me, and that usually is because of integrity. You know, when we say we’re going to do something, we do something we’re always looking out for our patients. We’re always, you know, when when Miss Johnson when you, you don’t like leaves and you go, What a bitch, I can’t stand that. I can’t stand it when she comes in here. Well, that’s just not the, that’s not the okay you want to give to your team every time they don’t like somebody? And how do I know that because that’s what I would do. And now I go, you know, she is she is a challenge. You know, she’s a challenge. I really appreciate you guys.

And the other thing about getting a team that’s on your side is when they put up with a lot, your team puts up with a lot of commotion from patients, and most of it are, these are patients who are a little bit more demanding, possibly. And they will gripe at them. They won’t say much to me as the doc, but they will gripe at them about everything that they want to gripe about, I can’t believe we do this can’t believe we do that. And you know, that that really breaks a team down. Especially if I don’t do something about it. And I’ve walked into the room before and said Mary, I said, my team is scared to you. And the Mary looks at you and goes what? What do you mean? How could that possibly be? I’m such a nice person. They don’t say it like that. But I say yeah, I mean, they’re afraid when you come in, you know, you’re pretty, you know, straight to the point. And you’re kind of I said, I tell you what, this is my family, these this my family and I really Oh, I’ll never do that. Again. I am so sorry. I didn’t mean most people don’t even realize they’re doing that. But hiring a perfect team means having perfect team support. And I’m going to support that. I’m going to support my team top to bottom now what I have done that years ago, you know, if somebody was griping about something as a patient was griping, then I would go evaluate the employee and say, Well, what did you do wrong? How did you do? Why did you piss them off. And you know, that’s not really the way to handle this. The way to handle it is to be intuitive about about what’s going on, to be caring to be somebody who says, you know, I really want to help all my patients. And I want to do it with a team that is glued together that really help each other the high Janice’s seating patients when she doesn’t have a patient or he doesn’t have a patient.

Everybody’s working together as a team. And there’s no, I’m going to talk on the next one again, about the front versus the back. And how do we get away from that. But those are things that can really destroy a business. And I promise you, if you get the right team, and you take care of that team, and you have the right emotional ability to govern your emotions, and to help people and to be a mentor to those people, you’re going to have a practice. It’s not just producing X, you’re going to have a practice that’s producing 3x. And it’s again, it’s not about, you know, when I look at numbers, when I look at profitability and productivity, it’s a direct reflection of how well we take care of people. It’s not, could I cut one more crown faster? Could I do this quicker, it has nothing to do with that. It actually has to do with if we take great care of the patients, the money always takes care of itself. And I love that, and I’m going to stick with that or rest of my life. Because if you take care of people, the rest of the stuff always takes care of itself. So it’s a it’s different way of thinking. But our inclination as a new owner is I’ve got a lot of debt, I’ve got school debt, I’ve got this, I got it, you know, and it’s it is stressful. It is extremely stressful. And our job at productive dentist Academy is to help you be able to, to,

to get through those to get through this part of your career with an amazing team. And again, I look at young dentists like Dwight pakora, who down in South Texas, or Southeast Texas, amazing boss, I just I look at him I go I’d like to work for him. You know, and I can name you know, I can name more Jackson being over in East Texas. I can name Dave deal up in Fort Wayne. I can name so many dentists who I’ve learned from just watching them watching. They’re watching their ability to be able to communicate in a in a really high stress environment, which is a dental practice. So anyway, anybody can learn the worst boss in the world can learn to be the best. And I challenge you to do that. I look forward to our next podcast and let’s Let’s make it happen. Tell your friends about this, I would really appreciate that. We have the productive dentist workshop coming up in, in Dallas on August the 15th of February. So look at that, that you can go to productive dentist calm and look at that. And we really would love to have you there. Our whole concept has changed. We still teach the same productivity things that we always have. But we we’ve added so much more on leadership and communication. So look forward to seeing you soon.

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 productivedentistspodcast.com Join me again next week for another episode of the Productive Dentist Podcast.