There has to be accountability for growth to occur.
Dentistry is a very weird business.
After all, where is it that the owner of the business is so busy doing the business that he can’t supervise, educate and guide and monitor the progress of all those he employs, because he is too busy doing the thing that keeps the business going.
He’s too busy drilling the teeth to be looking after all the extras in his business.
If this were a retail business, then the owner of the business would be out and about, walking the shop floor, overseeing the progress of his team, watching them interact with customers, watching them interact with each other, watching them go about all they have to do.
Not so in Dentistry.
In Dentistry he’s also the Dentist. He’s holding his pickaxe and picking that coal off the coalface, while those employed are behind him, sometimes watching, sometimes not even that.
These are quite contrasting scenarios.
And scary.
Because trust as we may, there’s a big amount of trust in the fact that we’re hoping that all that is meant to be being done is indeed being done behind us.
I guess that it’s this situation that often leads the Dentist owner into taking one of either of a couple of poor decisions that can really be *NOT* in the best interests of the practice, or the patients, or the dentist, or even the team…
Firstly, the dentist could start to micromanage the office.
He could really get serious about watching everything, and I mean everything, with such hawk eyes that he strangles the health of the practice and prevents it from growing even organically.
Micromanagement is highly stressful and very unproductive.
Micromanagement is not desirable.
And if it is occurring, and gets identified early, it needs to be eradicated.
The solution is to have people in your business responsible for educating and reporting on other people and their work, so that there is growth and supervision in your business.
So that you have team members helping other team members.
And they then in turn report back to you, so you can oversee and monitor their progesses, rather than micromanage them.
The second poor decision a Dentist owner can make is to become an ostrich.
By becoming an ostrich, that Dentist really does just stick his head into the ground and hope that things change.
And by change they hope that things either magically improve on their own, or they magically go away and things get better.
And we know that in most cases, neither of these things happen and the same old stuff just seems to keep on happening.
And things don’t get better.
Things just stay bad or get a whole lot worse.
Building accountability in your Dental Office does not happen overnight.
But it does happen.
It happens if you want it to happen.
And the first step of this accountability is to establish an accountability chain of command.
An order.
And stick to it and work with it.
When I coach Dental Offices I help build leadership and accountability in the Office, for the Dentist and for the team members.
It is the role of a great coach to build this as their legacy to the Dental Practice.
It’s about teaching a man to fish, rather than giving him a fish….
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My Two-Day Workshop in Las Vegas September 25 and 26 will explain to you the COMPLETE Ultimate Patient Experience process in detail. cover in greater depth how to address simple changes that create BIG RESULTS.
For all the details about Las Vegas, CLICK HERE.
LIMITED PLACES AVAILABLE.
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
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“Service is the desire to put the interest of others before ourselves.” – John DiJulius III
This statement pretty well sums it up.
This is what service is.
And has to be.
We must put the interests of others before our own.
That’s what it is all about.
Selflessly.
Even as a tax collector, the interests of those who benefit from the collection of taxes must be put ahead of the interests of those who have a moral obligation to pay their appropriate taxes.
And in business, we must put the interests of our customers ahead of the interests of us, as employees and as business owners.
What’s best for the customer?
That’s what it’s all about…
Is that what you think about, as you go about your daily business?
Do you think *SERVICE* as a front of mind mentality when you are out and about as a customer as well as when you are at work as the server?
And as Dentists, and Dental Office employees, we are all servers of customers.
Our patients are our clients.
Our customers.
They are paying to receive our Dental Services.
And our Service.
Not just our Dentistry.
Until we learn to flat-pack our Dentistry, you’re going to always have to have people interaction…
How we as people deal with people serving us as we go about our business reflects and impacts upon the way we interact when we are providing our services.
As a student of service [and why *shouldn’t* we all be students of our craft?] we need to understand that what we do today, in this moment then impacts and influences our future behaviours.
We must learn to understand, in order to improve.
What is best for the person we are serving?
It’s no fun dealing with grumpy sour people.
They are difficult, and make our life difficult.
But sometimes in order to make lemonade, you’ve got to deal with lemons.
To find your Prince you have to kiss a lot of frogs.
In your own business you can choose the number of frogs you need to deal with.
There will always be frogs, but you can do what you need to do to minimise how many you see.
Business allows you to do that.
It’s your business. You can make it what you want.
However, what you’ll find is that what you give out will be what you’ll receive back.
Give out nice to receive nice back.
Give out sour. Get sour back.
When we sincerely put the interests of others before ourselves, this is when we truly have mastered the Art of Service.
And until we do, until we do prioritise the interests of others before our own, well, we’re only paying lip service.
“There’s some [person] at work you have to kowtow to, and you find yourself doing things you thought you’d never do. But you try and minimise that stuff; be the best person you can be. But you set your priorities. And that’s the way life is….”
– Richard. The Big Chill [1983]
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My Two-Day Workshop in Las Vegas September 25 and 26 will explain to you the COMPLETE Ultimate Patient Experience process in detail. cover in greater depth how to address simple changes that create BIG RESULTS.
For all the details about Las Vegas, CLICK HERE.
LIMITED PLACES AVAILABLE.
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
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It’s a condition, or affliction, that many dentists are accused of having.
Micromanaging is defined:
to manage or control with excessive attention to minor details.
to control every part, however small, of (an enterprise or activity).
I feel micromanagement is an illness from big business that has crept its way across into dentistry.
Or the term “micromanagement” has.
There are several types of micromanagement. Several strains of the one virus…
In big business there is micromanagement for the sake of power.
“If I’m the only one around here who knows how to do everything then I’m irreplaceable.”
This is not the type of micromanagement seen in dentists.
It can be seen in Dental team members though.
The biggest problem I see with Dentists who micromanage is that they have a deep lack of trust.
They do not trust others to perform the roles and the duties they are meant to do.
These micromanagers have a need to oversee everything.
These micromanagers believe that they are the only person capable of doing the job or task correctly.
They believe that nobody else can do the job as well as them, and that if anyone else tries, then the micromanager will only just have to do the job over again anyway.
But there are other types of micromanagers.
Some micromanagers just enjoy the power. They are control freaks, and so by not sharing some duties, they maintain their control.
Other micromanagers are just overly cautious. They don’t believe that there are people in their organisation capable of doing certain duties, so the micromanager keeps those duties for themselves. In these instances, nobody ever gets the opportunity to show the micromanager that they are capable of taking over these duties. And as such, these micromanagers never feels as though their people will ever develop those competencies that are needed.
Some other micromanagers feel that they need to be seen to be being hands on, and as such feel that by letting go they lose connection. So they micromanage to maintain that feeling of being a part of the team, rather than being apart from the team.
Finally there are dentists who micromanage because that’s all they’ve seen. When they worked as an associate, their principal dentist was a micromanager. So these younger dentists feel that this is normal behaviour.
I think that Dental Practice, by nature, tends to create micromanagement.
There are many things that a Dentist does that nobody else in the Office is allowed, by law, to do.
And so the Dentist begins to assume and take on other roles, sometimes all other or many other roles, in the Office.
He thinks, well if I’m doing this [drilling teeth] then I may as well just assume this other duty, and this other task, and this other role as well.
I think a lot of the mindset of a micromanaging dentist comes from the fact that his name is on the door.
“After all, this is Dr. Ima G. Dentist DDS, and if things don’t go as they should then it’s my name that ends up in the mud. So I better make sure that that never happens.”
Is that what happens?
How does it happen?
I think the micromanagement gene grows because in dentistry, as the owner, we spend so much time doing the doing of dentistry, that there is not so much time to be overseeing the other tasks, and they either get done poorly, or they sometimes slip off the end of the earth.
And get forgotten completely.
Have you ever had that thought?
“Why aren’t we doing that procedure/report/protocol any more?”
Of course you have.
And not only once.
You can probably think of a reasonable list of times.
Chances are that these individual tasks, at each time, have simply been neglected, and then forgotten.
And it’s these continued occurrences of neglect that have led you to take on the management of those duties yourself.
It has to be simpler to manage a checklist of duties and task than to manage each and every task in its entirety.
Because of its nature, Dental Practice is different.
Different to other businesses.
The owner of the business is responsible for what drives the business, and that is the doing of the dentistry.
And while he’s doing the dentistry, so much is going on and not going on behind him.
As such, the profession of Dentistry almost lends itself to micromanagement.
A good business owner Dentist will develop systems of delegation, and protocols of reporting, to prevent micromanagement from taking root in his business.
We want to develop leadership in our Dentists.
Not micromanagement.
Because micromanagement is so tiring…
If we mange correctly we can grow our people, by trusting and nurturing them.
It’s very difficult to nurture while micromanaging.
******
My Two-Day Workshop in Las Vegas September 25 and 26 will explain to you the COMPLETE Ultimate Patient Experience process in detail. cover in greater depth how to address simple changes that create BIG RESULTS.
For all the details about Las Vegas, CLICK HERE.
LIMITED PLACES AVAILABLE.
The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
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