I grew up watching the opening of ABC’s Wide World of Sports when the winning runner breaks through the finish line, arms upraised in triumph, elated by the “thrill of victory.” On the other hand, they zoom in to see the championship skier as he miscalculates and goes tumbling down the slopes into the “agony of defeat”. Victory and defeat. Winning and losing. Good and bad. All similar concepts, right? Why? Because only winners enter the race in the first place. Like it or not, in every competition there are winners and there are losers. The losers will always outnumber the winners.
The risk involved in becoming a winner is a tall order for most dentists and their teams. One reason so many dental offices are suffering isn’t just because they don’t have winners on their teams, but because too many doctors and their potential employees won’t enter the race. They settle for a participation ribbon instead of going for the win. While the “thrill of victory” is undeniably seductive, the “agony of defeat” is often more intimidating.
Perhaps the most powerful mixed message we received as children is the belief we hold about winning and losing. “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game,” we learn to say. But what we really believe is the mantra of coach Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Is it any wonder then, that most people would rather forgo the “thrill of victory” than risk the “agony of defeat”?
I believe that most dentists tend to be “non-riskers”. Their tombstones could easily read: “Died at 30…buried at 80.” They’re men and women who’ve settled at an early age into the comfort zone of mediocrity. As justification for this greyness in their lives, they tell themselves: “Well, I may not have won, but at least I didn’t lose.” I want more for you, the dentist. You deserve more. But it is all up to you to rewrite your future and not settle for a “just OK” career.
In writing this, I feel like I should shy away from using the words winners and losers, but on the other hand, I couldn’t think of a better adjective to describe employees that just don’t make the cut. These words have no better example as when we hire employees to become part of our team.
As is everything in business, we should strive to “stage” any and every process for success. Let me list a few obvious mistakes in hiring to put you in the mood to look a little deeper in how each of us, by commission or omission, should understand that we have designed our teams and systems to give us the results we are currently getting. The reality of the new dental economy we find ourselves in is that we can no longer keep or even tolerate mediocre employees. The cost is just too much. Employees are demanding higher wages, replacing, or even finding replacements is extremely difficult, and fewer people are staying in dentistry. Lowering the bar and hiring the wrong person has a huge impact on our productivity and profit.
If we do hire the mediocre employee, it is like telling the good ones that it just doesn’t matter how good you are at your job. We hire people to partner with us in a very strong culture of excellence. If you find that you just can’t keep an employee for more than 12-24 months, there is a good chance that your workplace lacks the culture and systems to create long term employees. It’s become almost a cliché, but every time you have to let someone go or they leave it is at least 50% your fault.
In hiring employees, never hire someone when you are desperate. Your protocol for selecting teammates has to be a consistent, ongoing process before you “have to have someone”. Only offices that can successfully do this are ones that grow consistently every year. These offices, growing at 15%-20% a year, know they have to avoid staffing capacity blockages. They know that growth is controlled by having the right people in the right jobs and never letting the lack of a team member slow your growth and profitability. We must consistently produce $20,000 to $25,000 per month per employee. If we start going over this amount, we begin the search for the next employee/partner we need to hire in order to avoid a staff capacity blockage. Regardless of the position, we are consistently proactive in looking for our next hire. Someone with incredible people skills, self-motivated, and a lifetime learner. Anything else we can train. If you see that you fall short of at least $20,000 of production per employee per month, you can be assured that your overhead will soar, staff turnover in ensured, and poor growth will be the direct result of this.
Never hire someone that you cannot fire by freeing up their future. I will not hire best friends, family, or classmates. You must avoid hiring anyone that you or any team member is so close to that they would hesitate to let them go if they were not performing and embracing out culture. This is a tough one, and also makes “common sense”. If a team member wants you to hire family members or their best friend, you stand the chance that if they don’t work out, you lose both of them.
Never hire someone that you can’t or won’t take the time to train and onboard properly. I would say that this rule gets broken by most practices when they feel the time crunch of desperation to fill a vacant spot. It’s a hurry up and hire, and pray that everything works out, because you don’t have the time for any other strategy. Surprisingly, that same office always seems to have the time to search and hire the next employee when the rushed desperation always proves the point that it will not work. Every time you move to bring someone else in, you have to remember that there will never be a perfect hire. It’s like the old “blue light special” table at K-Mart. They would turn on this light above a table with short term discounts. You understood that by taking advantage of these discounts you were buying something “as-is” with a possible defect or unpopular color or style. But the price was right. Not so in hiring employees. You get what you pay for, if and only if, you onboard and train them as you indoctrinate them into your culture. Even then if you are not competitive in the job market, these too, will leave.
Never keep someone that makes your life miserable. I have never had a doctor not tell me that they had one employee that if they didn’t show up tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a big deal. It’s as if they hire someone as a place keeper. Like on the Academy Awards show, they have people paid to occupy seats when one of the stars gets up and goes to the restroom. A place keeper is someone who is there for no other reason than to fill a seat. These people that are not “A” players need to have their future freed up. The longer you keep this person, the more damage it does to your team and office. You will never go any further than the one person with the least commitment to your vision. He or she is the weakest link. Act quickly and replace them with someone else.
Now for those that are with me so far, let’s look at the grey area in hiring and keeping losers. What if you hire someone that can’t do what they are told? Remember that you are 50% of the problem when we look at hiring the wrong person. We will assume that you have excellent job descriptions, offer competitive pay, profit sharing, benefits, intentional onboarding, and great training and you have hired someone that can’t do what they are told. They do exist. They pass the interview with flying colors, your expectations are elevated, you take a deep breath of relief, because you’ve found the perfect replacement for the last “loser” that you had to let go. Don’t forget you hired the last one too. What do you do? What can you do? Whose fault is it anyway?
Good leaders admit their mistakes and move quickly to correct them. Then we meet the majority of owners that fall into the “yea but” group of doctors that seem to always have an excuse. _____________ (you fill in the excuse name) are hard to find where we live. There just aren’t any good candidates to choose from. I just need someone to ______________ (fill in the blank again as if whatever you put there, is insignificant in the scheme of team building). Doctors who always seem to have an excuse are rarely good at anything else.
There is never an insignificant hire in your office. Every person has to be at the top of their game, or you are going to lose money while destroying a good culture where 90% of your team cares. It’s that last 10% that holds you back. Subtly throws everything off the tracks and leaves you scratching your head to understand why you don’t have consistent growth and less stress. It will always come back to that “insignificant” position that couldn’t possibly have anything to do with other areas of the practice not excelling.
The phrase “working in concert” is illustrated most beautifully by a concert orchestra itself. What a cacophony would be created if a hundred musicians, playing several dozen kinds of instruments, were all playing separate pieces. But, by working in concert, playing the same score, they can produce a work of beauty. Even one instrument out of tune or one page of the performance being out of place, creates a noticeable discourse in your results. In the Super General Dental Practice book (free at www.supergeneralpractice.com) you see the foundation of a Purpose Driven, Doctor Led, Staff Owned culture that will make your practice remarkable in the eyes of your patients. If you want different results, you must do everything different from what you are currently doing.
What about the new employee that “only does what they are told? Is this enough to maintain a great culture and team? I think not. You must create circumstances where your employees, and I mean each and every team member, chooses to change what they do and how they do it to realize this perfect culture and synergistic results. Employees that only do what they are told to do tend to always create a micro-management style instead of transformational leadership. This is the symptom of poor leadership and an outdated management culture. If you have to constantly remind or tell someone what to do, how are they ever going to grow into a self-motivated leader in their own right? The ideal result of hiring team members is to make sure that each and every one becomes an expert in their area of work. They self-police themselves. They come up with new ideas of how to improve their workspace so that your culture is consistently adapting to ever changing circumstances in the workplace. This prevents stale leadership and stalled growth. By partnering with each team member, this attitude will create a staff ownership mentality. This ensures that they act like owners and are concerned about being the best they can be. They concentrate on their results. They become accountable for what and how they do everything. They also will not accept or allow mediocre employees to become or stay as a team member.
It is this attitude of ownership that will remove a significant amount of stress for you, while allowing each team member to grow and stay engaged in the success of “their” practice (because they have the staff ownership mentality, they don’t think of the practice as just being yours, it is the entire team’s practice). “Owners” look at everything differently than just an “employee” would. They accept the fact that what they do and how that is received by their patients, defines success in the marketplace. Once you have this, consistent growth and profitability is a given. Your practice will begin the journey of becoming “remarkable” in the eyes of your potential clients.
One last word about why you should be reading this, and a different way of looking at words on a page, that for the few leads to action. Most doctors don’t understand why we write these articles. I feel like many think I am trying to sell them something, and not giving them the whole truth in what we write about. Not by a long shot. You are actually getting growth hacking knowledge, force multiplier strategies, and a proven execution system to crush every goal you set. If anything, you are “buying”, with your time spent reading these articles, a shortcut. In a way you are buying the ability to enjoy greater success. You’re buying the ability to skip over years of mediocrity and failure, frustration, and small, incremental growth.
Contrary to popular belief, shortcuts do exist and that is why I write these articles. The challenge is and has always been that some will read the words, and a smaller group will understand what was written, but only about 10% will take the words and quickly act on them. Maybe acting is the missing ingredient that is holding back your success. Maybe those tired over used excuses make up the invisible force that continues to hold you back. Perhaps making a goal of ready, fire, aim, is the very strategy that will accelerate the change in your practice that prior to this was a missing ingredient in a sound recipe for success.
If not now, when?
If not you, who?
Today is the day that you get serious about making your life and practice a model that others will want to emulate. It is never too late to start over. You only fail if you don’t get up. Too many dentists fail because they give up on what they want most, so they can have what they want now.
Michael Abernathy DDS
972.523.4660 cell
[email protected]
PS. A couple of paragraphs back was the phrase “ready, fire, aim”. Be sure you fully absorb the impact this can have on your practice. The much more typical approach of most dentists/owners is “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim………..” and they never pull the trigger. What decision or action are you currently overthinking? Remember: procrastination is not your friend, and it will not help you succeed. (MG)