The Dental Marketer
479: Are You on the Road to Effective Dental Leadership? The Blueprint for Teamwork | Dr. Paul Etchison
Guest: Paul EtchisonBusiness Name: Dental Practice HeroesCheck out Paul's Media:Website: https://dentalpracticeheroes.com/
Dental Practice Heroes Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dental-practice-heroes-podcast/id1315253777
DPH OmniPractice Total Team Success Program: https://www.dentalpracticeheroes.com/offers/925o3Jgr/checkout
Other DPH Courses: https://dph.mykajabi.com/
Other Mentions and Links:Companies/Software:
People/Communities:
Podcast Episodes:
- 300: DR. PAUL ETCHISON | NELSON RIDGE FAMILY DENTAL
- MMM [INTERNAL MARKETING] SMALL DETAILS THAT MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE IN TEAM COMMUNICATION
- "WHAT IS 1 THING YOU WISH YOU KNEW BEFORE YOU OPENED YOUR START-UP/ ACQUISITION?"
- 455: DR. PAUL ETCHISON | ACHIEVING PEACE OF MIND: EMBRACING DELEGATION FOR A HARMONIOUS DENTAL TEAM
Host: Michael AriasWebsite: The Dental MarketerJoin my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/
Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
- How to establish truly effective leadership within a dental practice.
- Strategies for managing your team effectively and efficiently.
- The importance of creating a psychologically safe and healthy working environment for your team.
- How to delegate roles and responsibilities that best suit your team members.
- Implementing effective communication systems to foster seamless workflows.
- The first steps to transitioning responsibilities to your team for better office management.
- Dr. Etchison’s experience in specializing in only projects he loves and becoming a visionary for his practice.
- Learn how you can apply these strategies, regardless of the size or nature of your dental practice.
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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)Michael: All right. It's time to talk with our featured guest, Dr. Paul Etcheson. How's it going, Paul?
Paul: Hey, it's going good, man. How you doing?
Michael: Doing pretty good, man. You're, uh, this is, you've been on Monday Morning Marketing episodes and then we've also dived deep when you had your practice, right? Yeah, yeah. So, right now, remind me, how long has it been since you've...
Been in
Paul: practice ownership. So I have been in practice ownership since 2012 and in 2018, we expanded from five to 11 ops and then 2020 in December, that's when I partnered up with a DSO. I'm just wrapping up my third, my three year contract. It's over. And then I'm free, but I mean, the thing is I'm not leaving.
I'm not planning on leaving. So that's pretty irrelevant when I think about it. But yeah, that's, that's the whole like short, brief summary of it.
Michael: Yeah. Why aren't you
Paul: leaving? Cause I like it. when, when I partnered up, I was like, man, I got to get out of here. I got to find something else to do.
Maybe I'll be a fireman. I don't know. And through this whole process in the past three years, man, it's, uh, I've really just realized how much I do like being part of the team now. I don't like being there five days a week. I'm there about six days a month and I have a team that runs everything, but I'm just like the visionary.
I'm the, I'm out of the noise. I'm out of the day to day. And I do get to do like my. Ortho, I do band and bracket on kids. I still like doing that, but I've had like I had one period where I took like five weeks off and it wasn't supposed to be five weeks. I got COVID right at the end of a three week vacation and I didn't like it and it was like, wow, like I feel really drained.
I feel like I need to leave the house. I feel like I need a reason to go somewhere. I mean, I was going to, I was going grocery shopping when we just went grocery shopping just to go somewhere, you know? Yeah. I was like, well, this bread, this bread is probably going to expire in like maybe 10 more days. We should probably have some for those, you know, it was weird, man.
It was, uh. I just noticed it. I, I just noticed, man, I don't, I'm not feeling the greatest about this. And when I went back to work after that, I was like, gosh, I really missed all you guys. This is great. I'm so happy to be back. So I, I do want it as part of my life. I don't want to leave it completely. I had to realize that through going through this process, but, um, I'm not ready and I'm never going to go back to like five days a week.
I'm just not going to do that.
Michael: So then looking back, do you think you could have done that? Just work somehow minimized it on your own to three, two days a week or something still been profitable, but
Paul: good question. Yeah. Because you know, a lot of people say like, do you regret selling? Do you, you know, do you wish that you still had your baby and it was still all yours?
Because I've sold 85 percent at this point. I will say. Through that process, I've, since I sold, I kind of backed off. I let my leads do a lot more and it was kind of part of it. I was more comfortable letting them do more because I was saying, well, dude, I only own 15 percent now, you know, it shouldn't be, I shouldn't, I don't have as much writing on it.
So go ahead, do whatever you guys want. And what I realized is they were great at it it's been running better with them than it runs with me, you know? And I think that's one of the things I've kind of rolled into my coaching now with, with teams is that I had this epiphany that gosh, like your practice can grow and run so much better if you have teams running it.
Um, now would I still have sold? Yeah, I'm still happy. I sold, I still got a whole bunch of capital. It's all invested into different assets and a bunch of real estate. And I've, I've reached a point where I can kind of chill and just do whatever I want because I want to do it. And I'm happy for that. So I am glad that I sold, but could I have had this kind of de stressed practice lifestyle?
For sure. I think, um, I could have had this de stress, uh, just this, what I have now, and maybe I wouldn't have sold. I don't know. It's hard to say, but I'd have no regrets about doing it.
Michael: Is the decisions that like decision fatigue, you're like, Oh my God, too many. I just don't want the weight of all these decisions because technically they're still looking for you at you for
Paul: leadership, right? Yeah, yeah, there's, I mean, still to some extent, they're, they're pretty good leaders there and I've established a good team. I would say what bothered me, and this might be a personal thing, I know a lot of dentists go through this, so I know I'm not alone on this, is that I was trying so hard to make this an incredible place to work. And I really wanted to be, in my heart, I really do care about that, I want it to be a great place to work, I want people to love the job and love being there.
And I think through seeing patients and trying to manage everything. I was just really overwhelmed with the amount of time and my lack of time to do so. And then when people would come with, come to me and say, Hey, like, you know, we got to do something about it. So I mean, the front desk is going, we really got to redo this front desk.
It's just, it's just a mess up there. I would almost internalize that as. You are unappreciative of all the work I do. Like, why don't you appreciate I'm doing my best here and you're telling me it's not good enough. And it was just like constant frustration of giving all of myself to this practice, but at the same time having people still be upset.
And I think there was a mindset shift that I had to make that I said, well, you know what, instead of them being completely 100 percent happy with the practice, they just have to be content. And I have 40 plus team members. There is no way they are all going to love it and just be like, this is the best place ever.
100 percent of the time, 100 percent of them, it's just not possible. So I think I had unrealistic expectations there. But as I employed my leadership team and they started handling these interpersonal things, it just kind of the weight lifted and I didn't hear about these things anymore. And I have a clinical lead.
And she has been my assistant for like, man, almost 12 years now, almost the whole practice lifetime. And she's the one who handles all this stuff now. If somebody's complaining and it got to the point where like, I check in with her, she'd be like, Hey, this happened. Do you want to hear about it?
And I'd be like, if you don't want to tell me, I'm cool. She's like, I got it under control. Don't worry about it. And she doesn't really tell me. I mean, not that I'm in the dark, but I, I like how in the dark I am. I mean, she, she let somebody go like three weeks ago and she just shot me a text for like a blessing.
Hey, cool. You cool. If I fire this person, I barely know that person go, you know, it was a new assistant and she was there for like maybe five weeks and it just like, it wasn't working out. So she let her go. I don't even have to do that anymore. I don't hire, I don't fire. People, I walk into practice, I see new faces.
I say, hello. And I'm just doing like big vision stuff. Like we just dropped Delta. That's like our thing. We're, we're going out of insurance this year. So that's our big thing for this year, it's a good place to be. And, and yes, did I need to sell to a DSO to do it? No, not at all. And that's kind of what I'm teaching to my coaching clients is like, Hey, this is how you do it, because I wish I would have done it before I sold to a DSO.
I mean, I owned this practice for nine years before I sold. it could have been a lot different nine years. So overall,
Michael: you kind of don't wish that you sold. You wish you kind of, uh, worked on it on your own or what?
Paul: No, no, no. I I'm still happy. I sold because I got the capital and I got it. I got a really great deal for my practice, you know, and it's to invest in the company that has bought my idea, bought my practice or partnered up with me.
Like I just, I got so much for it. I don't know if I would have waited five years, if I still would've got what I got. I mean, as you know, private equity in dentistry right now is very, very hot. And this might be something like era that we look back in 20 years and be like, man, remember when that happened?
Yeah. So I just didn't want, I didn't want to miss it. I'm not saying that it's going away. I don't know, but who knows, man, I, I'm really happy with the amount of God. And it's, it's gotten me to a point where just kind of can do whatever I want now. And I'm doing the things that I want because I want to.
But there was also that period of in between like, wow, you can do whatever you want because you want to, what the hell do you want to do? and it kind of took me a little bit to kind of figure that out.
Michael: you sign an NDA or anything like that? Or could you give us like a range of how much you
Paul: got?
Or I don't know if I could give you a range. I could get, yeah, they probably wouldn't want me to talk about it. Okay. Don't
Michael: worry. You're like zero to 10
Paul: million. Okay. Yeah. We can go, we go zero to 10 million. I didn't get 10 million.
Michael: Okay. Got you. Got you. Got you. But, but it was a good one. That was a good mouth. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay, man. So rewind a little bit. you talked about how now your team runs your practice. I mean, I think that's the dream for everybody, right? Like what you're making right now. So what are the first steps to making my team run my practice? I'm listening to this episode. Yeah. Day one. I'd love to get there.
Can you give me the first steps to create this system?
Paul: For sure. I think the, I mean, the first steps of any practices is we're trying to get it systematized. We're trying to get it organized. So we've got to start with checklist. That's like number one. So got to look at checklists, got to like just basic checklists, like.
What do we do when we close? What do we do when we open? What do we do weekly, monthly, annually, like just making sure that everything that needs to get done is getting done. it's a whole process of systematizing your practice. But now, now that I have these leads. And this leadership team, what I realized is that they've created a lot of these systems without me now.
So when I first opened the practice, and I first was doing this before I had the leadership team, it was kind of a slow process, even though in retrospect it felt like it was happening fast. Now, like, I'll look at things and I say, how do you, how do you guys do this? Show me. And I'm like, who came up with this?
This is fantastic. And they're like, oh, we did. but I would say the first process is seeing who the leaders are on your team. And I have an office manager. I have a hygiene lead. I have my clinical lead, who is also my assistant lead, and then I have a front desk lead. So I have four people on my leadership team.
I don't think everybody needs that many people, because I think if you have maybe 10, 12 people, you can pull it off like that. But sometimes smaller offices, I mean, if you've got seven employees, you can't make three leads. You know, it's, that's just like half the team's not lead to have the team as a lead, but it's picking who are, who the people are.
And it's being really clear on the expectations of what you want them to do. And hopefully you're picking the right people. These are not people. These are not your best all star performers. Like, um, I don't want to say that my, my clinical is not my best assistant. She's fantastic. But she was not like my primary assistant, you know, she was, but she was the one who really was able to take things and run with it.
She was really confident in herself. She was great with talking with people and she was a really good leader. So you got to find those people that want to take on more responsibility and they need to look at it from a way. And I've seen this happen in some of my coaching clients offices is they assign the leads and the people are like, I don't want to be the lead anymore.
And they're like, well, why? Like it's just too much extra work and one of the things I realized when we had some issues with the leads you've got to give them scheduled time to work on their duties. Because when we started it, we said, okay, you know, you don't get a cancellation.
You're in between patients. You could work on this stuff and you could sit down and talk with the other assistants and you could train them and find out what they need help with. And you could do like performance reviews and all this stuff. And the fact of the matter is, is when it's in between patients, when you get a cancellation, people aren't like, okay, cool.
Cancellation. Let me work on this other stuff. They just want to chill sometimes, you know, we were running so much, they just want to like, you know, talk with their team members, talk with people they work with and just get to catch up and stuff. So that causes overwhelm is because we don't have time to do it.
So you need to schedule time for these people to do it. And that's why I told every, every single person, like, I don't want to be the lead. I'm like, just try this. You've gotta do this. 'cause I always tell people I need to do it. But then, you know, dentist just don't listen. They don't , they don't like to listen.
And I'm like, I'm telling you, you need to schedule time. They're like, no, no. Well, we'll just, we we're pretty slow a lot of time. Okay, cool, whatever. And um, as soon as you schedule 'em like maybe four hours a week to go in an office, shut a door and just work on stuff, they get it done. And they love that day.
They all wake up that day and they go, man, this cool, this is the day I'm just in the office. This is awesome. Even, even when you make 'em try to do stuff in between patients. You might as well not have them at all. They're not doing it. They're just not going to do it. So if you want help in your practice from the leadership team, and you want to build a leadership team, you've got to find the right people, you got to pick the right people, and you've got to make sure that they have time, but then you also need to sit in front of your team and designate what is this relationship that you have with them?
Because it's going to be hard for them to be almost like a boss to the people they've already worked with. And, and I'm saying like my leads. are kind of a boss to people that we've worked with that used to be their, their equals. Cause we've got a lot of long term team members and that relationship is okay.
But I had to designate this like, Hey, they aren't, I am still your boss. You know, they are, they are for communication and they're for like, you know, training and stuff. They're here to help you. They're here to support you. This is what I want the leads to do. This is the person I'm going to go to, but I want to change something versus going to everybody.
But I will tell you that the people that come into the practice now that are hired by the lead, that that's their only point of contact, they barely even talk to me. That's their boss and that's a completely different relationship than what they have from the people that they were in the same level with, but the people that they were on the same level with, and now there's the lead, they do respect them.
So it's, it's, I think it's because you had to, you have to, as a leader, designate what is the role and what does this mean for everybody? You know, are we taking orders from five people now? What am I doing? You know, so, so pick the people, give them time to do it and designate with the team what exactly this means.
And it's something that's just going to evolve over time for you. It's going to like, I didn't have my leads hiring right off the get go. It was just one day I was like, Hey, like these two people aren't getting along. I mean, can you handle it? They're like, yeah, I can handle it. You want, do you want me to help?
Nah, I got it. And then it's like, do you ever think you could like call on these people, these resumes and just see if you like them? Yeah, sure. What do you want me to do? Call them. See if you like them. If you like them, get them in for a working interview. And then if you want to hire him, send it to me.
And then it got to, Hey, if you want to hire him, here's your budget, figure out what to pay him, you know, and then, and then it was just like, you don't like him, do you feel comfortable firing him? Okay, cool. Off you go. And, um, you slowly give them more and more things, but what's cool about it is at first they're kind of like hesitant.
And then when they start seeing that they, they, it's almost like they get confidence in their abilities. And they're like, I can do this. Yeah. I can do anything. I got this. And people just love that role. So when I hear someone say, I don't want to be the lead, it's too much work. I'm like, we're doing it wrong.
They should love being the lead. It's an awesome place to be. It's a great place of autonomy, creativity. You get to be a big role in the practice. You get to make big decisions and how things change and everybody should like to do it, but you got to give them time to do it so they don't get overwhelmed.
So I think that's, that's the biggest thing.
Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So then you want to, and I like how you said, give them scheduled time to work on their duty. So one is you want to pick the right people, right? And then to schedule the time, this scheduled time is for them to work on their craft or is it scheduled time for specifically what?
Like
Paul: if it was front office. It's like office time. I mean, so like, for instance, like front office would be, this might be time for this person to give some one on one training. Some more one on one training to somebody that needs it. It might be time to do a performance review. It might be time to sit down and maybe come up with agenda for a team meeting that's coming up.
You know, just whatever we're, whatever we're transitioning or whatever new things we're implementing, this is time to work on this. Get a system in writing so that we can present it to the whole team. It's not for, hey, I gotta get caught up on these insurance checks. Man, am I so behind on these insurance checks.
Cause I mean, that's another thing that's happened to my front desk lead. Is we were like, why is this front desk like so crazy? Like what is going on? Like, and like, what are you doing in your lead time? It was like, I'm getting caught up. So then we were like, we gotta get, we gotta teach someone else how to do these insurance checks.
Cause this, my lead was doing this. So we got that off her plate and it's been great. It gives her time. I said, I don't, I don't care if you're sitting behind somebody and just listening to the front desk. I need this place needs to be managed and you need time to manage it. And that needs needs to be time that you're not working with a patient or doing some other tasks.
So it's just their time to be elite.
Michael: Gotcha. So you schedule the time for them to be elite. You get specific, but you also specify the leads to everybody, right? Who's the leads and things and what their role is. And then the leads create systems. So would you say like, Hey guys, once a month, I need you to make me a protocol or system on something you're working on
Paul: we used to have lead meetings with me and my four leads, we would do it every other week. Now we do it once a month. But we'll have a team meeting that's two hours long, and usually that's like 10 15 minutes of me talking about how things are going, trying to provide some little inspiration, a little gratitude, appreciation for what we've been doing.
And then we break into departments. If you want to know what to work on at a practice, ask your team. I mean, they, they know exactly where the pain points are. So they'll break off and all the hygienists will go in one room and all the assistants in another room. It's like, Hey guys, what's going on? What do we need to work on?
What's not working? And then that is where you find out where you come up with like a system or protocol. So it is a, it is a whole team collaboration. It is, for instance, say the assistantly talking down to the assistants and saying, Hey, this is something to happen.
We go up to the front desk. Sometimes we walk up with a patient and nobody looks up and we don't know where to go. And it's awkward. we don't know, like, is there, is, can we designate, and this is what they came up with. Can we designate a priority of the four chairs at our front desk that this is the person that always gets gone to first?
If they're not available, we go to this person, if they're not available, you go to this person. So we came up with that, and then we bought these little tap lights that change from red to green. And they just sit on the little desk next to the person. And if for some reason there's not a patient there, but they're still finishing something up, typing something into a computer, or like doing some correspondence to a patient, they tap the light that's red.
So that person's priority is taken, you go to the next person. And that was completely come up by my assistant and, uh, and the team. So it's just like, they're just, you give them the autonomy to just invent and come up with solutions and it's awesome. I mean, you'd be amazed that when, whenever you drop the ball on a patient or whenever something goes wrong at your practice, that's the opportunity to create a system.
And if you've got a leadership team to help you do it, you don't have to do it alone. And now you have somebody that's in on the front lines, that's working there. That understands that position a lot more than you. So it's, it just works on so many
Michael: levels. Gotcha. Now, why did it go from every other week to a month, your meetings?
Paul: So and that's why I tell everybody just about meetings. How often should we meet? I don't know. We were meeting every other week, or every, yeah, twice a month, and it was getting a little stale. We just felt like we didn't have a lot to talk about. So we're like, hey, what do you guys think? Things are running pretty smooth.
What do you think about us going down to every, once a month? And that's been fine for now. Um, there was a time where we were doing some front desk training. We were doing phone skills training. And we were doing it, like, where we have two shifts. We have a night shift and a morning shift. So the morning shift would stay late.
We'd meet with them, and the night shift would come in early. And we'd meet with them and go through phone calls. And we did that weekly for six, seven weeks. And then you just feel it at a certain point. We're like, okay, I think we've got this. Start flipping through phone calls as a team. And you're saying, I can't find much to critique here.
These sound fantastic. You know, okay, we're good. let's just stop. And we stopped the meeting. And then at one point in the future, and when we listen to a phone call, if we start hearing a lot of, um, bad phone calls again, we're going to start meeting again. So you just play it by ear. So you'll just feel, nobody wants to go to meetings that are unproductive and boring.
So if your meetings are being unproductive and boring, because there's not a lot to talk about, you might be meeting too much.
Michael: Yeah. I like that, man. I like that a lot because a lot of the times we get so like, uh, I guess, It's dogmatic about like, we got to meet every week, like if not then, I mean? And then we get more of a, like, ah, we got to, but if it's a seasonal where it's like, Hey, this is a, it's, it's bad.
We should be meeting about this stuff often. Right. So it can like get into, burn into their brain. That's good. So then I guess that kind of leads my next question. Like what if the leads say like every, everything's fine. Everything's good. I can't think of a system. I can't, month two comes around. Yeah. I can't think of a system.
Like everything looks good. Are they like looking
or
Paul: how can we be sure? I would find that hard to believe that everything's ever good. There's always, there's always something. If, if my lead was saying that to me, I would say, when's the last time you did one on ones with your department? You know, that's what I would ask.
When was the last time you did some one on one meetings with everybody in your department? Because, uh, do a round of one on ones with your team. You know, if you don't have a leadership team, sit down with everybody this week. You're gonna find stuff. It's never going to be everything's fine. They might say when you ask them. Everything's good. Yeah. Yeah, keep probing Everything is not fine. And I like the question when I asked when I used to do one on ones I used to ask people what is something that frustrates you when you're working here? No, I like it. Everything's great. Everything's great Well, there's got to be something we all get frustrated something.
No, I don't care how minor it is What is something that frustrates you? and Everybody can always come up with something and then you can there's always truth to it It's just like when that crazy patient complains, we all want to dismiss it. We say, Oh, they're crazy. We don't care about them, but there is always truth to every complaint.
If it comes from a crazy person, or if it's just a minor complaint from somebody on your team, there is some truth there that could be addressed. And that complaint is a gift that we should take and create something with it. So, um, there will never be a point that everything is good. I mean, things are running smooth right now.
My practice, we haven't had a whole lot going on. Um, big stuff at least, but there's always stuff going on and there's always things that improve on. I could show you system after system and protocol after protocol. And I think our office is one of the greatest offices in the world. And I really do believe that, but we dropped the ball all the time.
We have humans on our team and they make mistakes and they have bad days and sometimes they're tired and sometimes they're in a bad mood. Things happen. We are human. And that's okay. Like, we offer everybody grace. We understand that. But there is never a point where you will ever have a practice that is free of issues, stress, or problems.
But you can just reduce them as much as possible and use them to make your practice a better place to be. And if that is the core of your being, that that's what you want for your team, a really nice place to work, it makes it easy to have, and it's a pretty, it's a nice, um, it's a great why. It's a really great why to kind of motivate you to really take this, this avenue and put on this hat for your practice.
So. and it's, it's good for everybody. It's good for the patients. You know, when everybody's happy at work, the patients get taken care of really well. It's good for the community. It's, it's good for patients that are happy and tell more friends and family about you because now you're going to help more people.
So it's really all coincides with your mission. If your mission is to help as many people as possible, all these things
Michael: matter. Yeah, no, yeah. A hundred percent. Now, what would you recommend if like. We're starting out, and it's just me, front, one front office, one assistant. But we want to have this in place because we can see a vision, like, I would love, for whatever Paul's telling me right now, like, to have my team take over, I would love that.
How can we start?
Paul: So, I mean, with just two people, that'd be, that'd be a pretty small leadership team. Because your leadership team is your normal team, I guess. But I think when, I tell people for small offices, it's time for an office manager. You know, that's, that's the first one to do. And it needs to be an office manager that's not working at the front desk.
And they go, what do they do? Well, they're gonna do your payroll. They're gonna do the 4 0 1 K reconciliation. They're gonna do all the credit card reconciliations at the end of the month. They're gonna be working through the ar. Just checking on all these things that you're checking on. 'cause you don't necessarily need a leadership team when you're a smaller office, but I do suggest that you, you don't need to be the only leader at the office.
And it's just one of those things that. It's a matter of having somebody and you give them that title, you put them in that role, and you, and you tell them what to do and you get help. You're getting help growing this practice. Now, and I will say my leads were all my leads. Every single one of them was not my first person I hired in that position.
They have been with me a long time, but they were not, you know, and if anyone's wondering how we did this, cause we were probably a team of. 16 to 18, when we incorporated this lead structure, we had everyone do ranked ballots. So where you would vote for who you want the lead to be, who your first choice is, your second choice and your third choice.
And it was all anonymous. And then I took them home and counted them and everybody voted the way that I would have picked. And I don't know what I would did if they didn't, because I had the ballots at my house and I don't think I could have, I could have did whatever I want with that election.
Um, But I didn't have to, I, I, I, I was able to not have to make the decision because they did pick the right people. And so I think your team knows who it is, but that's how we did it. Cause I didn't want anyone to think I was playing favorites. I wanted the team to play their favorites. And thankfully the, the team had the same favorites as me, I guess it's just worked out.
Yeah. I
Michael: like that. I like that the rank balance. So, okay. So that's how we kind of want to start it off as right. But we want to already start giving like, um, I guess the sense of authority to the people that we, we feel could be leads. Because I feel if we hired a front office and we're like, man, they're great at accounting, they're great at this.
And then our assistant's great at that. What should we ask ourselves to be like, but are they a good, or are they not a good
Paul: lead? Well, it's, it's, it's hard because like we always want to put the person in the leadership position. That's our best employee, our best front desk employee. Our best assistant, our best hygienist and, um, I mean, I'm not going to pick who's my best is, but I would say they're not always there's a different set of skills that is required for leadership and it's more of the soft skills.
It's more of the personality and it's more of, um, if I had to look at my leadership structure now and say, who are the best ones? It is the people that are comfortable getting out of their comfort zone and having a weird conversation, having a difficult conversation. They're not afraid to go to somebody and say, Hey, I got to, I kind of got to talk to you about something, you know, can we go into the office?
I got to talk to you about something that's going on and, and, um, yes, people have been telling me this. I want to hear your side of it. What's going on. People that can sort through conflict and you want to like hope that most people have these skills and they don't and that's like with one like I was mentioned like my program that I have that's like part of it like is.
Part of my, I have this program coming. I'm just going to spend it. Can I just talk about it now? It's going to run it is like, so I got a seven month program. It's called the omni practice total team success program. And what this is, is what we do. We we've helped the doctor pick their leads and we help them take to that transition and then it's all online contents that is slowly leaked out to fully systematize the practice.
So the first month is pick your leads, doctor. And then we bring the whole team into it. Now the team's looking at like, okay, the leadership team is watching leadership videos. How do I manage people? How do I, how do I engage people in conflict? How do I embrace and inspire people with a vision? So that they're getting that leadership and management training that first month.
While the other team members, they're starting to kind of work on things like what is a brand? What is a touch point? Why does everything we do matter? And we take it through this, the whole office through this course, and there's scheduled things and assignments in our hope to get this office completely systematized and running with the leadership within seven months.
And within that there is coaching. So I'm having monthly calls with the doctor. Every one of my leads is having a monthly call with the person on the, the, the client's leadership team. And it's been awesome, man. It's just been a game changer for these offices that are doing it right now. We've just rolled it out like three months ago.
We're only like, we're getting on our third month now, but man, it's cool to see the changes. It's, it's just when you bring in the team, that's when things change. And that's what I noticed because I was doing coaching for about four years. I had a client that said, Hey man, can my hygiene lead just talk to your hygiene lead?
I'm like, of course. And then it was like, do you mind if my front desk lead talks to your front desk lead? Yeah. And the office manager talking. And he's just like, I can't believe how helpful these calls are with your team. Cause one of the things that like my team does when they talk to other people, they can't believe how much my team does.
And they're like, this is great. Like, yeah, I want to do that. But you do the hiring and the firing, like, wait, what did you build? This is so cool. And it's, it's a lot different coming from somebody who's in that same position versus me telling another doctor, Hey, you should have your leads do this. And then they go to their lead and say, Hey, my Dr.
Edgerton says his lead does this. You should do it. Can you do this? That's what you're supposed to be doing. It's just a completely different way of motivation and implementation. That's it. It was like, it was a game changer for that one client. That's why we created this program. But yeah, it's like I was saying is people don't have that leadership skills.
They just, they don't have it in doctors. We don't have it a lot of times either. So it's, it's a game changer to give this to your team and, and my team has picked it up for me, but now that they're, my team leads are part of this program, they've watched these videos. They're like, these are great. Thank Man, why didn't we ever talk about this?
I'm like, we did, we talk about it all the time. They're like, no, no, not like this. And I'm like, well, okay. Well, I'm glad it, I'm glad it was beneficial. I kind of wish we would have done this earlier with you guys, you know, it's just training, man. It's just like, can we optimize every area of this practice?
And make everything the best it can be. And all it takes is a little intentionality and a little bit of time. But that's, that's the, that's the challenge. Is we don't have the time. Or we don't make the time. We don't think it's valuable time. And, and when we shut down our practice and do these things.
Officers, doctors say, Well, ah man, we just risked out on 3, 000 of production by shutting down. You know, they, they think of the negative and the opportunity cost. They don't think about what are you gaining. And I assure you, you're gaining way more value when you shut down your practice. And have some dedicated time.
Try to get your team to come in on a Saturday when they're supposed to be off. Yeah. Good luck with that. They don't want to do that. They're not going to bring their best self to that meeting. You know, it's gotta be when they're scheduled time. So, yeah, that was right. But that's answering your question.
Yeah. That's, uh, I don't even remember what the question
Michael: was. No, no, no, it's good to you, Michael. It's, uh, when they're, I guess when they're like, you know, kind of dropping the ball, but it's hard to find, I think, cause you mentioned, uh, you want to find people who can sort through conflict, leads. because sometimes we don't know how it is, if that person would be a good leader, they're just a good employee.
Right. At the very beginning. Um, but sometimes I feel it's hard to find people who can sort through conflict because sometimes I feel like I'm thinking, are you someone who wants to sort through the conflict and you were, Hey, tell me why you got fired. Or are you just wanting to know the gossip? Like you just want the drama.
You're like, Hey, why did they fire you? What's going on? Right. Like kind of thing. Right. Right. So. I guess, would it take more leadership training? On the owner to, to like know about themselves to be like, okay, uh, how can I make sure I do a good hire?
Paul: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what's really worked out in my practice as well is it's like the, the team is going to model the leader and my leads are going to model me as a leader.
So And I feel like I've always just kind of set a good example. Naturally, I've been very engaged in leadership training, leadership books, and just things like that stuff online. And Udemy is a great course. That's had got some good stuff on there. There's, there's so many cool things that you could do for like leadership training, but, um, if you don't have it yourself, it's going to be hard to get it in your team.
It's gonna be hard to recognize it. And I think like, just to give you like a nugget, like the big one for me is safety is, is, and I'm not talking about physical safety, like, and your team needs to feel safe, like psychologically, they need to feel that they can screw things up. They need to feel that they can come to you and ask you for help.
They need to feel that they can come to you and let you know when things aren't working out or things are going wrong or somebody's doing something. And they need to know that when they tell you that you're not going to get defensive and you're not going to make them feel guilty. You're not going to shame them.
You're not going to criticize them. You're going to be like, Oh, I thank you for, thank you for sharing that for me. That probably was a little hard to share. And that I think is a huge thing in man. I would say so many people just completely screw that up. We want to be the boss that we were taught on TV and growing up, how the boss is supposed to be.
And it's the big fat cat in the, in the chair with his feet up Boston, everywhere on telling people what to do. And that's not how good leadership works. It's about a collaboration. It's about leading with everybody. And it's not about scolding people, and, and that's leadership by intimidation, and that doesn't work.
You'll get the bare minimum out of your people if that's the way you lead, if they are scared of you. there's just certain things, like, if, if you have this open line of communication and your team feels safe. They will come to you and let you know what the problems are. And when you have a team member that's like, I'm getting really frustrated with this, nothing is, nothing is changing.
I think I'm going to go look for a new, new job. They don't ever get to that point. Because when they're frustrated, they come and let you know about it. And they, they don't have a reason to leave your practice. Now, am I saying I don't have any turnover? I absolutely do. Yeah, I'm just like everybody else.
But I, we, we keep good team members. And there's been a number of times where somebody has, I've done this one on one. I said, Hey, tell me what frustrates you. I say, have you ever thought of quitting? Is I just curious. I feel this from you. I feel its vibe. I can feel its energy that like you're not liking being here and people have been like, yeah, I have been.
It's weird that you noticed that. Tell me about that. Tell me more about that. And they tell you about it. And one, you now have a certain something that you have to fix something. You need to come up with a solution for, but to this person now feels validated and heard and appreciated. And wow, this person cares about me and my wellbeing.
I mean, if you don't want your team members to leave, that's the way you need to lead. If you don't want them to leave. it's a lot and it starts at the top, just like everything. The doctor needs to be the first one to be trained. So everybody needs it. Everybody needs it. I mean, it's not just for work.
It's for life. These are life skills. These are not just work stuff. Yeah.
Michael: No. Yeah. You know what, Paul? I never thought about that when it came to safety. How, like, you got to be okay with it because I feel like we were always, you know, we Just in general, in school, everywhere, we're always brought up to like, never disappoint, right?
Like, never disappoint, you gotta get the good stuff, like, all the time and everything like that. And so when you did, remember you'd like, go home and your report card was like, CCD or whatever, right? Maybe like an F or whatever, and you're like, how can I forge my parents signature, right? Like, you're like, how can I escape this?
So you're thinking that. I feel like throughout the whole process, especially when you're an employee and even when you're an owner to your employees, I feel like that you're like, I don't want this point, but I got to look like a leader, but you're really just looking like a boss. You know what I mean?
Instead of a leader, like you said, interesting. So that's what it would be called safety. They have to feel safer than that.
Paul: It's a, it's an idea from Harvard business, uh, maybe psychologist. I don't know what she's doing. Her name's Amy Edmondson. She's the one who coined that.
And she got that from, she did a study on hospitals. And they looked at like really well communicating teams and really poor communicating teams. And they said, which one of these teams is going to have more adverse events at the hospital, meaning Which one's going to give the wrong medication and give the wrong dosage to a patient.
They're like, well, it's got to be the poor communicating team. It's definitely going to be that. It ended up being the better communicating team that made more mistakes. And like, whoa, what's that about? That is not what we thought was going to happen. And then they dug into it deeper and it wasn't. It was the bad team that was making more mistakes, but they weren't reporting them.
They were hiding them. Because they weren't safe to report. And there was no safety in making a mistake. It was not, let's learn from this. It was, you're in big trouble. So they didn't tell anybody. The
Michael: bad communication team, or?
Paul: Yeah, so it was the bad communication team that actually made more mistakes.
But in the study, they just weren't reporting them. They didn't feel safe to report them. So they came back and they, she came back and did some more studies and more surveys and stuff. And that's what they found out. They're like, oh my gosh. this is all about safety. They don't feel safe admitting to the failures.
So it's because of the leadership. It's because of the dynamic created on this team. So that she wrote a whole book about it. It's really interesting.
Michael: Yeah. So then how can we like, I guess, mention that to our team at the very beginning, like you got hired on like. Without telling them like, yeah, make a ton of mistakes.
It's cool. You know, but like, Hey, it's okay to make. Yeah. How would you say that?
Paul: That's something I do with my team. I do. We have, we have onboarding videos that do it now, but I used to sit down with everybody. I said, Hey, this is my, this is what I want you to know about me in this practice. I do understand that everybody is human and we all make mistakes.
I want you to 100 percent always be comfortable telling me if you make a mistake, if you need some more training, if there's something you're not understanding, or if you're seeing somebody do something that you think I should know about. I want you to feel comfortable telling me about it and the only way that we can do that is we, we have this mantra here and we call it grace over guilt is that something goes wrong.
You drop the ball on a patient. I don't care who did it. I don't care how it happened. Okay, this happened guys. What do you guys think? What can we do so this doesn't happen again? We are not shaming that person because if you shame that person. You're not going to find out about it and you're never going to be able to address it.
So we always just say grace over guilt. And that's hard sometimes, especially when, um, somebody is coming after you as a leader telling it's you, Hey, you, this is your fault. You got to go. Yeah, you're right. You know what it is. Even if deep down in your heart, you're like, this is not my fault. You, you gotta, you gotta look at how you respond because psychological safety, it's, it's a lot like, It's like trust in a relationship, you know, you can break that in one dumb mistake.
You can break that trust, years of trust that you built and same thing with psychological safety. You could blow up on a team member or get really, really critical and really make them feel bad. And you just broke that whole thing. They are never going to share with you ever again. Because you now have made it unsafe and when the team is unsafe, the only way to stay safe in that kind of environment is just to be quiet.
And that's the whole thing with quiet with when people are quiet, we don't know because it's silence. It's an invisible act. We don't see it. And it's one of those things that it's just somebody comes and quits and you're like, wow, I can't believe they quit. They're like my best team member. Why did you quit?
And then they say, I don't know. I just might, I just ready for something new or just, I think I need less hours because they're not going to tell you the truth. You've trained them not to because you, the way that you've approached them as a leadership, as a leadership style. So it's, that's the problem is you miss out on all that collaboration, all that good stuff that can come out of your practice, because you're getting upset and mad with people with their decisions.
And what I see in most offices, man, people will get mad at their teams for doing things, not the right way. They have never designated what the right way is. They have never made a system or protocol around it, yet they're upset. You know, should I address this with a team member? I can't believe he or she did this.
And I always say to them, I say, well, what's the way they're supposed to do it? Well, I think they should do it like this. I'm like, well, do they know that? Yeah, everybody knows that. Well, how do they know that? Have you ever like put in a document? Have you ever trained? Have you ever talked about it? No. Do you think I should do that?
Yeah. I do. I think you should do that before you, before you start getting critical of their performance. Why don't you just, why don't you make the rules, make the rules of the game before you're telling somebody they're losing at it. we don't do that. We expect everyone to know what we know and do everything in our way.
And that's just our natural human perspective that we think everybody thinks like us and has the same values as us. And I think part of getting older and becoming wiser as you realize that we're all different and that's cool. We can all be different.
Michael: Yeah. Uh, sure, man. And our memories. All right. You can tell him like, yeah, I told him to do that three years ago.
And you're like, you sure? I think so. Like, you know, I don't even remember, like, how can I remember it kind of thing, you know? Interesting. So real quick, if you can, man, break, I know you did already, but break down to us your program that you have, or this, it's a whole
Paul: training course. Yeah. So it's a seven month training course where we've, we've come up away with me and my leads.
How can we implement this in somebody's office? And this is for, um, if you have a larger, I'm saying larger office, if you've got a team that's large enough for a few leads, it's a great program for you. If it's something where you've got a really small team, we do have a program that's just, there's no coaching involved.
It's still got all the videos. You still get to have all these different, there's eight different tracks for different positions in the office. Um, that would be like doctor associate, the four leads, the office manager. And front desk hygienist and leaving somebody out assistance them. We didn't forget you guys.
We like you assistance. there's eight different tracks, but every month. There's a set of videos to watch, there's some worksheets, and there's assignments. And I can just tell you, like, for the first month, it's all about leads, it's leadership for the doctor, let's decide your lead system, let's talk about your goals, let's figure out where you're going long term.
Second month, the team comes in, and we're talking about how do we stay on time, how do we implement this scheduling protocol that I like to do, it's called block scheduling, it works great, everybody can follow it, and it makes nice, easy days that are productive, and we work on how can we get more new patients from our existing patients.
And then as a third month, um, hygiene's working on going through cases together with the doctor. So we're all calibrated and hygiene's working on verbiage so they can sell more adult fluoride and sealants. And then at the same time, the adult fluoride and sealants relies a lot about insurance coverage.
So that now the front desk that same month, they're working on like polishing up their insurance verification systems. So it goes through every element of the practice on a sequence schedule. So that it's not overwhelming and it's something that you can stay on top of. And it's not just like throwing everything at once.
Like you can't go in this program and watch all seven months of videos. They don't release. They slowly release every 30 days. And, and you got to get through the first stuff before you get the next stuff comes out. So I love the way it's arranged. We were hosting it on a site called Kajabi.
That's just a really nice platform. I started it on Trainual. There were some things I did not like about train you all for at least for what I was trying to do. So I moved everything over to Kajabi and it's just such a cool platform, man. It's, uh, I I'm super proud of it. I'm super proud of what's coming out of it.
And what's cool now is we're in the third month with our first group. cause I didn't want to open it up to everyone until we got a little bit through it. Is I'm not done with it yet. I have the plan, but I'm still recording videos because I just had to be a few, I have to be a month ahead of everybody else, you know, cause I got to get these videos done before they come out, but the whole program's there.
It's the outline is done and it's just, it's turning out so cool, man. So, I mean, if anyone wants any information on that, uh, you can go to dentalpracticeheroes. com heroes is plural, or you can go to dphcourse. com. DPH is for dental practice heroes.
Michael: awesome. Awesome, man. That's exciting. Good stuff. So if anybody wanted to reach out to you, ask more questions, have any questions or concerns or anything like that, where can they reach out to you?
Paul: Yeah. Dentalpracticeheroes. com. There's a contact form on dphcourse. com. There's a contact form. You can get in touch with me. If you wanted to possibly do the coaching program, there is a scheduling link. You can go click on their schedule, a 30 minute call with me for free. I will discuss with you whether I think you would be a good person for the program.
Like some people I've talked to, we've got eight. People enrolled in this right now. And some of them, I had some other people that wanted to enroll in. And I said, you know what, I don't know, I'm not sure this is the right program for you right now. And we went into one on one coaching, you know, so I can talk to you about what I can offer and what my team can offer.
I've got some associate coaches that are doing coaching at a lower price point than I am too. And we got something for everybody. So if you're unsure, you want help and you're like, I don't know where to start. Uh, do sign up with a call for me. I'm happy to help. And like I said, like I am to the point where.
I doing things because I love doing them and I love seeing offices change and I love being part of that. love. Other dentists getting to the same point that I've gotten to in a shorter time because of they're not going through all the, the negative things and the mistakes that I went through.
So I just love helping people. So reach out to me, happy to talk to anyone. Uh, dentalpracticeheroes. com or dphcourse. com.
Michael: Nice. So that's going to be in the show notes below. So if you want to go in the show notes below, look for Paul's name and then click on his links. And Paul, thank you so much for being with me.
It's been a pleasure and we'll hear from you soon. Yeah. Thanks Mike.
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