148: Sum Total of What We Choose to Tolerate

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. This is Ken Kaufman, your host today and I have no guests today. I've got a topic that I just wanted to tackle and share some thoughts with you about all on my own. It starts with this concept. The principle here behind this, or the concept is that each one of us as human beings, we have the power to drive change in ourselves. And we have the power and the ability to try to influence change in others around us. When we don't like something that's currently in our control, but we don't do anything about it, we let it just keep going as is. When we know it should be better or it should be changed in some way, we're choosing to tolerate it. Even if we're ignoring it, it means we're choosing to tolerate it and allow it to keep going on. And the thought process here is that we end up becoming the sum total of everything that we choose to tolerate. And as I've evaluated myself, I've been thinking about this quite a bit and I've got an example I'll share with you in just a second. I've written some notes down because I've got some examples and things I want to make sure that I cover here in this episode. To give one example, if we have an employee working for us, and let's say that their attitude or culture fit, or maybe just their overall performance is not where it needs to be, it's below the expectation that we have set in our mind. This is making the assumption that all of the expectations are realistic and not over aggrandized. And if we have this employee and they're just not meeting the standard that we have and that we hold other employees to, if we choose to do nothing about it, it means we're choosing to tolerate it. Another way that I've heard this said, it's I think, a very similar principle, maybe a sister principle to this concept. That we're the sum total of what we choose to tolerate is that silence is acceptance. If that employee doesn't receive any feedback, they're not given any instruction on how to change priority or how to think about things differently, or how to potentially meet the standard that you've set for them, then our silence is acceptance, meaning we accept the way that they're currently doing things. Now, going back to the very first principle, we have the power to change ourselves and we have the power to try to influence others, to make changes and to make improvements, or to try on new processes, or to do things differently. As I think about this, I came up with four reasons and if you can come up with more, jump on over to DSF Secrets. Let's have a chat about this. I'd love to hear your perspective, but I came up with basically four reasons why, at least for me, and I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this. Why I've chosen to tolerate things in the past, probably far beyond a point where I should have tolerated the first one is sometimes just don't have the bandwidth or the time and energy to be able to jump in and tackle it and address it. Sometimes tolerating that is fine for the time being because there are bigger fish to fry, so to speak, or bigger fires to go and put out inside your organization. Another the second reason that I thought about just as I evaluated myself is there are sometimes other things that I just want to that it's more important that I pay attention to. So it's kind of like the first one, where if the first one is I just don't have the time to take it on. In this case, I I have time, but I'm choosing to go and make change and lead change in some other part of the business or some other part of my life. The third one is sometimes as leaders, we're afraid that we're going to be viewed as not being compassionate or not giving people enough grace or giving people enough room to do the job that they've been hired to do and maybe come up with their own ways to do it, and maybe we'll come across as a bit dictatorial or unkind or not compassionate. And so sometimes as leaders, we worry about how employees are going to look at us personally as opposed to how they're going to engage with us professionally and help drive the business forward in the right way. All of this being under the premise that tolerating something indicates that it should be better, or we have an expectation that it should be better and we would prefer not to tolerate the current state. We'd rather see the current state change and then the last one, and this may be the hardest thing of all to overcome as a leader is I think sometimes we don't address this. We don't address the what we're unhappy with and what we're tolerating and what we want to be better. Because sometimes we are afraid as leaders that it's going to expose our incompetence or maybe our lack of knowledge in a certain area. And I'll give you a quick example of this. Since the end of last year, we've been in a high growth mode at CDP and things have been moving really fast. My accounting and finance teams have just been working hard to integrate affiliations to push through our annual audit, bring on a new banking relationship with some pretty complicated reporting requirements. There's a lot that's come on the team. And our monthly close process to get financial statements issued to the business leaders and our equity partners and so on, that was slipping. It was no longer at the 15th day of the month, it was slipping to the 20th day of the month. We even had one month where we basically closed and then started the next month's close because we closed right at the end of the following month. So it was like a 30 day close time period. And I remember thinking about this and looking at this and saying, what is going on? What is causing this to happen? And there were certain things and tasks because we were moving so fast that I didn't know anything about. And I was afraid to show up and say, hey, I don't understand what this process is and why it's prioritized where it is. Can we talk that through? I felt a little embarrassed or a little ashamed that I wasn't into those details. Truth be told, there's no way that I could have been into those details. And that's why I have a team and why all of you have teams and organize them that way. But I just felt maybe I felt like I might appear as an imposter or like I was incompetent in some way. And so what we did was to basically change the tune of this is I went to the team and I said, hey, let's change things up here a little bit. Instead of doing things the way we've always done it, maybe there are some things we can do that will allow us to move faster. And so the two places that we attacked were our accounts payable closing and the our company credit card. The kind of the expense reimbursement program, but via credit card program that generally those take a long time to close because we're waiting for invoices to come in or we're waiting for employees to indicate which practice an expense was for or what the expense was for to submit their receipts. And so I suggested a shortcut for each of those two processes. And rather than leaving those open and closing those weeks into the closing process, we, I said, hey, by the end of week one, I want those closed. Let's just do whatever it takes, put in the appropriate journal entries, which there are reversing journal entries that happen the next month to continue to drive accuracy in the financial statements and so on and so forth. And we said this is a priority, this has to happen by this date and this has to occur. And the amazing thing is with that little bit of leadership and that little bit of guidance to the employees, they did it. And not only did they do it, they crushed it. And not only did they crush it, but they went from almost a 30 day close down to a 15 day close, which was incredible to see that turnaround in just one month after all the very intense things and projects and time consuming efforts in so many other areas of the business. And the most interesting thing is now that I've chosen not to tolerate it and now I'm putting in their mindset that they don't need to tolerate it anymore either, we now are seeing ways to accelerate the closing process even more to possibly get down to 12 days, maybe 10 days. I'll say this out loud, I've ultimately would love to see it get to five days. If my team is listening, they'll cringe at that at this very moment. But I think there's a possibility and there's a way to do it. And there it all comes down to our mindset. It comes down to we're each the sum total of what we choose to tolerate. And if we choose to not tolerate anymore and to lead and to make change. And it means we've got to expose ourselves a little bit as a leader and, and own the fact that we were letting things go along a certain way. And now we want to change it and we want to get our teams on board with the change. And so I really wanted to do this episode for this one reason. I want to give you permission as a DSO leader to stop tolerating whatever it is that's bothering you the most inside your organization. And I'm giving you permission to come up with your game plan for how to stop tolerating might be one quick discussion. It might be getting an entire team aligned around a whole brand new process. It might be some employees that ultimately you've just tolerated for too long and you've invested in tremendously and they're just not fitting in your organization. And the beautiful thing there is as you own that and as you choose to not tolerate it, and if that employee ends up not being part of your organization anymore, what happens is that employee is now free to go find an organization that they fit better in, and you're able to find an employee that fits better with your organization. I've always talked about employee departures and those things. It's just like a big ship sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. Let's say it leaves from New York City, that's headed to the uk and some employees are halfway on the trip and they say, you know what? I really want to be on the ship anymore. I want to go to Africa, I want to go to Indonesia, I want to go to Hawaii, whatever their destination is. Well, there's nothing wrong with getting on a different ship, and there's nothing wrong with people who like where your ship's going and want to get on that ship. And it's just part of the journey of building a business and of being DSO leaders. So again, I'm giving you permission. Think about what it is you're tolerating right now that you don't want to tolerate anymore. And do what you do best, lead through it, go and lead, change and drive change inside your organization. And then guess what, you don't have to tolerate it anymore. And then the law of constraint tells us that, or maybe we should change it to. The law of tolerating tells us that once we get rid of whatever that noisiest thing is that we don't want to tolerate anymore. Once we solve for that, whatever the solution needs to be, then there's going to be ultimately a new thing that we're tolerating that starts to bubble up to the top and we say we don't want to tolerate that anymore. Now let's go take that on. It'd be fair to, to make an analogy or to make this comparison between what we tolerate, what we choose to tolerate, I should say, and the general constraint theory in our business. Because if we're choosing to tolerate it, it means it's probably something that is causing a constraint inside the organization. So we're the sum total of what we choose to tolerate, hopefully. My example, I'm trying to be a little bit transparent and vulnerable and talk to you about some places where we were struggling and how we chose to not tolerate some of that anymore. I hope you take this and find ways to continue to drive change in your organization. Create great DSOs. Keep building up what we know as the dental industry. Many, many thanks to you for joining today. This is a wrap on We Are all the sum total of what we choose to tolerate.

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