19: Alignment in ASTRO

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success. When I was working as an associate right at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you. You have helped build my marketing mind to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And today one of the secrets I'm going to give you is the business pillars we use within our executive team and our organization. We call it Astronomy. Alignment, Support, Transparency, Results, Ownership. And these five different business pillars help us to solve some of our biggest challenges. And I'm just going to take an episode to go through each one and you're welcome to steal them and use them, change them up to meet your organization's needs. But we'll start with the first one, which is Alignment. You know, as I said in other episodes, we live in a knowledge based economy where people have the flexibility to work with who they want and where they want. No longer do we live in a time in the industrial age where you're in the factory and the amount of time you put in is critical. In fact, I find every day that some staff and team members can get something done in 15 minutes and others it takes two hours. The capabilities are different and the ability for team members to find another opportunity or decide that they're going to go backpacking through Thailand and, you know, work off of a laptop and blog or help support people remotely. There's just so much flexibility and opportunity in the world today that it's critical for us to take care of. And as we're talking about in this episode, align with our team members. We have to remember that our industry is like every other industry. Commoditization is happening all the time. What do I mean by that? We have competitors coming into the space, constantly putting pressure to bring prices down for consumers. As a consumer, we love it when this is happening in other industries. We love how cell phone prices have just continued to crash and it forces these competitors to come up with new and brilliant ideas. And everything tends to bifurcate out. Either successful groups are creating better and better experiences where they can charge higher prices, developing new technologies, et Cetera, or they're figuring out how to bring those lower prices in in an operationally efficient way. So we love it when it's happening in other industries because it really helps us as consumers. But man, it's painful when it's happening in the industry you're working in. So what are the things that we can use to help us always be successful? Well, I love what Dan Sullivan says, which is the three things that can commoditized our leadership, relationships and creativity. And all three of these things really around the human brain, the human mind and our ability to connect with other humans. And I think alignment sits right in between all three of these because alignment's required to ensure that the entire team, our entire asset base, if you will, knows the direction we should be rowing, that we should be working towards. Now this seems obvious, but misalignment can happen so easily. Humans are so complex. So you know how, how can misalignment happen? Well, one of the easiest ways is just lack of clarity. We see something in our head, we maybe we have some experience around. We communicate to the team in a way that we feel is very clear. Hey, we're going this direct. It's going to be amazing. We're going to start doing this every day. Won't that be awesome? And the team just doesn't quite understand it. They don't have the full picture. A little lack of clarity, walking out of a meeting and everyone nodding their head and everyone hearing something different creates misalignment. Obviously with humans we have feelings. Unresolved feelings can create misalignment. Resistance to a project. Maybe we don't feel supported fully to reach the result. So we're dragging our feet or we're just feeling this lack of clarity again of how do we get to this end result when we only have this level of resources. All of these things, if not fully worked on, fully expressed, create misalignment. Now here's the painful part. Alignment takes effort, like a lot of effort, consistent effort. You almost need to have this sixth sense to constantly be watching for and on the prowl for alignment. Is alignment really there? You can't assume alignment. You have to work for and drive towards and be ambitiously, ferociously trying to drive alignment. Now if you're an A type personality, somebody who likes to just get things done, alignment can feel like a waste of time. It can feel like the effort you're making is all this soft, touchy feely, sit down, talk through where they're not feeling the clarity and where they have some unresolved feelings and where they don't feel supported. And it just feels like, man, come on guys, we just want to move forward. Let's just go. I've already told you this 10 times. What more can I say, right? So all of us with this a type personality can get very frustrated. And what we'd really love is just to have team members around us that could read our brains, know exactly what we want, and have all the capability and the ambition to solve our dreams for us. I'm going to be a big bubble buster today and tell you that that world doesn't exist. That alignment is going to have to be a key component if you really want to scale and grow. And you're going to have to do it at every level of the organization, of course, starting at the top. I'm going to summarize and reword a quote from Stephen Covey that basically says you can pay for their hands and their back, but you must earn their hearts and their brain. And with the economy that we're in, knowledge based economy built on humans, we have to constantly be looking for ways to how do we earn their hearts and their brain? And it's not going to come from just paying them more here. Maybe if I just pay somebody or if I hire this person and pay them a lot of money, then I don't have to waste all this time on reaching alignment. Alignment's the ultimate capability in any company. Can you imagine a set of humans all understanding the vision of the CEO, of the owners of the clinical leadership and all putting in their best effort, whatever level that is, to reach that goal. But the problem is, is in that communication, it's so easy to get lost. But man, team members can feel when there's alignment. If you've got a turnover issue, it's an alignment issue, I can tell you that. It's number one. Look at where you have alignment issues. You know, you always hear of kind of the nightmare of these husband and wife teams running practices together that should not be happening. That should be some of the best practices out there. But really, if you ask the staff, where are the issues? It's misalignment between the husband and the wife, right? If they were completely on the same page, then the team would love, love, love, love working in those practices in those organizations. And there's plenty of those out there too. But more often than not you see this misalignment and the reason it happens most often in kind of marriage business situations is because alignment is assumed. Hey, we're. She'll Take care of this, I'll take care of that and it'll just kind of all work out. And man, that misalignment creates so many issues and turnover issues. If you've got a sliver of misalignment between two leaders, executive leaders, clinical leaders, clinical and front office leaders, it is a blinding light for everyone below them. What you might feel is like, yeah, we're not quite on the same page, but you know, it'll all work out is absolutely confusing and overwhelming to everyone below that. So I want, I want you to think a little bit about some of the bigger issues you're trying to solve right now in your dso. And how would taking the time to get to greater alignment help? And I know that's not easy, I know you'd rather say here, you know, read this book and everything gets solved. Do this marketing thing on your website and everything gets solved. This is much, much more difficult than any kind of marketing strategy or any kind of tactical issue. This is really digging into the human components of the asset that you're building. You know, think about your specialties. If you've got specialties within your practices, it is a lot of work to get alignment between each of the specialties, general and specialties. If you've got different departments and you've got OPS and you've got marketing, you got accounting and clinical, how many issues are getting driven because OPS doesn't completely understand or marketing doesn't completely understand clinical's needs, or clinical doesn't understand what marketing's trying to accomplish, Accounting doesn't understand marketing or OPS or hr, you know, so each of those, if you just drive alignment, drove alignment, what would that do to start solving problems? I can tell you that if you go kind of below and say, no, we're going to solve it down here at the, at the team member level, man, that gets really expensive and really difficult. But if you take on the leadership issues and get alignment there, then you can solve a thousand things with just one bullet. Recently I was at a conference and sitting at a table and had an orthodontist who was talking about the amount of turnover that he was having on his team. And I asked him a little bit more about it and it was, they were in a practice with his pediatric general, his pediatric partner. So you have this pediatric staff and then you have this ortho staff and he was having all of this turnover on his team. And so I started asking around alignment. These guys have been partners for a long time. I said, do you all have the same goal. Do you have one metric or are you trying to accomplish something? And he's trying to accomplish something and then quickly and very importantly, does the team have one goal? Is the office manager of the pediatric practice being measured by something different than the office manager or manager over the ortho side? Do they have one goal? Because if they don't, holy smokes, you're going to have friction and rubbing that is going to create turnover on both sides. I love what a business coach Dan Chase once told our team. He said, you use the term team, but are you a swim team or are you a football team? Football team. There's one score and if things aren't going well, whether you're on defense or offense, you're on the line or you're the quarterback, you are all in it together and you can have people who are individually failing, but at the end of the game you fail or win as a team versus a swim team. Yes, you practice together, you might work together. I guess in a relay situation you're even on the same team. But in reality, most of the time you're swimming for your own gold medal, for your own silver medal. And so even though you're a team, you're really a group of individuals all trying to accomplish different goals. So we have to ask ourselves when we say that we're on a team, what kind of team are we and do we have one score and one goal that we're all working towards? If so, we're going to have awesome alignment that layered in with some really good communication is going to be incredibly create incredible momentum within the organization. So hopefully this secret is helpful to you as you think about your organization. Where's that next place of alignment that needs to happen to take you to the next level and to solve a myriad of problems that you're having to deal with. Take on one issue, solve a bunch of problems. Hopefully this is helpful. If you have additional questions, come on to our private Facebook group on DSO Secrets on Facebook. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook @DSO Secrets and get answers and resources to some of your most challenging questions. If you want to get a copy of the seven secrets of any DSO, go to our website at dsosecrets.com and we will get that emailed to you. Remember, don't go at this alone. Let us be your team while you build your team.