Keeping Your Word

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Welcome to Million Dollar Dentistry with your host, Gary Katie, brought to you by Next Level Practice. Next Level Practice is the leader in dental practice management. In fact, they are the best in the world at creating happy teams that implement sustainable results. Your host, Gary Katie welcomes you to this podcast as he discusses the common concerns, challenges, and shares his decades of experience in empowering dentist and dental teams to go from good to world class. Gary Katie is a visionary voice of Next Level practice and has for the past 20 years interrupted the status quo of the dental world. He continues to bring national attention to the oral systemic connection and believes in the complete health dentistry model. He is a powerful educator and advocate for dentistry, dentist and dental teams. He is inspired every day by the courage and personal successes of the doctors and team members he has the privilege of working with.

Hi, Gary.

Amber, we're back.

We are, we are. It's so good to chat with you again.

Yep, you bet.

I.

Go ahead.

I'm sorry, Yeah, I was just going to say, last time we were talking about being complete with our pasts, so we're going to head on into this and talk about keeping your word. And I believe this is in chapter six of your raise your healthy deserve level book, which if someone would like a copy of, we'll be happy to get that to them. We'll let you know at the end of the episode how you can get a copy.

That's great. Yeah. No, if you're looking to build a happy team that implements sustainable results, this is the tool. If you're a dentist, you can't work without a handpiece. But if you're a team leader and a manager of people, you can't live without this tool called Management by Agreement. And I'm, you know, just blown away. I'm a control freak. So I'm like, how do we create if. You know, I always say if people just did what I wanted them to do, when I wanted them to do it, how I wanted them to do it, Amber, I would not have to drink, right? It was the cause of my drinking. Like, if people just. I mean, if they just did it the way I wanted them to do it and they did it consistently, man, my life would be better. And then I. I invented this tool, found this tool, invented it, and it was a game changer. Because when you can create a culture of agreements, what happens is you take out the. Out of the emotion or the feelings or the one person thought this and another person thought that, the interpretations go away. And it. You remove all that and you get it down to the facts. And when you can manage by facts versus emotion, you can really. It just is or it isn't. And so it's much more black and white. Whereas when I first got into dentistry and I, I started poking around and said, well, how do we manage people and how do we get them to do what we want them to do and follow systems and you know, show up on time and all these things. Every upset, Amber, or inefficiency in a practice is rooted in one of two areas. It's either a missing agreement or a broken agreement. So a missing agreement is, you know, I have the expectation that our morning huddle, you have to be in your chair ready to go for a morning huddle at 7:45 in the a.m. and the team thinks it's 8 o' clock. And no one's ever created the specific measurable outcome of like, who's going to do it, what are you going to do and by when you're going to do it. So those are the three elements of an agreement. Who's doing it? The team, what are they doing? They're showing up at 7:45 in their chairs, ready to go, read their charts, prepared for the day, have their coffee, went to the bathroom, you know, have their, their scrubs on and ready to go. And, and the by when is starting yesterday this was the agreement that we have in place. Now all of a sudden you have that agreement and let's say a person is violating that. So you'll always have the one person that's going to press the boundaries, one person that's not going to operate by agreement and then they that then you're dealing with a broken agreement and usually broken agreements go avoided, there's no accountability and then it goes out of existence. So we're going to unpack this a little bit today on the elements of agreements, the levels of agreements and how to correct it when agreements are being broken.

I love that Gary. So I like that this is one of the core foundational parts of working with next level is learning this type of management style or communication style. And you talk about integrity along with that as well, which I like when you talked about that. Integrity is not just about honesty and telling the truth and that kind of thing. It's about wholeness. And I think this brings a wholeness to your, to your management style, to your relationships and all of that. When you are operating from a place of agreement, because it's not an agreement, doesn't happen just in one way. I'm not giving you direction in the sense of you will do this, this, this, and this. It's. I have spoken to you and, and we've made an agreement and we shook hands kind of, you know, that kind of concept. I love that part of it. It's a whole, it's a whole concept. As opposed to a style where you're micromanaging everything.

Well, yeah, because. Well, also, what's underneath this is this concept of I love this quote. I'm going to say it twice because it's a little hard the first time you hear it. So get ready to listen. She convinced against her will is of the same opinion still. All right, so it's a mind bender, but stay with me here. She convinced against her will. So her will or his will is to be on time. Or if it's, she doesn't care about agreements. Like, there is no commitment to having the agreements. And you're putting agreements in. Into a world of a person that doesn't agree to agreements. Well, you're going to end up battling with this person forever and spending all your time and energy that's going to go to this person. Because underneath it all, they never agreed that they're going to operate from agreement. And so where I learned this was, I used to fly to practices and I used to tell everybody, here's what we need to do. They would say yes, they would mean no, and I would leave and so would the results. But the missing element was I didn't get to their core of what they believed. And when you start with what people believe and agree to and then you tap into that agreement, you're not forcing them to do things, you're just guiding them. You know, my, my philosophy around leadership is leaders don't force agendas or results. They simply remind the team what has already been committed to. That's very different than, you know, how I, I, you know, I, I go docs, I go team leads. How often? Like, what is your biggest frustration? Well, I gotta keep saying the same thing over and over. Well, you don't have an infrastructure, you don't have a systematic process. The team's not bought into an accountable outcome per day. And inside of that, they don't ha. There's no culture of agreements here. It's how people feel. And when you're dealing, when you're running a business on feeling, you can't pay your bills on that. You can't, you know, charge out vacation time with that. This is why you don't have time, money. This is where frustration is. You know, there's three promises of this program that this, this tool provides. Debt freedom, frustration freedom, and time freedom. Those three things are the benefits of managing by agreement. And by the way, the hardest thing here, Amber, is when the business owner is managing the agreements. You see, it's not until I put somebody, a team leader between me and the team, because they have patience. They don't have the purse strings. Like, you know, if you're having a bad month and you're operating with that level of frustration and somebody's not doing what they need to do and you're losing money because of how they're dealing with it, like, that becomes the forefront of the interaction rather than what's the agreement? What is the promise you made? You're not hitting that. We're your partner in helping you get that. Here's the plan. Do you agree to the plan? And then, you know, did you schedule the time to get training, to get better at what you're doing? So all those elements are a flip the script paradigm that most people don't operate from, and that's why they're always pulling the team up the hill.

Absolutely. And that's the. One of the. I think key things that we talk about too, is decentralizing yourself from. From the middle of your business so that you can do the things that you're good at. And each person having the right people in the right places doing the right things.

Yep.

Makes a huge difference in creating happy teams.

Well, with the right measures. You know, so often what doctors fail to do or practice owners fail to do is say, I want to work 46 weeks a year. I want to work three days a week. I want to make a million dollars in profit. Well, you just run the numbers and reverse engineer and create the algorithm of what you need to do per day. And then what you do is you bring that to your team and you say team. Do you agree, you know, team member, appointment coordinator. Do you agree to fill the doctor schedule to 5,000 a day? And do you agree to fill the hygiene schedule. Hygiene schedule to fifteen hundred dollars a day? And do you agree to get bonused on that if when you do that? Like, is that all cool with you? Like, we don't tell people, hey, you need to fill a schedule of when you tell people what to do? Nobody likes to be told what to do. But if you figured out what the algorithm is and then you ask them, are you willing to make sure that by the end of each day, the doctor had 5000 in her schedule, 1500 in each of the hygienist schedule. Do you agree to that? Yes, I do now. And do you agree like you should be rewarded for when you do that? Yes. That's awesome. Great. Do you agree that I can only pay that if we collect a certain dollar amount? Yes, I agree. Now you know the makeup of our business model. Now you know your position. You've agreed to it. Now here's the way we're going to operate with you. You raise your hand when you want help and need help and we're also going to support you when we see something. And are you going to be open to having that dialogue and feedback? Yes, I am. Now you have full agreement around how to manage this person and you're not bumping into their, their resistance or their defiance or their unwillingness. Very different to operate with a team of people like that.

Absolutely. Because when that. Because it is truly a balance of being in partnership as opposed to being. And I love that our organizational chart is about communication and not about who's above who, that type of thing that we use. It's like it's about who, how we communicate with one another and where the levels of communication are as opposed to. And that's because we can, we operate so well on agreements.

Well, it's that plus we also understand that there's an interdependency that, you know, in a dental practice, if you don't schedule right well, the hygienist and doctor, they don't have an opportunity to do what they need to do. And if the assistant and the hygienist don't educate properly, the patients don't accept treatment and you know, they have to go to a treatment coordinator and the treatment coordinator has to do all the enrollment and that's the wrong person. They should just be really finding a way to fit the treatment into the patient's time and money and get that done. And so when everybody understands that each person holds the same value and that, that the machine doesn't work with what with, without one person, all of a sudden there's a different level of responsibility that you have not only for yourself, but for your fellow, for your colleagues and your peers, but also for your patient base. So it really transforms how people relate because a lot of people, you know, a challenge with this, they're very self centered, they're very, you know, for themselves by themselves on a team. And it's the I in team, if you will. It's like I am over here and you're over there. You. This actually creates an interdependency of collaboration versus competition or isolation. It's really powerful and I love that.

Because it's like you realize the importance of, of your teammates. You realize that your, what you do and your success is based on what they can do. And so it's not them doing things for you, but it's doing things with you to create this amazing, you know, team amazing sustainable results that happen when you are all working together that way. Yeah.

And then becomes self policing, if you will. I don't even like using the word policing, but it's like self responsibility. It's like how people identify their role and how they see their responsibility in the greater good of what's actually happening in the practice. And it's just putting a system in place. You know, so many doctors, this isn't like theory. This is a systematic step by step process that gets installed and once it's installed, then it's managed by a person. And there's three types of agreements. It's the one, one with yourself, there's one with others and one with your morals and values. And I want to unpack these a little bit here because you know, we now know that there's. All right. Management by agreement is just to review. So far it is the root cause for sustainable implementation and happy teams. It's the root for empowerment and workability. Every upset or inefficiency comes from either a broken agreement or a missing agreement. So that's what we've covered so far. Right. And then we also distinguish that if you don't get to the core of somebody of what they really agree to, you're going to be bumping into them and you're going to get resistance and defiance. So you're going to get unwillingness. That's how it's going to show up. It's going to show up in procrastination, poor performance, isolation, defiance. You say black, they do white. It's like all that stuff that is like BS and don't accept that anymore. Right. So now you have all that and then we know the three components of an agreement. Who's going to do it? What are you going to do by when will you get it done? All managed by a team leader that the doctor practice owner doesn't manage this, the team leader does and then the team leader manages it. And then you create a culture. Culture meaning there's a sender of receiver of agreements. So what you'll find is a team member will say, well what's the agreement around that? That's how you know you got a receiver of agreements. Because if you're just the giver of agreements, that's still one sided. Agreements are two sided. Now let's get into the three levels of agreements. And this is a very powerful distinction. Very, very powerful. So the first one is one with yourself. So we, and we're, we're the worst at this one. And this is where you don't keep your word with yourself. I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to go to the gym three days a week. I, that's my word with myself. Nobody else knows that I put that agreement in place, only me. And I just, I, I just go, yep, didn't do it. Yep, didn't do it. And then I beat myself up. And then there's no self love. And then, and then it becomes the actual thing that I'm trying to do which is create a healthy body and lose weight and have more longevity. I actually eat because I'm beating myself up and that's how I numb myself. And you actually gain more weight. So it's like the opposite happens. So just being aware of an honoring your word with yourself allows you to start noticing, oh, I broke my agreement. I didn't make keep my promise, acknowledging yourself, saying, you know what? I said I was going to do it three days a week, I did it two days a week. Being self compassionate, not beating yourself up and getting back on the horse, asking for help, raising your hand, putting new structures in place. You know, when I went on a keto diet, I did it myself. My wife cooks all of my meals in the evenings. She didn't know I was on a keto diet. I needed to share that with her. All right, so we got rid of and we reinvented and she went to work and now we eat on a keto diet and it's like very healthy, low inflammation, easy to do. But if I was trying to do it all myself, I couldn't get there. So that's an example of keeping your word with yourself. I have a doctor who said he went back to dental school and after 10 years and they said, what was your biggest accomplishment? He goes, cleaning my garage out. They go, what are you talking about? He goes, I gave my promise to my, my. And this is the second level of agreements. I told my wife I would clean the garage out and I didn't do it for six years. And the minute I did it, our relationship changed because she could now trust me that when I said I was going to do something, I actually do it. And by the way, this is how you earn trust with people. And when you start with yourself, you start trusting yourself. When I make a promise with myself, I keep it most of the time. When I don't, I, I acknowledge it and get back on the horse. Ask for help, put structure it. When you do it with others, you can't expect your team to follow through on agreements if you don't do that yourself. If you're not showing up on time, if you're not paying your bills on time. It's a universal truth. There's laws. It's called the law of reciprocity. How you want something to show up in the world, you have to operate from yourself. You can't expect somebody else to operate in a way that you don't yourself because they, they're observing that, right? And so agreements with others is easier, you know, and we do that with time. I learned that lesson when I, I, I, I was like, late, notoriously late, Amber, for three hours, you know? And my coach goes, he's like, you now have everything you need. He goes, but I can't work with you anymore. I go, why? He goes, you're late. I go, ah, yeah, a few minutes here, a few minutes there. He goes, yeah, I can't trust your word. He goes, your word go, what do you mean? You, you're, you're full of crap, Roger. He goes, a hundred dollars for every minute you're late. And I'm like, fine. And I'm a people pleaser. And I actually agreed. He shook my head. He goes, I want to distinguish. We are making an agreement that you're going to pay me $100 per minute. And I said yes, meant no, and just thought it was a bunch of BS. He came back and said, you're 36 minutes late. You owe me $3,600. At the time, I had 4,200. This was like 20 years ago. And he goes, Gary, you, you're 36 minutes late. You owe me 3,600. I ended saying, forget it, I swear to Adam and told him to get lost. And then I called him back three weeks later, paid. And he goes, that's the best thing that, that you'll ever invest in because now you understand the value of your word. And he goes, that's what was missing. You would make promises, and they would have, they'd fall on no action behind them. And here's the thing where this shows up in dental practices. You make promises for reviews. Team members are sitting there, they're not getting reviewed, they're not in communication they don't know how well they're doing. They, they want to know how to do better. You don't, you don't keep. And it's not because you're a bad person. Docs and team leads, it's because you don't have a structure for the fulfillment of these things. So. But what happens is they go, you don't keep your word, I'm not keeping mine. And then that goes out of existence. And then the last one is like, you know, if you signed an oath to not hurt people and to, to do no harm and, and get people healed and you know, and you say, we're going to watch that tooth. There's the disease and decay in that tooth, and we're going to watch that tooth. You know, you got to look to see if that goes against the oath that you took. Like, are you putting your personal, you know, fears or concerns between you and what you gave a promise to, you know, and you just want to look at that, you know, only you can see that for yourself. I don't know. I'm, I, I don't have your license. It's your license and what it means to you, but that's a good place to look, right? Or, you know, if you're a committed person to, you know, whatever morals. Like, for me, it's like some people could cheat on their wife and they're okay with having multiple relationships. My wife sat me down and said, gary, you know, if you do, don't come back. And she was very clear. And I know my, you know, and I have friends who, their wife is cool with them doing whatever they want to do. And that's like so mind blowing to me that I'm actually, I can't even hang out with them as friends anymore because that goes against what I believe. So that's morals and values, like on, on a certain level. So I've lost some friends to that. But, you know, just an example of trying to give examples so people can see the three levels of agreements.

I like that. So I like that once you're clear with your past and you're consistently keeping your word and your agreements, this creates space and it actually creates space for our clients to step fully into being true advocates for their patients. Complete health. And when they're a stand for that, they can stop sugarcoating the truth about oral health. I mean, they can do that. They can move fully into that. And we have steps and processes and, and we have a five step healthy patient blueprint or healthy practice blueprint that I You know, I love. And. And if someone would like a copy of that, they can reach out to us as well. But this is so enlightening, Gary. I love this part.

Yeah, it's. It's a blind spot for a lot of people. And, you know, Dennis didn't go to dental school to be great leaders and managers. And if you're a dentist and you're managing, you're the wrong person to manage it. Just please get that. If you get one thing from our session today, give up managing.

Thank you for listening to Million Dollar Dentistry with Gary Katie. This podcast is brought to you by Next Level Practice. Next Level Practice is the leader in dental practice management. In fact, they're the best in the world at creating happy teams that implement sustainable results. If you would like a copy of Million Dollar Dentistry, please contact Amber Keithley at Next Level Practice. You may call us at 212-388-1712, extension 119, or go to nextlevelpractice.com podcast and request a copy in our Ask a Question box. We look forward to brightening your smile.