Your Dental Team Should Run Without You—Here’s How to Make It Happen

Here's the truth. If you're the one who's holding everything together, your practice isn't scalable. It's in fact very fragile. And what if your team could take more ownership of the business side without you having to micromanage every move? You know, there's a difference between being controlling and being in control. Let's get honest for a second. If you were to take a week off right now and you didn't have any texts, any emails or emergencies coming your way, would your practice keep running smoothly or would it just completely fall apart? Most dentists think that they have a team inside of their practice, but what they really have is a bunch of people waiting for their next command. What we call that is a staph. That's an infection. And that's what we're talking about on today's episode. All about making that shift from dependent staff to truly an empowered team. Welcome to the Next Level Practice podcast where we don't just talk about the business side of dentistry, we fix it. I'm your host CEO of Next Level Practice, Kelly Dahmer, and today we're diving into something most dentists hope is going to fix itself. Or maybe they're just hoping to keep their head in the sand, but it truly never does. Which is this. Your team dynamic. You didn't go to dental school to become a babysitter, a referee or a therapist. But if your front desk, your hygienists and your assistants aren't aligned, you've become all three. But let me tell you about Dr. Waters, who comes to mind when talking about Teen Dynamic. When she and I first connected, she had a team of completely willing people, but she was self admittedly completely checked out. Now I don't want to minimize the amount of circumstances that she had happening to her last year that caused her to self check out. I don't want to minimize that because I know we all have things that go on, right? And she had no real leadership happening in her practice. Her team was really just sitting there waiting for the next direction and really waiting for some structure and some goals to be put in place so that they could do a better job. The crazy part was that not only was she checked out of her leadership, she didn't have a team leader or an office manager giving any sort of direction to the team. So there was no direction happening happening, no leadership was happening whatsoever. Now she's completely out of the weeds, her team is thriving, and she just got back from a 10 day vacation where no one called her once. So let's walk through how she did it. Here's what we're going to be talking about on today's episode. Why most teams are stuck in that chaotic collaboration instead of true team alignment. Number two is how to actually assign roles, create clarity for your team and build a culture of ownership. There's a difference between knowing and owning. The third thing we're going to be talking about today is the secret to getting your team to care about the numbers just as much, if not more than you do. Because I know a lot of us are not numbers gurus. If you've ever said, it's just easier if I do it myself, this episode is your breakthrough. Because let's be real, most dental teams are running on personality, not processes. Let me say that a different way. If your team is dependent on people instead of systems, you're doing it wrong. It works that way until it doesn't. Usually you reach a level of success, a level of production, a level of busyness, and then it's like a glass ceiling. It's like, where do you go from here? You can't scale personality, but you can scale systems. So let's go deeper into Dr. Waters story. She really had a great team, but they were completely winging it. There was no defined responsibilities, she had no goals or performance metrics in place. And then no one was actually holding the team accountable either. Let's be real, there was no ownership. Not only was she checked out, but she didn't have a team leader leading in her mental absence. She was there physically, but mentally there was nothing happening. So here's how we helped her. Four key steps to getting her a team that was working in harmony versus a staff that was working to collect a paycheck. The first was we did truly identify that team leader. It's very important because as the doctor owner, anything that comes out of your mouth, no matter how nurturing and humanistic you are, anything that's going to be coming out of your mouth is going to be ten times more confronting than what comes out of your team leader's mouth. So step number one, invite someone on your team to step up as the team leader. Everything we're doing here is asking for permission. We're not forcing anything on anyone. So identify that true team leader who's going to be measuring, monitoring, making go right. Step number two, once we had that team leader who was willing to measure, monitor, make, go right, we then created crystal clear roles and KPIs by position for the team so that they had really clear expectation as Far as what they were to be doing, how we did that was by taking her annual goals, breaking it down by month, then by day, then by position, and making sure each person was tied to an outcome that helped us achieve that annual goal that we wanted. Another key and tip here is that we also applied a bonus system so that they were motivated and incentivized to get their job done. The third thing, align on vision, purpose and values. If you just roll out numbers and metrics and talk about money, some of your team is not going to be interested in that. You're not in business because you are profitable. You stay in business because you're profitable, but you're in business because most of you are deeply connected to caring for your patient's health. Right? That's why you're in this business. So we really want to bring those vision, purpose and values to the forefront of the conversation. It should be driving your team huddle. Any sort of crucial con that you're having, even your hiring, should have your vision, purpose and values in it as well. The last step that we did was training for confidence, not for compliance, not to minimize compliance, but we want to make sure that your team has the structures and the confidence that they need to get their job done. We train them to think like owners. In this day and age, more and more people and team members, you know, there's like five different generations in the workforce and how do you align all of them when they all think and relate to work differently? Right? We want to train them to think like owners and entrepreneurs. That meant learning to say no and understanding how their individual role impacts things like production, collection, patient retention, even your bottom line, even profit. Within 90 days, Dr. Waters had a self managing team and a practice that could finally grow and scale without her having to be in the very center of it because she wasn't really interested in doing that anyway. So three actionable steps I want you to take away and really start working on in your practice today. One, assign ownership, not tasks. One strategy is worth a thousand tactics, right? Stop giving people to do lists, give them outcomes, give them scorecards. Define winning looks like, celebrate those wins and review it consistently with a team leader in place. Two, lead with vision, not just instruction. Your team doesn't need more tasks. There's plenty to do. I'm sure that you hear a lot how busy everyone is, right? I want you to repeat this. I have exactly enough time in the day for everything that matters. Cut through the weeds, figure out what actually matters tied to our daily role and understand why Their role matters inside of that, then you want to tie every responsibility back to mission and the money they're getting compensated for this. Step three is making time for alignment. 20% of your time should be spent working on the business. 80% of your time is producing results. Monthly team meetings, daily huddles. Those aren't optional. Those need to be in the schedule every time. Use them to solve problems, share wins and track progress towards your goals. No more status updates. Real alignment towards our goals that everyone is crystal clear on. All right, let's recap the key points from today's episode because there was a lot of really good nuggets in here today. One, a team without roles is a practice without structure. You need Clari, otherwise you just have chaos. Two, if you're the glue holding it all together, your practice is not sustainable. You're the bottleneck. And three, empower your team to lead and your practice will finally be able to scale. If you want to dig deeper into lining your team, we have what's called the total team tune up training. We're going deeper into these concepts. We're giving you more actionable steps. It's absolutely free and I'm the one who leads it, so you'll get to hear more from me. You'll find the link to this in the show notes or you can head to our website nextlevelpractice.com to get started. If this episode gave you a new way to lead team, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.