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Endo Mastery

Month: May 2025

Navigating team resistance

Trish - ARTICLE500

Every leader knows the frustration of dealing with team members who resist change or growth. It’s a significant hurdle that can prevent your practice from moving forward.

  

When faced with this, the most important question to ask is: “What’s truly behind this person’s mindset and behavior?” Often, the answer isn’t a deliberate attempt to undermine your plans. Instead, it’s usually rooted in everyday human tendencies.

  

Here are some common reasons why team members might be struggling: 

  • Disorganization or procrastination: They might be focused on their current workload, leading to missed opportunities or delaying new goals until they feel “caught up.”

  • Distraction: Personal issues outside of work or even office dynamics can divert their focus, making it hard for them to concentrate on key tasks.

  • Habit: Both long-term employees and new hires can be deeply ingrained in their routines. Habits are tough to break, even when a new approach is clearly beneficial.

  • Fear of mistakes: Adopting new methods means doing things at which they’re not yet proficient. The fear of looking bad, being embarrassed, or facing criticism can make them hesitant to try.

  • Unclear expectations: Sometimes, the issue isn’t unwillingness but a lack of understanding. What’s perfectly clear to you might not be to them. They might need more explicit, step-by-step guidance to connect the dots.

Before considering the costly and disruptive process of replacing a team member (which offers no guarantees of a better outcome), a personalized, supportive approach is often best. Dedicating a few extra minutes each day to help a team member align with your goals (or even scheduling a weekly brainstorming session in a supportive environment) can significantly boost their motivation, focus, and accountability. This investment in your team can foster progress and strengthen your entire operation.

PRACTICE AND TEAM COACHING

Work-life balance in endodontics 

DR. ACE GOERIG

OWNER & CO-FOUNDER
DDS, MS, ABE Diplomate

Many doctors struggle to integrate their love for their family with their dedication to the practice. Upon closer examination, the reasons become clear. They face frequent and persistent demands—financial, team-related, and otherwise—that consume their attention.

  

Practice concerns lead to worry, exhaustion, and the carry-over of stress into personal lives. This infringes upon crucial family time, which should ideally be a sanctuary. The question then becomes: how can one truly enjoy life amidst these pressures?

 

Our commitment at Endo Mastery has always been to empower doctors to reclaim their personal time and enjoyment from the pressures of the practice. When you and your team successfully complete a productive day of patient care, you deserve to experience satisfaction, confidence, and the peace of mind that comes from achieving your goals.

 

The secret is creating a stress-free practice with a highly trained team that offloads the burden of practice operations from the doctor. Let the doctor focus on patient care and build a team that handles everything else! When you can finish each day without a hangover of unresolved issues and take-home work, owning an endodontic practice is an incredible and beneficial force in your life.

  

The greatest joy in your practice is to look forward to each day, and to conclude every day with high energy and positivity. It allows you to return home and to fully dedicate yourself to your family, offering them 100% of your focus and love. This commitment is not only owed to our families but also to ourselves. 

Marketing Tip: Branded Power Banks

As vacation season kicks off, a custom-branded power bank makes the perfect monthly delivery gift for your referring dental offices. Portable, practical, and thoughtful, these slim power banks are great for on-the-go charging during summer travel.

 

Stay top of mind while helping your referrals stay connected! Add your logo for a professional touch and brand visibility all season long. One great example is a compact credit card-sized power bank, the other example is a wireless power bank, both from Custom Ink:

Have you found your professional community?

CYNTHIA STAMATION

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Dentistry can be a solitary profession, but not in the conventional sense. Most doctors spend a substantial portion of their time working with their teams while providing exceptional patient care, which ensures a constant presence of people around them. But professionally, many doctors feel isolated from their endodontic colleagues most of the year. They lack meaningful connections with other clinicians, leaders, and business owners.

 

A TED Talk from several years ago highlighted the findings of a 75-plus-year Harvard study on adult development, which revealed that a primary defining factor influencing long-term well-being and happiness is the formation and maintenance of fulfilling personal relationships. This principle surely applies to professions as well for maintaining engagement, fulfillment, and enjoyment.

 

For individuals in demanding professions such as endodontics, it is crucial to cultivate intellectual and creative camaraderie with colleagues who are open, unguarded, and forthright in their support. In fact, one of the most common comments we receive from doctors attending our events is the energizing experience of being with like-minded colleagues who learn from and share knowledge with each other and the Endo Mastery team.

  

Our coaching clients also share similar sentiments about our coaches, expressing how they finally have someone who genuinely understands their practice, connects with their goals, and collaborates with them to achieve new levels of professional and practice success.

 

Endo Mastery is committed to building a community of endodontists who support and empower one another. We firmly believe that the spirit of professional collaboration profoundly strengthens the profession. This culture is deeply ingrained in our DNA because Dr. Ace Goerig established the company in this manner from the outset. His unwavering desire and drive to generously share his knowledge and impart his expertise inspire everything we do.

 

For any endodontist seeking to enjoy the profession immensely within a community of doctors equally committed to happiness, growth and success, engaging with the best of the profession is going to open up a whole new world for you. Come join us.

Special Recognition: Debra Miller

DR. ACE GOERIG

OWNER & CO-FOUNDER
DDS, MS, ABE Diplomate

When Debra Miller joined the Endo Mastery executive team 10 years ago, she had already mastered the platinum level of dental coaching and consulting services. We were so lucky then to have found her, and so lucky today to have benefited from a decade of her specialized leadership and experience.

 

As Director of Coaching, Debra built up our amazing coaching team, brought an even higher level of professionalism to our programs, and championed the needs, goals and visions of endodontists.

 

Debra loves it when doctors experience growth and success beyond their expectations, when teams love contributing to and sharing in practice success, and when patients receive excellent interdisciplinary care in collaboration with referring doctors.

 

Debra has always been a true believer in the endodontic profession and an empowered vision for doctor success. Through her years at Endo Mastery, hundreds of doctors have trusted her insights and directly benefited from her coaching and advice. Her influence will be immeasurably felt by many for years to come.

 

As Debra moves forward with her personal goals and the next stage in her journey, it’s hard to imagine Endo Mastery without her. We’ll always cherish the memories we’ve created together, and her powerful voice will continue to inspire us.

 

Debra, we enthusiastically wish you all the best in your future endeavors!

Do I have the right dental team?

DR. ACE GOERIG

OWNER & CO-FOUNDER
DDS, MS, ABE Diplomate

Many doctors become accustomed to their practices functioning at a certain level of productivity and success, even though their personal vision for the practice is often higher.

 

Bridging the gap between current reality and higher goals depends on tackling new challenges and opportunities. One of the first questions doctors ask themselves is, “Do I have the right team?”

 

Doctors who are hesitant about their teams are frequently the most reluctant to start any process of change that would result in improvement and growth. The fear of upsetting team dynamics and opening a potential can of worms often prompts doctors to conclude that “now isn’t the right time”.

 

It’s a catch-22 situation though because teams are the human part of business operations. Team members naturally have strengths, weaknesses, habits, mindsets, and varying levels of skills. If you wait for the perfect wart-free team before you do anything, you will wait forever. The perfect team does not exist.

Team readiness factors that matter

When it comes to setting the practice on a new path toward higher goals, the team is always the central focus. Doctors should be chairside almost always, which means the team handles everything else.

 

There are only 3 things that truly matter when it comes to evaluating if your team can evolve to new challenges:

 

The first factor is purely functional. Do you have the right number of team members needed to achieve your goals? It’s going to be very hard for an understaffed administration team to jump headfirst into new challenges. It’s going to be equally difficult to improve doctor productivity and patient flow with just one dental assistant. Obvious stuff.

 

The second factor is practice systems. Systems are the processes, procedures and guidelines that teams follow for the practice to function effectively. Good systems are important during periods of growth because they keep the team aligned to the business fundamentals. Without good systems in place, the effectiveness of new initiatives for growth can be cancelled out by the ineffectiveness of the practice’s systems.

 

A common example of this is implementing a new referral marketing strategy, but the practice’s scheduling strategy and system at the front desk is haphazard. As a result, daily productivity doesn’t increase, even if referrals do. Instead, stress is created trying to find openings for patients, and patients end up being appointed further out.

 

That misalignment in systems will eventually cause patient and referrer dissatisfaction, and the marketing bump will be eroded and disappear. It could be the best marketing strategy ever imagined, but if the rest of the practice is creating resistance rather than building on new opportunities, the results will be fleeting at best.

 

The third factor is training. Every initiative to create growth involves the team learning to do something they have never done before. That could involve doing something at a higher level, doing it in a new way, or doing something completely new that has never been a part of practice operations.

 

Effective training is the only solution to team inertia and closing performance gaps. Inertia is what is at play when team members try something new but quickly revert to the old way at the first setback.

 

This behavior, which may be frustrating to doctors who are trying to stimulate growth, is a natural team instinct. Team members prefer to handle things in a predictable way, and they also want to know they are doing a good job. When doctors introduce new objectives, it creates the risk of team members falling short, and that can feel unsettling.

 

The only way to help team members through potential uncertainty is by providing training, resources and support. When teams understand the doctor’s vision and see that the doctor is investing in them, the level of engagement and success soars.

Coaching for team-driven growth

In fact, the process of growth is a lot easier than most doctors think it is, once the team is engaged to drive the growth effectively. Endo Mastery coaching provides doctors with both the practice systems and team training that are needed to unlock an incredible level of success in the practice.

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