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.
