Ivoclar is dedicated to supporting your DSO.
Together, we will work to deliver best-in-class, best-in-service treatments to your patients, now and into the future.
– Grow your practice with unique clinically proven solutions and exclusive pricing opportunities
– Take advantage of personalized immersive training and education
– Benefit from a dedicated team of clinical restorative experts
MANAGING EDITOR
Graham Garrison ggarrison@sharemovingmedia.com
SENIOR EDITOR
Daniel Beaird dbeaird@sharemovingmedia.com
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Pete Mercer pmercer@sharemovingmedia.com
CIRCULATION
Laura Gantert lgantert@sharemovingmedia.com
ART DIRECTOR
Brent Cashman bcashman@sharemovingmedia.com
EDITORIAL BOARD
Dr. Eric Roman, DEO
Josey Sewell, DEO
Rachel Shipley, DEO
Hilda Gonzalez, DEO
Cassidy Parker-Knight, DEO
PUBLISHER
Jake Puhl jacobpuhl@deodentalgroup.com
VP OF MEDIA SALES
Amy Cochran acochran@sharemovingmedia.com 619.886.5842
rights reserved.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to info@dentalgrouppractice.com.
If you would like to subscribe or notify us of address changes, please contact us at the above numbers or address.
The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Dentist Entrepreneur Organization, LLC, DEO Dental Media, LLC, or DEO Magazine. Also, the information in this publication is meant to give readers general information that they may find of interest. It is not intended to substitute for compliance, audit, advisory, tax, legal, or other professional advice. Readers should consult with appropriate professionals before making a decision to use any of the material presented in this publication.
Please note: The acceptance of advertising or products mentioned by contributing authors does not constitute endorsement by the publishers. Publishers cannot accept responsibility for the correctness of an opinion expressed by contributing authors.
In life and business, growth is a common goal. But it often comes with growing pains, especially cultural growth in the workplace. We heard this echoed by Tiffany Fleisch, Director of Operations for Frandsen Dental. In 2021, Frandsen Dental experienced its largest yearly growth ever, but it wasn’t easy.
“It was great, but it was also chaotic,” she told us for this issue of DEO Magazine. “We lived in the fire,” she said. “We were firefighters. Something would pop up and we’d all jump in and put out the fire, but I don’t think that helped anyone grow.”
DEO was there to help, and we introduced Fleisch and her team to DEO MAP –the first dental operating system specifically designed to build thriving dental companies. Leaders and individual team members have gotten positive results by using DEO MAP’s new approaches to address their company’s growing pains.
We want the same for you! In this issue, we are zooming in on the Culture Element of DEO MAP.
The DEO MAP covers a wide array of topics. For this issue, we highlighted the following:
> Effective coaching techniques
> How to connect with your team
> How to create a career development pathway
> Understanding the ROI you gain from an effective culture
> Using your company’s core values to identify the best candidates
With the Culture approach, the conversation becomes about how we can maximize our enjoyment of what we do and who we get to do it with. At the end of the day, the relationships we have throughout our lives are what we’ll remember the most. So, let’s move from “us vs. them” to the generation of “we”.
Thank you for reading this issue of DEO Magazine
Cheers!
Jake Puhl
BY ANDREW SMITH, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ASSOCIATION OF DENTAL SUPPORT ORGANIZATIONS
In March, the Association for Dental Support Organizations (ADSO) will bring together leaders in the dental industry for three days of thought leadership, unparalleled networking, and the ADSO Solutions Center showcasing cutting-edge technology and innovation. The summit, “Uniting Dentistry –Bringing the Industry Together for Growth & Progress,” is an event for DSOs by DSOs that will prove to be a valuable experience for anyone looking to gain advanced insight into the industry and collaborate with other leaders in a joined space.
The ADSO Summit will bring in 1,000+ attendees from across the dental industry to discuss the most pressing issues facing DSOs today. Major themes that will be explored include the Mouth-Body Connection, technology as a driver of resiliency and growth, staffing and retention in an unprecedented labor market and DSOs as partners for new dentists. These are among the key issues the dental industry is facing in 2023.
In the spirit of bringing industry experts together at the Summit, Brian David Johnson and Cynthia “Cynt” Marshall will serve as keynote speakers at the event. Johnson is an experienced futurist, a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of
Innovation in Society, and a Fellow at Frost & Sullivan. Marshall is the CEO of the Dallas Mavericks and the first Black female CEO in the NBA. Prior to joining the Mavericks, she spent over 36 years of her impressive career at AT&T and founded her own consulting firm, Marshalling Resources. Johnson’s and Marshall’s insights into the business industry will surely help dental leaders and practitioners navigate the complex terrain of the evolving dental landscape.
Other summit highlights include the pre-summit session “Innovative
Solutions for Unprecedented Times;” a post-summit session targeted to Mid-Market DSOs; Thought Leader Theater with talks from ADSO partners; the ADSO Solutions Center for networking; and breakout sessions on
topics including Operation/IT, Marketing, HR, Finance, Clinical Leadership and Procurement/Supply Chain.
The ADSO Summit will be held March 28 – 31 at the Omni Orlando Resort in Orlando, Florida.
At Dentsply Sirona, we help you care for your patients through connected dental solutions that support healthy practices and healthy smiles.
Find out more on dentsplysirona.com
Clinical Procedures
Preventative Restorative Orthodontics
Endodontics
Implants
Platform Technologies
CAD/CAM
Imaging Systems
Treatment Centers Instruments
Caring for patients is your priority, helping you care for them is ours.
Major themes that will be explored include the Mouth-Body Connection, technology as a driver of resiliency and growth, staffing and retention in an unprecedented labor market and DSOs as partner for new dentists
In the early days of the pandemic, it was hard to imagine starting anything other than a new TV show, a puzzle, or a loaf of sourdough. It was a period of time where everything simply came to a halt, whether we wanted it to or not. While many used that time for rest and reflection, endodontist Jonathan Fu used that time build a business.
Dr. Fu started his first self-owned dental practice in December of 2020, after working for eight years in Oahu, Hawaii. While the timing meant that there were more challenges than usual, Dr. Fu was excited and ready to start the Coastal Endodontic Studio in San Luis Obispo, California.
With the Coastal Endodontic Studio, Dr. Fu and his team are working to provide the highest quality care, using the state-ofthe-art tools and technology to take care of their patients. “The cornerstone of our practice is about providing quality patient care. As an endodontist, a lot of my
patients come in with a significant amount of pain. We try to take care of the emergency patients as soon as possible,” Dr. Fu said.
It was hard enough for some businesses to keep the lights on in 2020, which makes the prospect of starting a business from scratch all the more daunting. While Dr. Fu and his team were confronted with new challenges every day, he understood that there was an overall need for dentistry, especially endodontics.
Speaking of those challenges, Dr. Fu said, “Supplies and equipment were always backordered. All the restrictions made operations more challenging, but because there’s always a public need for dentistry, we got busy fairly quickly.”
Even that growth presented challenges for the Coastal Endodontic Studio. Staffing shortages were a significant hurdle for the industry during that period, especially in a remote area like San Luis Obispo. Nestled midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo has about the half the population of Oahu. Pairing the remote location against the waves of people leaving the dental industry made staffing this new venture much more difficult.
Despite these challenges, Dr. Fu’s practice grew and flourished. In 2022, Coastal Endodontic Studio almost doubled its annual revenue from the year before, with Dr. Fu and his team of associates each seeing about 80 patients a month. Additionally, the move from Oahu to
San Luis Obispo has brought him closer to family.
“I grew up in Southern California and my wife grew up close to where we are at as well, so we just decided we wanted to be close to family,” Dr. Fu said. “I think, like a lot of other people, the pandemic triggered those emotions and self-reflections on what’s important in life.”
While being closer to family was certainly a huge trigger for moving to California, the other piece of that equation was seizing an opportunity. “I was a partner in a group in Oahu, and we had a thriving practice. It was great. But I wanted to take the opportunity to go out on my own and figure it out.”
Not only has the Coastal Endodontic Studio grown its revenue and patient
size, but Dr. Fu and his team have acquired two more locations –one of which was set to open in January. They recently closed escrow on the newest location, marking an exciting move forward for the growth of his practice. That growth points to an element of success that Dr. Fu is grateful for. “We have been really thankful to be so well received in the community. It’s not something that happens every day.”
Any new business has to establish itself in the community as a trusted operation that people will want to do business with, regardless of the industry. Dental practices can have an uphill battle attracting a new patient base, especially if there’s a trusted and established practice in the area already. Fortunately, Dr. Fu and his team have partnered with several general dentists in the area for patient referrals.
About 90% of Coastal Endodontic Studio’s business is from referring dentists in the community, with the other 10% coming to them organically. Because Dr. Fu is a specialty dentist, he still operates in the chair five days a week. He said, “Patients get comfortable seeing the doctor they want to see. That’s been a bit of a challenge in trying to figure out how to balance managing the practice versus
“We have been really thankful to be so well received in the community. It’s not something that happens every day.”Dr. Jonathan Fu
seeing patients. But I have aspirations to go down to three to four days eventually.”
A significant part of running a new business is establishing a healthy company culture. For the Coastal Endodontic Studio, the mission is to provide better care for the patients. As long as the patients and referring dentists are happy, Dr. Fu considers his practice a success.
At first, he and his team focused on providing that high quality, concierge service to the patients.
As the practice grew, Dr. Fu said that he was just trying to live out what the culture should look like.
“We are going to provide the best service, so I’m going to spend time with patients and we’re going to explain everything. We’re going to make sure that our patients are comfortable and continue to check in on them after the operation. A lot of things that patients don’t expect, we try to deliver.”
As the team has gotten larger, it became more difficult to maintain that culture. Not everyone had faceto-face time with Dr. Fu, so it became a challenge for him to convey what they were trying to do. He credits the DEO’s resources on company culture as a helpful tool to build a solid culture foundation for the Coastal Endodontic Studio.
“It’s still an ongoing process. Obviously, some people fall off that train and they aren’t interested in what we are trying to do. We’ve lost a couple of people like that, which is OK. We want the right people in the right seats.”
Regarding the future, Dr. Fu doesn’t necessarily have any grand plans for how large he wants his business to be. As far as he’s concerned, the growth they’ve experienced in the last couple of years has been a result of the hard work of his team and their being well received in the community. The only thing he is focused on is treating his patients. “I just have a passion to help people,” he said. That’s enough for right now.
Why office managers are key to the long-term success of a growing dental company.
BY JOSEY SEWELL, PARTNER, DEO
Do you have regular words in your organization that have turned into cuss words? Words that in any other situation would be just a regular word, but because of some frustration, irritation or negative experience this seemingly innocent word has become a word you and your team despise?
I’ve worked with hundreds of teams across the country and find there are two very common words that have become cuss words in the dental environment: corporate, and office manager. In this article, I want to focus on office managers and address the negativity regarding this position, advocate strongly for the evolution of what we all know about this position, and highlight the importance office managers have in the long-term success of a growing dental company.
The practice of dentistry has experienced dramatic changes in the last 40 years, but the management of the dental team has not kept pace with the technological and clinical changes. We cannot use the outdated management principles of the years gone by and expect modern dental teams to thrive.
People represent the greatest line item on the P&L. In fact, up to 50% of revenue that comes into the office is spent on the team. People are the greatest investment and the greatest competitive advantage for teams; however, this is where we have the least amount of training, education and systems. In addition to the lack of training how to lead and manage people, here are a few industry specific complications that have contributed to the negativity related to the office manager:
> Lack of standardization of what it means to be an office manager. The traditional role of the OM has been more like a “super front office” team member
or an insurance coordinator. This makes it hard to move from office to office and hard to hire outside the organization. This position is moving from one of administrative only work to that of a true leader of teams and a grower of practices.
training aren’t skilled managers –not to mention they really don’t have the time necessary to be a present, focused manager teams deserve. The right org chart will drive clarity and accountability. Every team, no matter how big or small, benefits from an org chart
> We seem to think that if you have a license, there is no need to report to a manager. The license we hold as clinicians does not ensure we understand and follow the practice philosophy of care, know what is expected of our position, or how we are supposed to behave or contribute to the team. That would be like assuming anyone who has a driver’s license is a great driver. Licensure does not mean we do not need and desire feedback, clear expectations, and the opportunity to be an accountable member of the team. The dental team would be far more productive and enjoyable if we dropped the ego and let go of the belief that our license makes us “above the law”.
> We aren’t clear who does what. The dentist is often the de facto leader/manager. Yet, in my experience, dentists don’t love to manage people and without
that is updated, shared and discussed regularly with the team.
“People don’t leave companies, they leave managers” isn’t just a catchy phrase in business books, it’s the conclusion of years of research in workforce engagement. We all seem to know this truth on the surface, but we don’t do anything about it.
In a book called “The Manager”, Gallup points out that the greatest short-term economic disparity is the inability to harness and unlock human potential and human energy. The authors go on to say that the single, most important lever is the team manager.
It’s time to leave behind the outdated ideas and practices of dental office managers and move to a modern model where the manager and the team can thrive. The primary job of an office manager is not to bury themselves in insurance posting or run errands for the dentist;
It’s time to leave behind the outdated ideas and practices of dental office managers and move to a modern model where the manager and the team can thrive.
the modern manager is so much more and can have immense impact on the practice, team, and patients.
Let’s take a minute and talk about the role of a modern office manager, core competencies, expectations and KPIs. If you follow this model, and find the right person for this seat, your practice and your team will thrive.
Job Title
> Sometimes we must change the name of things to break our mental model and preconceived notions. This position is about people, practice growth, and development. Some of the modern titles I’ve seen are: Operations Manager, Practice Manager, Practice Administrator, General Manager. Titles matter and should be considered carefully.
Roles and responsibilities
> Connect-Measure-Coach: the most important role of a manager is to create a healthy, happy, performance driven team. You can accomplish this by connecting with your team members in a meaningful way (1:1 and in a group), measuring their performance, and coaching them up, in, or out. Up into a new role, in their current role, or occasionally out of the company if necessary.
> Practice Optimization: this should be anything that helps the practice maximize capacity, performance and profitability.
> Patient Experience: owning the patient experience journey and ensuring all team members (clinical and non-clinical) are providing an exceptional experience for patients. Managers will also often handle an escalated patient issue and work to make things right.
> Build and implement systems to increase revenue, manage expenses and keep the team healthy and happy.
> Profitability of the practice
> Team engagement/ satisfaction
Key Competencies
> Emotional intelligence, self-awareness
> Strong written and verbal communication skills
> Ability to influence and persuade others
> Ability to manage change
> Understanding of key business metrics and KPIs
> Ability to understand and work within a budget
> Data analysis and strong decision making
> Professionalism
> Creative problem solving
The greatest competitive advantage for businesses right now is the team. In order to unlock the latent potential within the team, you have to have a manager who cares about their people, knows how to motivate others and create an environment of accountability, and understands data and can make decisions and drive action.
It is time for managers to be more than a super front office team member or a highly paid insurance coordinator; it is time for managers to be empowered to coach people and manage systems. When you get this position right, growth and profitability are just around the corner. It is my hope that as you work to build, grow and hire modern managers in your business, the term “office manager” will no longer be a cuss word. Instead, it will be a position that garners respect and admiration for the impact they make.
Josey Sewell is a dentistry expert in applying an operating system in dental groups to help them clarify their vision, focus on what matters, and achieve improved team health. She has unique expertise and the ability to weave together sound business systems and team development strategies. Her development programs have empowered leaders and executives to find more joy in their work and control of their business.
Culture is my jam. I’m a culturefirst leader, meaning culture is at the heart of everything I do in my life and my businesses. I even turned my passion for culture building into a full-fledged business: joyFULL People.
This obsession with dental cultures deepened when building the Dental People Revolution with the DEO, so clearly, I have some time under tension when it comes to dental cultures.
I get the pleasure of looking inside hundreds of businesses as a coach, advisor, and consultant. And one statement I hear from 90% of the leaders I work with is, “we have such a great culture.”
Ironically, this statement is often far from the truth.
Sometimes dental culture can sneakily morph behind your back into a pseudo-culture and harm your business. What do I mean by “pseudo-culture”?
Well, on the face of it, you might think the culture at your dental practice is fine and dandy without seeing what’s really happening to it beneath the surface.
And having an inauthentic culture is more dangerous than you think.
Because when your dental office culture is suffering, it can seriously make or break your business. A
pseudo-culture can lead to disengaged teams, decreased productivity, and poor patient experiences. Not good.
That’s why, in this column, I’m delving into the topic of authentic dental culture. I’ll help you understand what a pseudo-culture is, how it can affect your dental office, and what a healthy, genuine culture looks like by comparison.Let’s go.
Very few of us are willing to say, “the culture at my dental practice sucks.” But it’s only by acknowledging this fact that you can start creating healthy changes for the good of your business.
So, how do you actually know if you have an inauthentic culture on your hands? Let me give you an example of how culture can be misinterpreted and wreak havoc within your dental practice.
I recently met with some team members at a well-known software company, and, as you know, software companies have a reputation for having “incredible cultures” with perks upon perks.
Yet all was not what it seemed. During our conversation, it became apparent that a department was attempting to stage a coup. When it came to light, they ultimately exited many team members from the department.
One of their executives asked me, “Eric, what was all that about?
At the leadership level, we talked non-stop about our amazing culture, but they just exited the whole department for trying to stage a coup. I don’t think our culture is what we think it is.”
They were right. They had become blind to their own culture and couldn’t see it for what it really was or the damage it was doing.
I call this a pseudo-culture.
A.K.A, the opposite of true, authentic culture.
Simply put, a pseudo-culture is a false culture at your dental office. A culture that’s not what you think it is.
We all love to talk about how great our dental office cultures are. Many of us think we have such a great culture because we have kombucha, trail mix, casual Fridays, ping pong tables, and let people work from home.
That’s not culture, dentist friends. Those are called benefits.
Many dental practice owners think they have a great culture
because they hang out with coworkers outside of work, and perhaps they consider them to be some of their very best friends.
That’s not culture. It’s called friendship, partying, and hanging out with each other. It’s not complicated. And it’s not about your dental business.
The truth is, if you don’t have a culture based on great performance, people truly exemplifying and living practice values, and even sacrificing for one another and the good of the company, you probably don’t have the dental culture that you think you do.
From my experience, two harmful things will happen when a dental practice has a pseudo-culture:
1 Teams create their own culture
Pseudo-cultures almost always start in the same place: At the top. Often, the executive leadership team builds this wave of disconnected self-adoration around how “amazing” the company culture is.
Even worse, the more the executive leaders talk about the “amazing” culture, the more the team members choose to nod, disengage, and subsequently build their own sub-cultures. This is exactly what occurred in the software company I mentioned above.
Because the executives seemed disconnected, this department built its own culture beneath the radar of the higher-ups. Eventually, the departmental culture took on its
own life and even tried to take over the executives.
2 An “us and them” mentality brews
I often see multiple pseudo-cultures and subcultures existing within the same dental practice. Usually, the executive pseudo-culture becomes the ENEMY of the departmental sub-culture, creating an “us and them” mentality.
Team members can almost “trauma bond” with one another over how disconnected their leaders are. They even deepen their love for the product or the customer in spite of our leadership. You heard that right.
Our team members often love the customer and serving the customer more than they love you as a company. And with you, the executive, as a common enemy, they band together out of love for each other.
When you build and perpetuate a pseudo-culture, your teams placate you with nods of agreement while they secretly create subcultures and disengage from you.
Have you ever heard about or been a part of a company where, years after everyone has departed, they still have text groups and meetups to talk about what it was like in your company? Yep, you built a pseudo-culture.
This pseudo-culture can severely impact the success of your dental office. Teams won’t perform at their best, they may leave sooner than necessary, and you’ll have difficulty resolving issues when your entire team is “against you.”
Bottom line? All these things affect your bottom line.
Knowing if your dental culture is as healthy as you think it is or if it’s heading into the pseudo-culture territory can be challenging. So here are some surefire signs you’ve got an awesome dental culture.
Committed to values. In a true dental office culture, your people preach your company’s core values, then practice what they preach, perform well, and call you and each other out when you aren’t being authentic.
Top-down alignment. All of your departments are equally aligned with the executive culture, and sub-cultures are limited to quirky things like an IT team that likes anime and an operations team that’s into cats.
Unhypocritical leaders. The executives, including the CEO, all practice what they preach in the company values as well. Teams see this not only in their words but in their actions.
Same-page mentality. You know you have an authentic dental culture when everybody’s on the same page without constantly having to “get everyone back on the same page.”
Consistent performance. One of the best aspects of having an authentic dental office culture free from pseudo-cultures is that your performance should be through the roof!
Employee referrals. If your team members are constantly referring new team members to your dental practice, this is an excellent sign of a healthy office culture.
Sworn allegiance. Your culture is authentic if your team members all have the company logo tattooed on their bodies (Joke … this might not be a good sign)
Human resource departments right now LOVE to measure retention and Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS). But guess what?
When your team hates you, the executive, but they love each other and the company, they often stay at your practice, despite their overall lack of satisfaction with executive leaders.
Oh, and your eNPS score may be great, but what’s the number of new employees referred by your team members? This figure is probably a more accurate measurement of a great dental culture.
Let’s return to my original story about that software department staging a coup for a minute. The company hired a new, experienced leader to take over the department.
And when the dust settled, nobody had won. Not the customer. Not the executives. And certainly not the department.
So, wake up executives! Your culture matters. Take special care of it.
Hone your self-awareness, listen to your teams, and practice what you preach. Because our teams are calling our lies about culture precisely what they are: LIES.
Lies that no amount of lunchtime Yoga or stocked refrigerators can cover up.
And they are telling us they won’t stand for it. So don’t let it happen in the first place, fix it if it’s happening already, or face the consequences.
The dental practices that thrive in the generations to come will own and prioritize authentic cultures above all else.
If you’ve finally admitted to yourself that your dental office culture sucks or want expert guidance to make an already awesome culture even better, speak to me.
I’m your heart-centered dental coach, inspiring change and manifesting impact to help you create a better future for your dental practice and the dental industry at large.
Ready for stronger teams, happier patients, and surging growth? Let’s talk.
Growth is never easy, and it’s even harder without the benefit of a blueprint or established plan that you can work from. Finding a system that can help you to build your business can relieve some of the stress and challenges that come with those early days of growth.
William Harvey graduated from the University of North Carolina in 2006 and took his first job as an associate at a dental practice. Eventually, Dr. Harvey purchased his first practice in his hometown, where he spent the next 10 years as a single office doctor with one associate.
About five years ago, Dr. Harvey and his family moved to their beach house on the North Carolina coast. He had a friend practicing dentistry in the area who was going through some health troubles, so he spent some time helping out with his practice. Eventually, this became practice number two. From there, Harvey Dental grew to be a dental group with eight locations over the next few years.
As a dental group, Harvey Dental is focused on their surrounding communities. Dr. Harvey said, “We are your hometown dentist. We are very involved in the communities we serve; working to support our patients, their businesses, and the causes that are important to them is foundational to Harvey Dental.”
Like most modern practices, Harvey Dental focuses heavily on technology and implementing tools that not only improve the workflow for doctors and staff, but also help to improve patient care. The goal is consistency, and it’s especially important for any acquisition to meet the standards already set by Harvey and his team. “We try to level up all of the offices that we purchase, and along the way we often learn some things from them that we can implement to become better ourselves.”
Part of the challenge of growing a group practice like Harvey Dental
is finding the right framework to set your organization on the right course. That’s where the Dental People Revolution comes in. The Dental People Revolution is an immersive training program for dental practices that want to leverage their most precious resource: the people.
This system is built on a foundation of 6 principles that help effectively and consistently engage team members, hire the right people for the right seats, make a great first impression with your onboarding process, and grow your team every step of the way. By implementing the Dental People Revolution, Dr. Harvey has been able to successfully grow his organization to the impressive operation it is today.
Dr. Harvey has been a member of the DEO since the early days of the organization. “At the time, there were no other places you could go to learn more about what we were doing. Many of the people ahead of us forged a path on their own, laying the groundwork for later classes.”
He even credits the DEO as an instrumental part of helping him to grow from being a practitioner to a business leader in a matter of years. Not only has Dr. Harvey been able to put himself in the right sandbox with other leaders in the DEO, but it also helped him to understand the value of an operating system. Having a DOS at his disposal is like “having chains or snow tires for traction,” propelling his organization forward to meet their goals head on.
It’s that growth that he experienced in the early days of the DEO that pushes him to provide that same opportunity to his team. “Whether it’s reading books on leadership or participating in coaching programs, we have to grow ourselves so that we can grow our people,” he said.
Dr. Harvey and his team started using EOS/traction with joyFULL People, the predecessor for the DEO Map: Culture program, to build a better framework for how his group practice was going to operate. From there, his team modified a couple of things in the processes of
the program to better fit what they were trying to do. Once the DEO progressed from joyFULL People to the DEO Map: Culture, Dr. Harvey said that some of the changes his group made appeared to make it into the final iteration of the program.
As for the utility of the DEO Map: Culture program, Dr. Harvey says that it’s helped him better understand how he’s doing and the areas that he needs to work or focus on. It also helped with how they delegate tasks to other team members. “I feel like we’re better organized. We’re able to turn people on our mid-level leadership team
Dr. Harvey attributes the culture of his group practice to the DEO Map: Culture program, helping his business to become a highly desired employer for those looking for jobs during the Great Resignation.
loose to do things that I was hesitant to let go of, because I know they now have an effective process to go through.”
Additionally, it’s helped the interpersonal relationships of his organization grow and thrive in a way that they hadn’t before. “We’ve been able to elevate team members, genuinely letting them know that they are appreciated, and they have a voice. We are all rowing in the same direction and tying our goals to theirs,” Dr. Harvey said. “It’s been a really phenomenal framework to accomplish what could otherwise be an awkward or intimidating task.”
Just in the last couple of years, the concept of company culture has shifted to the forefront of the conversation for business leaders. As a buzzword topic, culture can make or break your organization, especially in an age where employees are fed up with the traditional challenges of the workplace. A healthy culture will now truly decide the future of your organization.
Dr. Harvey attributes the culture of his group practice to the DEO Map: Culture program, helping his business to become a highly desired employer for those looking for jobs during the Great Resignation.
“We want to create a place where everyone is happy and has fun and looks forward to coming to work each day, knowing that they make a difference,” he said. “I think the culture that we’ve built and become more conscious of through the Dental People Revolution has
created a lot of satisfaction among our team members.”
In fact, a lot of his team members have in turn invited friends and former coworkers to come and join in on the fun at Harvey Dental. Armed with the tenets of the DEO Map: Culture, leadership can connect with
they want to be.
As far as the next phase of Harvey Dental is concerned, Dr. Harvey is open to the possibilities of great opportunities. His team had a lot of
opportunities in the height of the pandemic to help out other dentists and group practices that were struggling to survive through all of the disruptions. Many of Dr. Harvey’s colleagues had trouble keeping all manner of staff, from doctors and associates to IT and HR.
Whatever comes next, Dr. Harvey knows that “there are a number of opportunities on the table.” With the culture and framework that his organization has in place with the DEO Map: Culture, Dr. Harvey believes that his team is uniquely positioned to step in and help lengthen the careers of the dentists who survived the pandemic disruptions, and even help to improve the working environments and cultures of other group practices.
For Dr. Harvey, tools like the DEO Map: Culture are critical to providing a pathway and framework for training and elevating team members beyond the “ceilings” that existed for them before. Roles like the front desk, assistants, and hygienists have an opportunity to develop leadership skills and expand their skillsets in ways that they might not otherwise be able to do.
“My manager of operations was a hygienist,” Dr. Harvey said. “She has grown tremendously through this experience, to the point where she is now a leader and bringing other hygienists and front desk staff into leadership positions. From there, they can coach, train, and lead their contemporaries using the framework of the DEO Map as a means of more meaningful leadership training.”
There are clear pathways in Harvey Dental where employees
can maximize their performance within their role, grow into their role, and grow into the organization beyond what their role might entail. The beauty of this framework is that it gives anyone the opportunity to develop their leadership skills and mold their career into something new.
It’s all about finding ways to connect to your teams. People are your most valuable resource for a
reason, so it’s important to find the right ways to invest in and develop your people into the leaders and innovators they were born to be.
Engagement is a key part of this, which is why you need a framework that is designed to drive growth by retaining and engaging the best people for the job. The DEO map does exactly that, tapping into what makes people such a unique and valuable resource.
Dr. Harvey is just happy to provide a better framework for the new dentists coming into the industry now. “We have worked hard to do things the right way and preserve the legacies for doctors that are trying to phase out in a healthy way. We want them to know that their life’s work is in good hands, so that they can be proud of what they have accomplished and know that their teams are taken care of.”
With the culture and framework that his organization has in place with the Dental People Revolution, Dr. Harvey believes that his team is uniquely positioned to step in and help lengthen the careers of the dentists who survived the pandemic disruptions, and even help to improve the working environments and cultures of other group practices.
2023 presents an opportunity to Upskill your Team and Grow while reducing overhead costs.
BY J.W. OLIVER JR., MANAGING PARTNER, SUPPORT DDS
The road ahead will most likely be filled with “potholes and speedbumps”. Most experts agree that we are in or headed into a short recession for the next 18-30 months. This creates an amazing opportunity to rebalance your team.
The current trend among employees and young adults is tied to recent studies by the American Psychological Association (APA), which concludes that stress levels across all races, genders, and economic groups is at an all-time high. Data suggests these are at unprecedented levels according to Arthur C. Evans Jr., CEO of the APA. Understanding the mindset of young adults is crucial for business owners, CEOs, and managers. What they desire is less stress and working only 40 hours (or less).
One additional factor is a diminishing young workforce. The population turning 18 years old each year is reducing by 400,000 each year. This creates a short-term and long-term problem for the workforce. The following are three options to offset and help rebalance your team.
A recent CEO survey by the magazine Chief Executive found that over 54% planned to give access to Upskilling programs. Fortyeight percent of these CEOs planned to increase incentives and bonus plans. (The No. 1 objective was to reduce capital expenditures, and No. 2 was to reduce travel and entertainment expenses in this impending recessionary environment ahead.)
One key is to measure productivity with defined objectives and performance evaluations on a regular, recurring timetable (quarterly or bi-annual). Show empathy to your team as they navigate the changing
world, helping them to know you do care and want to understand. Give a voice to all levels of your staff, allowing them to sit on your leadership teams or even as a board member. Effectively using “spot bonuses” as immediate reward and recognition to your team will encourage and inspire. Check out programs like WorkTango.com as a tool to enhance your team’s experience.
With the rising labor costs and availability of quality teams, consider remote/virtual teams working from countries with the following key attributes:
> English as a first language
> High university education rates
> High performing work cultures
> Rates that save you 60-75% in key roles
> Dental trained
> No work from home, but in HIPAA compliant facility
> Key roles include: Director of first impressions for new patients, scheduling, accounting and bookkeeping, insurance verification, re-care, unscheduled treatment plans, digital marketing and social media management, IT, and even full RCM teams.
Focusing on these three areas can help to ELEVATE your existing team, REDUCE your overhead, and GROW your business during a changing economic and culture landscape. At the end of 2023, you will “BEE amazing”! A vision for a WIN for teams, WIN for clients, and a WIN for ministries worldwide.
J.W. Oliver Jr. Managing Partner of SupportDDS.His objective is to assist organizations to leverage growth, increase productivity, manage costs and free up time utilizing virtual/remote teams. He is proud to be a Christian led entrepreneur.
Ever yone talks about having a healthy company culture. We all know this is important for a
been made to believe that if we ser ve kombucha and snacks in the break room, install a ping pong table, and take our teams out for mini-golf once a quarter, we ’ re building a great culture. This isn’t a real culture, this is what we call a pseudo-culture. Real culture is about having a team of people engaged in a common purpose who are diving results in the business.
Why do you need it? People are our greatest investment — the biggest number on our P&L statement — and yet the old systems for managing most often create an “us vs. them” mentality that doesn’t actually ser ve anyone. Human Resources is frequently described as existing to protect the company, but this sets up an adversarial relationship when what we could be doing is creating systems founded on care and mutual respect for each others’ shared humanity.
At the DEO, we take a different approach. Through our Culture approach, the conversation becomes about how we can maximize our enjoyment of what we do and who we get to do it with. At the end of the day, the relationships we have throughout our lives are what we’ll remember the most. So let’s move from “us vs. them” to the generation of “we.”
How do you build healthy, high performing teams?
This break down of the DEO MAP: Culture System Graphic (left) gives you a high-level look at the 4 core elements necessary to build your healthy, high performing team.
ENGAGE is all about how you connect with your team, measure their performance, and coach them to their highest potential — whether that’s within your company or not.
HIRE includes using your company ’ s Core Values to
Vision, leveraging the Fit Filter to assist this. In this phase, we also focus on writing job ads get results, inter viewing with intention, and ensuring that the candidate you make an offer to can pass the Head | Heart | Hands test.
ONBOARD experience, and guides you through ever ything you new hire up for success in their role.
GROW is where we make training effective, and how to do it well. We also look beyond training, to how to create a Career Development Pathway for every position in your company, so that your team is engaged and excited about their own learning and development.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years, it should be pretty clear that our employee/employer relationships are experiencing some manner of evolution. And for most of us, this evolution hasn’t necessarily made it easier for us to operate our businesses and serve our patients.
The evolution was coming one way or another. You weren’t going to avoid it. Unfortunately, the pandemic appears to have accelerated the process.
The first variable is that our workforce set new expectations for their work experience. Whether it was simply a better “work/life balance”, or more complex like wanting to work in a “mission-focused” environment, the fact is that employees are telling us that they have different expectations for their work experience in the future.
This inevitably led to the second variable: They voted with their
feet, by leaving any and every position that didn’t meet their new expectations. Welcome to the Great Resignation!
Which led to our third variable: newer, younger team members were showing up, and they had new requirements for training AND compensation. Coupled with significant inflation, the dental industry ended up losing an entire generation of skilled workers, to be replaced with unskilled workers that were often demanding higher pay. For the business, this meant higher expenses, and lower output.
Which finally led to our fourth variable: The Great Regret! These team members, now turning over regularly into new jobs, began realizing that none of their new work environments were meeting their expectations, and perhaps they should have considered staying in their original role! In our businesses, we hoped that the new employee would work out well and that our challenges were simply transient. Unfortunately, the reality is that team members now expect a healthy work environment…and few of us know how to deliver it.
What got us here won’t get us there. The same team management systems and cultures that created our challenges are simply inadequate to create our solutions. We studied the healthiest, highest
performing cultures across all industries and realized that they shared some critical distinctions.
First, the younger generational dynamics forced this shift, and as such, they need to be our focus. The good news is that the same systems and experience they require will also satisfactorily serve our more “advanced” generational dynamics in the workforce. What is good for one, is good for all.
Second, we are going to have to make some revolutionary changes to our people processes in order to accommodate our new world…and it isn’t going to be easy.
In our businesses, “entering the danger” always referred to addressing the thing you didn’t want to address. The real issue, or perhaps the issue behind all the issues.
With our teams in 2022 and beyond, entering the danger means talking about their personal lives. Pause here if reading that line made you sick or if you need a minute to compose yourself.
You may not like it, but it’s true. Our people have realized that their work life and home life aren’t separate. First, they realize they might spend more time at the office than at home…so it needs to be enjoyable. Second, they realize that work problems go home with them, and home problems end up affecting their office life. It is all connected! So what is the ramification to your business? Your business MUST be making a meaningful contribution to their personal lives…and the only way you can do it is to talk about it.
The first question everyone asks when this subject comes up is “are we even ALLOWED to talk about personal lives in this HR era?” Let’s put you at ease: As the manager, you aren’t responsible for what is going on in your team members’ home lives! You aren’t forcing them to disclose private information, or anything that violates their rights to privacy. You should never cross the appropriate boundaries that have been established by our HR professionals. However, what you ARE doing is letting your team know that the business wants to make a contribution to helping them live a fulfilling life. You ARE telling them that their personal life matters. You ARE leaving room for them to have personal life challenges…because they do… just like you do. It’s the truth. We’ve just acted like it wasn’t.
It all comes down to having a structure for what you talk about, and when you talk about it. We call this “connecting” with our people, and it’s the first step in our engagement process. Every team member needs to have a plan, and a balance across their “5P’s.”. What are the 5P’s? The first is their POWER, not like strength, but more like energy, with a battery. Physical and mental health are key here. The next is PURPOSE, because every person should have a clear purpose and know that they are fulfilling it in their activities. Third, is PEOPLE, because humans were designed for
strong, healthy relationships…they just don’t happen by accident. The fourth factor is PROSPERITY, which encompasses what we do with the things we receive from our actions. Finally, each person needs to PERFORM, which means that we are validating and measuring the value that we provide to the world. When you and your team are healthy in all 5P’s, life is working well.
Which brings us to the last point: When do we talk about this? In our companies, it happens at least every 90 days. Any less is not sufficient. Life happens constantly and quickly. How much has changed for you in the last year? And…when things start to drift in any one of the areas, the more quickly that we are able to diagnose and address the drift, the more aligned everyone will be.
It might not be what you wanted to hear. It might not be something you are comfortable with…yet. But entering the danger, and building a system to support the personal development of your team members is critical from this day forward. At the end of the day, isn’t this what we should all truly want as employers? Making a meaningful contribution to the lives of the people that support our business? Being willing to see them as they truly are, as whole people that are the sum of their different life spaces? Our hope is that someone will make that commitment to you, and that you will make that commitment to your people. Enter the danger, because it’s the truth.
Is engagement worth the investment? Is it worth putting the time, energy, and money into the culture of your company? The truth is that culture is one of the most important things to the modern workforce – without a healthy company culture, your organization will struggle to meet goals and grow. People are our greatest asset, and they need to be treated as such. Treating your workforce as expendable and recyclable will not only be reflected in your ability to grow, but also your ability to attract better talent. Like any investment, what you put into it is exactly what you will get in return.
If people are going to be your greatest investment, you should also have your most exceptional return on that investment. It’s perfectly fine to have high expectations for your team if you are investing in them the way that you should. Establishing expectations
for your team is not only healthy for your organization, but also for your team members. Boundaries and expectations remove any guesswork out of the equation, thus decreasing the likelihood of a liability being on your team. Investments are made to succeed, not break even.
Below, we’ll be discussing the differences between a disengaged team member and an engaged team member, as well as how each will affect the success of your organization.
A disengaged team member will clock in and out, doing just enough to not get fired from their job. This person will create drama and problems within your organization, often amongst their other team members. They will not care about any training that you might require, nor will they concern themselves with any extra levels of continuous improvement. Essentially, a disengaged team member will not be aligned with the vision of your company or the direction of your leadership.
Disengaged team members are constantly cutting corners, and don’t concern themselves with the quality of service that you are hoping to provide to your patients. This is a person who is doing the absolute minimum at their job, thinking only about the short-term.
Conversely, an engaged team member knows the vision and values of the organization need to be aligned.
They understand their contribution to the organization and seek to improve their performance each day. Additionally, this is a trusted person on the team that does not create problems, opting to find solutions to the daily challenges that your dental practice will face.
Your engaged employees will work to increase the quality of service on a daily basis and make decisions in the best interests of the company. They are looking for opportunities to grow, contribute to improvements throughout the office, and hit their key performance indicators (KPIs).
The question that a lot of business owners have is whether culture really matters. How does culture affect the bottom line? The answer is, unequivocally, yes – culture matters. When your culture suffers, your company suffers.
Investing in culture requires a lot of time and capital to really dial in the specifics of what you need from your team. You need the combination of the right people, the right amount of training, and the right system to be able to make it work. None of this is free or easy.
Measuring KPIs is a key component of checking on your investment. When you set the expectations for performance, you can in turn celebrate those in your organization who are going the extra mile and getting things done. KPIs are the data points inside the practice that will tell you everything you need to know about your team.
Monitor the KPIs to give you a better indication of the engagement levels of your team, so that you can then plan your next steps for investing in the culture of your organization. Use this four-step, sequential equation to better understand what your investments needs:
Your first outcome for investing in culture should be to drive engagement. While it’s unrealistic to expect 100% engagement, try to get 80% to 90% engagement inside your team. When you have that level of engagement with your employees, you will get better performances across the board.
Performance and culture have always gone hand in hand. Culture is not kombucha, trail mix, Casual Fridays or nights at the bars. Don’t let the world deceive you into thinking that’s what culture is. Culture is performing well, having a great time together, and being excited about your patients. It’s saying yes to treatment that changes lives.
When you have the right performance from your team, you will definitely have profit. With profits, you can reinvest in your business, reinvest in your people, and use it to grow your practice. Profits bring de novos and acquisitions, new tools and new software.
Following this four-step formula will help you to better equip your team to succeed on a daily basis, while giving you the opportunity to identify the people within your organization who fit your culture – as well as those who don’t.
Building connections throughout your organization is the best way to ensure that everyone is dialed in to the mission and vision of your organization. When you have outliers – people who aren’t engaged with their work or coworkers – your entire organization will suffer.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are just one facet of how we can set goals and measure our process. The “5 Ps” is a framework to help your team members set personal and professional goals that matter to them and allow you, as the leader, to support them in achieving their highest and best potential.
The important thing to understand about “power” in this context is that it isn’t necessarily about strength or having power over someone else. We’re talking about power as a concept of energy within a human being. We all know that energy is not an infinite resource, despite how it may appear.
As business owners, many of us have worked over 80 hours within a week in our practices. Many of us wake up early in the morning, often before our partners or children are out of bed and come back home after they have gone to bed. We have missed workouts, mismanaged our schedules during the day, and resorted to junk food for quick and easy meals.
Where’s your energy? What’s energizing you? If you want to lead people well, you need to have the energy to lead them. When you allow your energy to be depleted and you allow yourself to break under pressure, what kind of leader does that make you? Our society just tells us to hustle and grind through whatever we are going through, but that’s not how this works. That’s not healthy leadership.
Imagine yourself as a battery. You have to be conscious of where your energy goes, as well as how
you can recharge your energy once it’s depleted. As entrepreneurs and leaders, we often believe that fun, rest, and relaxation come after we have burned ourselves out.
Every human should have a consistent and regular habit of creating physical, mental and spiritual health. Your power comes from how you, as an individual, are energized.
Purpose is how we deliver our unique impact on earth, how we create value for other people. While purpose is an integral part of how you connect with your team and your organization, it isn’t a fixed property: it can change, grow, and redirect over time. Sometimes our purpose isn’t clear, but it shouldn’t pull us from trying new things and finding our purpose.
One of the things that we say often is “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” One of the best ways to feed your personal and professional growth is through enhancing your purpose. It’s not tied to temporary, frivolous things like income. Sure, income can be a result of your purpose. But the income itself isn’t your purpose. We are meant for bigger and more tangible things than a dollar amount.
The shift to a more digital society has changed the ways that we relate to others, often complicating relationships by creating the false assumption that digital relationships are equal to other types of interactions. Connecting with others is what makes us human, and we need
We all have a role to play, whether we know it or not. This is an area where we can always make progress. For example, if you have found that your purpose is to create avenues of continued education for your employees, that needs to be something that you set aside time for each week. Each one of us needs to actively be discovering our purpose, refining our purpose, and magnifying our purpose.
it. The COVID-19 pandemic made this more evident than ever before, forcing many of us to realize how badly we needed other people.
While the pandemic was significantly isolating for all of us, the advent of modern technology has already started to isolate us in one way or another. Digital relationships are no replacement for the real thing.
Relationships need to be built and cultivated with a sense of
One of the things that we say often is “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
One of the best ways to feed your personal and professional growth is through enhancing your purpose.
DEO MAP: intention: if focus is taken from these efforts, these relationships will suffer and fail to thrive. A critical thing for business owners to understand is that your business is not the important thing in the life of your team members. There are so many times when we expect it to be, but the reality is that it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. If we aren’t leaving space for our team members to have healthy relationships outside of work, how can we expect them to want to spend any time in our environment?
Your team needs to be in an environment that allows them to have what’s most important to them. Challenges in our relationships are often the biggest source of lost energy and power, which can then drain the efficacy of your organization. Your team needs to understand that their relationships inside and outside of work are a priority.
According to Merriam-Webster, prosperity means the “condition of being successful and thriving.” Prosperity means more than just money; it’s making sure that you have “enough.”
What does fulfillment look like?
What things are the most important in your life? What is an appropriate compensation for the value you create? Answering these questions creates a far more accurate picture of prosperity. Earnings, financial strategies, and debt reduction may be a part of a prosperity plan, but not the only focus.
Prosperity is about being clear on what your “enough” is for you to be fulfilled and connected to your
people. If you want more – whether that’s flexibility, pay, influence, etc. – you have to create more value.
In order to have a better understanding of what prosperity means to each of us, we need to actively be doing three things:
1 Considering what prosperity means to us.
2 Have a strategy, milestones, and targets that are regularly assessed and adjusted.
3 Regularly consider how we can create more value to drive more prosperity. Perform
We need to make sure we have some system of measuring the output of our team members, allowing us to quantify our goals and the goals of
our team members. Measuring team member performance helps calibrate those goals by providing insight into where someone is doing well and could be stretched.
Performance gives you and your team tangible data for how everything can improve, and it’s verifiable proof that you are reaching your goals and milestones. To truly get the most out of the performance metric, your team needs to be aligned with the core values of your company.
Most importantly, performance is about being effective, where you connect the personal to the professional. This is going to look different depending on the employee and the role they serve in –essentially, the performance of a dentist will be different than a front office manager.
To truly get the most out of the performance metric, your team needs to be aligned with the core values of your company.
Finding the right candidate for the job is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses everywhere. It’s a time-consuming process and is ultimately a gamble on someone that could ultimately not be the right fit for your organization.
How can we simplify this process without losing the efficacy of our recruitment systems? The best tool in your arsenal is the core values of your organization.
When you are ready to hire new team members, make sure that your company culture is where it needs to be to hire the right people for the right seats. Start off by ensuring that you have a clearly defined mission and vision for your practice.
If not, you need to establish one that defines what you want to accomplish with your dentistry. Are you looking to elevate the patient experience?
Is your team focused on improving full body health? Once that’s established, check your core values. What’s important to you? How do you want your team members to conduct themselves?
Your company culture is the combination of shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that make up your practice. It’s not free chips and Casual Fridays. A strong company culture is your single greatest asset in hiring. When the culture is healthy, the employees are happy – it’s that simple. Use your culture as a recruiting and retention tool to help you bring in the best people available for the job at hand.
Our systems should start with engagement, which is what builds our company culture. When you
have engaged team members that can join in on the hiring/recruiting process, not only have you built a strong internal support system, but it makes your company look significantly better. It’s one thing to make a video talking about how great your culture is, but if your team members are actively talking about how great it is to work for your company, it will mean so much more. Recruits
powerful tool in these scenarios. Your primary customer, as the leader, ends up being those team members and associate doctors that work for you. Shifting that mentality and thought process as you grow your business is a really big deal, helping you to refocus and reprioritize your efforts.
In the dental industry, one of the big talking points we discuss with our teams is patient experience. What’s your patient experience? What’s the process? What’s the workflow? Are you meeting expectations? You need to be just as intentional about your team member experience with workflows, graphics, expectations, and metrics.
will see that your team members are genuinely and excited to come to work – use that to your advantage.
Your patient base ends up being the customer of your associates and your team members. Those people are most responsible for the patient experience within your practice, which makes customer service a
If you aim to build a practice that people will want to work for, it will create an environment that your patients will want to keep coming back to. In order to do that, you need to target your customers (your employees), and the results of those efforts will trickle down to your patients. Leverage your core values to create the environment that your team wants to work in.
When the culture is healthy, the employees are happy – it’s that simple. Use your culture as a recruiting and retention tool to help you bring in the best people available for the job at hand.
Like culture, coaching has recently become one of the major buzzwords in the workplace. While it might seem vague on the surface, the idea of coaching is a simple approach to management that allows you and your team to accomplish the daily tasks that are required of operating a dental practice.
Setting a foundational process of coaching your employees is a powerful way to encourage growth and productivity within your organization. By establishing a coaching relationship, you are instilling a sense of trust that you and your teams can collaborate to work towards the mission and vision of your company, while improving daily processes and workflows.
There is a common misunderstanding about business leaders, likely perpetuated by traditional workplace cultures: when you have the title of manager, there’s an expectation that you have all of the answers. That, because you are in a management position, you need to know how to do everything.
This simply isn’t true. Effective coaching isn’t about having all the answers – in fact, you likely won’t have all, if any, of the answers. The best thing that you can do for yourself, your team, and your organization is change that mindset.
In a coaching relationship, you get to collaborate, connect, and coordinate with your teams to find the answers to the challenges that your organization is facing. Coaching is an effective method of leadership because it builds a sense of trust and opens the possibility of a relationship with your employees.
Here, you get to facilitate the development of your teams and provide teaching moments when necessary. Drawing on your own experience, you can guide your employees towards the solution without ever giving a straight up answer. It’s less about providing answers and more about asking the right questions to help them find the answer on their own.
One of the biggest opportunities you have in a coaching relationship is to open yourself up to feedback. Ask your team questions like, “Am I providing you with the tools you need to get the job done? How can I better support you? What ideas do you have?”
As we have established, a significant component of coaching is asking questions. The ultimate coaching question is “How are you growing?”
There are three different types of specific growing questions that you can ask your team: growing up, growing in, and growing out.
Growing “up” refers to growing into a different role inside of your company. This isn’t really tied to whether the employee wants a promotion or a raise but is meant to signify a sense of growth: finding a role that better fits their skills, their journey, trajectory, and the challenges they want to take on. We grow into a role because that role is the right fit for the growth process.
employee, or both. If we want to elevate people to their highest and best purpose, can we help them grow out of the company? The reality is that this is already happening, at least on some level. When you are having these conversations with your employees, these situations won’t catch you by surprise and you can coach them through the process of growing out of your organization.
Difficult conversations require vulnerability, which is never easy. There’s typically an emotional charge in the air, making them uncomfortable and unpleasant for everyone involved. At work, these
Growing “in” is a conversation about mastery. This is where some of the career development pathways will come in, where the employee has an intentional growth strategy for the role that they currently have. Growing in will consider how employees are getting better at providing value in the next 90 days. A coaching relationship allows you to come alongside your team and help them discover what that might look like.
Growing “out” is the intentional, strategic growth out of the company because it’s the best thing for the future of the company, the
conversations have to happen when expectations aren’t being met or boundaries aren’t being respected.
Interestingly, we somehow falsely believe that if we don’t have difficult conversations and avoid conflict, we will have a great relationship. Are your team members coming in late? Are they not meeting KPIs? Are they violating company policies? Whatever might be going on needs to be addressed, no matter how difficult the conversation might be. The speed at which your practice will grow is directly proportional to the frequency and the quality of the difficult conversations you have.
If we want to elevate people to their highest and best purpose, can we help them grow out of the company?
Through the DEO Map: Culture framework, we can create better career development pathways and develop a method for your team members to get excited about their own personal growth.
How can we create an environment where amazing clinicians stay super excited and engaged about staying in patient care? If everyone decides in three to five years that they don’t want to be dental hygienists or dental assistants anymore, that’s not going to be good for our patients. There’s still so much to do in the art and science of treating dental disease and treating patients; so many ways to improve how we do what we do.
Essentially, we need to build avenues that allow for growth within the organization and the industry that engages and stimulates the employee. If there’s too much information, it can be overwhelming and burdensome. If there’s too little, it can feel stagnant and slow paced. Find the sweet spot for you through some A/B testing and develop the framework that works for your organization.
A career development pathway is a roadmap for how we can provide coaching opportunities for team members that might not have a great career ladder to feel that sense of growth and development. Opportunities for growth within your role at work are exciting, and it’s important that everyone in your organization feels like they have a way to grow and learn.
Career trajectories aren’t a onesize-fits-all deal. Once you have begun to develop these trajectories for your organization, don’t make any customizations right away.
Allow your teams to work through these trajectories as they are, giving them space to grow within the framework of what you have built. Celebrate the growth and development of each person as an individual, not based on how quickly they have worked through the program.
Once you have established this framework for career development, you need to revisit your training protocols to ensure that they align with what you are trying to accomplish.
How can your teams improve without the proper training for what’s expected of them? If your employees are not given an opportunity to grow in your organization, they are probably going to grow out of your organization. As business leaders, we often find out that someone is growing out of the organization too late.
One of the ways that you can provide better training for your team members is to assess them for the gaps in knowledge that they might have and tailor your training experiences to those specific components. It’s not training for the sake of training but establishing an outcome and objective that your employees can meet. So much of the training provided to our team members is just a “knowledge dump” that we expect them to retain.
Give your team a say in what they’re learning – When you start to shove continuing education opportunities at your employees, many of them will feel like it’s a chore. The mindset will be “I have
to show up and I have to do this because you are going to make me do it.” If we give them a say in what they are learning and have them participate in the process, they will be more motivated to learn if it’s something they have chosen.
Make it relevant – Make it relevant to your vision, to your customer, and to the role that the individual is in. Make it clear as to why this training actually contributes to what they are doing and what your company is trying to accomplish. The training has to solve problems and address pain points for specific positions in your company, and it’s your job to help your employees see and understand that.
Make the goal clear – Your employees have to know what the goal is for the training you are providing.
If you come in and start changing a bunch of systems and processes, people are going to think that all you want to do is change stuff. Whether the goal is to have a more engaged culture, a better patient experience, or get more efficient, it has to be clear and concise for the people who are working towards that goal.
Repetition, repetition, repetition –Repetition is key for the success of your training initiatives. People do not learn things the first, second, third, fourth or fifth time that you teach it to them. In some cases, your employees may have to hear something seven
Give your team a chance to apply it – Training without interaction isn’t always the best way to learn how to do something. Role play is often the best way for us to learn in a safe environment where we can practice something. If you’re rolling out a case acceptance technique, don’t just throw your team into a $5,000 case for the first time. Work with them. Let them practice and build up to it. Your team members will learn by engaging with the information that you have provided.
times before it actually connects. Repetition can be a gentle reminder in a variety of different voices and tones.
Connect new information with past experience – Stories can make a big difference during training. If you can connect your new training protocols with a past experience or story, your employees are much more likely to remember the story over the data or numbers that you have given them. Try to connect the new information to something familiar and memorable.
Whether the goal is to have a more engaged culture, a better patient experience, or get more efficient, it has to be clear and concise for the people who are working towards that goal.
Frandsen Dental, with three locations in the Salt Lake City area, experienced its largest yearly growth ever in 2021.
“It was great, but it was also chaotic,” said Tiffany Fleisch, director of operations for Frandsen Dental, which has locations in Orem, West Jordan and Grantsville, Utah.
and consistently engage its team members, hire the right people for the right seats, make a great first impression during the onboarding process, and grow the team each step of the way.
Old systems for managing people can create an “us versus them” mentality. The DEO Map aims to maximize the enjoyment of what people do and who they do it with. Relationships drive people throughout their lives and DEO wants to move from an “us versus them” mentality to a “we” mentality. The approach includes:
> Engaging with people focused on connecting with the team, measuring its performance and coaching the team to its highest potential.
> Hiring people using core values to identify candidates who best fit the company vision.
“We lived in the fire,” she said. “We were firefighters. Something would pop up and we’d all jump in and put out the fire, but I don’t think that helped anyone grow.”
Fleisch implemented DEO Map: Culture and its tools this year to help Frandsen Dental embrace its growth. Now, its teams are welcome to openly challenge the system in place at Frandsen Dental.
“Before using the DEO tools, our teams wouldn’t have voiced their concerns about anything. They just wouldn’t have followed
our system even if they had concerns about it. But now, I tell them to rip it apart and they do,” Fleisch explained. “It’s my system. Tell me how to do it better.”
It’s been such a success that Fleisch’s leadership team and office managers want to implement the DEO tools even faster at Frandsen Dental.
The DPR approach is a people management solution for the modern era. The system is built on principles to help group dentistry effectively
> Onboarding people while focused on the first 90 days of a new hire’s experience, making a first impression and setting up a new hire for success in the role.
> Growing and effectively training people while creating a career development pathway for each position in the company, making it exciting for the team to learn and develop its skills.
Frandsen Dental has shifted its focus to a team-oriented model. “Our teams see that and they’re more open and honest about how
they’re feeling and what’s going on if something isn’t working well,” Fleisch explained.
“We changed our core values this year because my leadership team knew our teams were ready for it,” Fleisch said. “The day we rolled them out at our locations, some team members cried for joy because they felt like they had lost why they get up and do this every day. It was a reminder, and it was so helpful for our teams.”
The DEO Map aims to build and cultivate relationships with intention through direct person-to-person contact. It sets long-term and short-term goals through this relationship building.
DEO’s SMART goals stand for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound.
The goals state specifically what is going to be changed or accomplished, the amount of change needed and the quality of the results. The results are measured by making the achievement of success clear and unambiguous. The best goals are challenging but achievable through planning and persistence, stretching the team and forcing it to grow and improve.
The importance of goals should be known and how successes will enrich the lives of others. There should be a specific start date, due date and milestones to help track progress, allow celebrations or make larger projects more manageable.
“Somebody holding me accountable has been huge,” Fleisch said. “Knowing that we’re meeting with our implementer every 90 days
makes me accomplish these things with my team. We struggled at first. We weren’t successful in our first quarter of the program. Halfway through our second quarter, we realized what we told our implementer we were going to do, and we had to derail because we didn’t stay on top of it. We were finally successful in our third quarter as a leadership team.”
Fleisch compares it to losing weight. “If you say ‘I want to lose weight’ but you’re the only one holding yourself accountable, you might lose weight. However, if you fall off the wagon, who cares? By meeting with our implementer every 90 days, it holds us accountable. It also holds me accountable to using the great tools our implementer brings us.”
One of those tools Fleisch mentioned for team growth is called Gap and Gain.
“People tend to live in a gap if they’re upset or sad,” she said. “They’re frustrated because they
didn’t accomplish things. But instead of looking at that gap, we look at all of the things we accomplished, and we can do this on a monthly basis.”
These tools have helped Frandsen Dental celebrate team successes and have made 2022 Fleisch’s favorite year in dentistry.
“I’ve been with Frandsen Dental for 15 years and in dentistry for more than 20 years and this was my favorite year by far because we know what we have to finish in a quarter,” she said. “Before this year, we never stopped. It was one project after another. But now once my quarterly projects are done, I don’t feel like I have to keep going. That’s been very helpful.”
Fleisch says last year’s growth at Frandsen Dental was like drinking water out of a fire hydrant. But this year, they are mastering a few things and building on those.
“The DEO Map helps us focus on the most important things and not 40 other projects,” she said. “It helps eliminate the noise.”
DEO determined it was time for a name change because DEO serves more than DSOs (and has for a long time) so had outgrown the name. DEO is dedicated to helping dental leaders build thriving dental organizations and have more profit, time, and impact; and helping practices become businesses
and businesses become organizations. Working with companies of all sizes from large individual dental practices to small dental groups with multiple locations to DSOs, DEO serves leaders and organizations seeking to create a thriving company with robust systems, happy associates, and teams.
The Facebook Group needed a makeover to better reflect the broad impact DEO seeks to make by leveling up dental leaders and organizations to thrive and grow, best serving their teams, and organizations, and providing top-quality patient care.
DEO’S Growth Secrets for Dental Organizations Facebook Group is a place for dental industry leaders to make connections with a community of dental entrepreneurs, group dentistry professionals, practice
owners, DSO executives, subject matter experts, and more — really any dentist or professional striving to run or serve a successful dental company is welcome to join!
This exclusive private Facebook Group offers a place to get burning questions answered right away on topics like leadership; hiring; onboarding; training; retention; associates; technology; profitability; KPIs; operations; compensation and equity structures; deNovos and acquisitions; finding funding; getting out of the chair; the current economic climate; dental industry trends; marketing; insurance; reimbursement; patient care; central-
ization; supplier recommendations; revenue cycle management; “quiet quitting”; and much, much more.
Group members get access to free valuable resources and exclusive content for help running a successful dental company, as well as special discounts and more that are only available to group members!
Get to know the DEO Partners in the DEO Growth Secrets Facebook Group
DEO Partners regularly share expert tips and real-time advice culled from their combined 60+ years of experience in the dental industry. Join to connect with Jacob Puhl, Partner
& CEO of the DEO; Darin Acopan, DEO Partner & EVP of Sales; Dr. Eric J. Roman, DEO Partner; Josey Sewell, RDH, DEO Partner & Head of Implementation & Coaching; Emmet Scott, co-founder of Community Dental Partners (CDP) & DEO Partner; and Ken Kaufman, President/CFO of Nuvia Dental Implant Centers & DEO Partner.
Scan the QR Code to Join DEO Growth Secrets Facebook Group:
Access to complimentary bonus resources for group members only: Exclusive Bundle4 Resources To Help Your Dental Organization
Thrive With More Profit, Time & Impact
Connect with 7,000 of the country’s most successful dental leaders
Get burning questions answered right away and expert insight to help you run a successful dental business
Special coupon code for steep Summit savings
Watch Facebook live events with DEO Partners sharing timely and valuable content
Download free curated topical resources for dental company success
“Hear it first” exciting news and announcements about upcoming DEO events and offerings And much more!
There’s no easy way to say this. Recruiting in today’s marketplace is hard, and that’s putting it nicely. Not just for clinicians either. Hygienists, dental assistants, front office staff – there are too many job openings and not enough people coming back into the workplace.
Now more than ever, dental group practices must be on their game when it comes to recruiting. “Whatever you were doing before, it cannot be the same anymore,” said Jackie Brown, Executive Director of Human Resources for Texas-based Community Dental Partners. Dental group practices must examine, and in some cases rethink, how they recruit, tell their story, and show up for prospective candidates.
In a recent DEO presentation, Brown and Tiffany Green, Director of Clinical Recruiting for CDP, provided dental entrepreneurs with some best practices – and encouragement – to equip DSOs wanting to successfully navigate the current labor market.
Before you and your team get started, take a nice, deep, collective breath. CDP leadership encourages its team to focus on an abundance mindset. All those rural areas that are getting declined by candidates? Retrain your brain to think of them as your “easiest-to-fill” locations.
“If you don’t believe it in your mind, you can’t sell it,” said Green. “If I go to my team and say, ‘Hey, if we don’t hire a doctor, the practice is going to shut down and we’re going to have to fire staff,’ they’re going to look at me with glossed over eyes. You can’t operate like that.”
Sometimes you must shift your energy. Yes, some days are hard, but
by living in abundance, the challenge shifts from a recruiting team problem to a company problem, and everyone is on board with solving it. There are no sacred cows, no toes you have to worry about stepping on. “Test it. Try it. Live in abundance,” Green said.
CDP’s recruiting team starts every new conversation with a provider by talking about the organization’s nine pillars (see sidebar). If the provider reviewed the pillars and company culture description on the website, Green will then ask what pillar resonated the most with them. “If they can’t understand who we are foundationally and culturally, then are they going to be a fit for our organization?”
“Everyone in our entire organization is a recruiter,” said Green. She has people in the organization texting her all the time about potential candidates. She is more than happy to give out her cell phone number and email to any team member who has a potential lead. “We’re making this process way too difficult,” she said. “Think of it more in abundance.”
Yes, technology can make our jobs easier, including recruiting. But we’re all humans. Recruiting involves human beings recruiting other human beings. “They are relational, and we are relational,” Green said. “They can tell when it’s an automated email. They can tell when it’s an automated text.”
Are all automated emails and texts bad? No, because there are only so many hours in the day. But trying to make recruiting as relational as possible is better than relying on too much automation. “We’re not robots. We’re humans. We’re trying the best that we can in these uncharted territories.”
When you speak to people, you might not hire them today, but don’t look at them as a complete lost cause, because you might hire them in a year, or two, or three. That person you met two years ago might be right there at the door tomorrow, Green said. All you have to do is open it and let them in. “If you have that relationship with them and you’ve created that trust and that transparency, you’re already 75% of the way there.”
The reality is you can’t implement everything overnight. It’s
just not possible. Green said think about the resources that you have now. What can you add one at a time? “Take messy, dirty action,” she said.
Don’t be left getting ready. “Does anyone ever have all their ducks in a row?” Brown said. “You’ve got to be taking action and moving forward in a positive way.”
Brown said if you’re frantic to fill a position, the candidate will sense it. “When you’re talking to that doctor on the other end of the line, no matter where they are in their career, it’s a massive decision,” she said. Whether they’re just coming out of dental school or they’re moving their family across the country, “you have to show up confident that you know what you’re talking about, that you have the support for them, and that you have the culture and the business to sustain them.”
Brown said CDP utilizes multiple marketing strategies for recruiting. “You can’t just use one.”
Each strategy needs to be specific in what you’re trying to recruit for. “What’s the position? Because what I’m doing for a hygienist is not the same for a pediatric dentist.” Don’t use the same paintbrush across every job that you’re trying to fill. You’re going to have to make some things a little bit different. You’re going to need to tweak some things so you’re reaching the audience you want.
It's not just the role that needs a targeted approach. The location
does too. CDP does a lot of recruiting for rural communities, which are typically more challenging to find clinicians who want to relocate to. “We definitely have to do a totally different recruiting marketing plan around those rural communities than we do in the big cities,” Brown said.
The brand also factors into recruiting. For instance, if the brand is pediatric dentistry, does the candidate you’re recruiting enjoy seeing kids? “If we’re trying to hire somebody who doesn’t really enjoy seeing kids, do I really want to bring them into a practice that sees 80% children? I can get them in there at the beginning, train
We use humility as our basis for learning. It allows us to let go of the past and change who we are.
We work hard to be personally accountable. We eliminate excuses from our lives.
We are grateful for the opportunity to work.
The happiest people are those that have learned to be grateful for the small things.
We respect co-workers because we accomplish much more as a team. We do not gossip; we look for the good in each other.
We do not judge others. We know that each
them up, but then eventually they end up leaving.”
DSOs must be good at how they’re recruiting for every individual thing, from position to location to brand. “You’ve got to be really, really good and detailed at all those different things and not just have a blanket statement, because that’s not getting recruits anymore,” Brown said.
As you’re speaking to candidates, are you showing up in an authentic way? Are you selling them on butterflies and rainbows, only to see them get smacked in the face with reality once they get into the practice?
person is doing their best to overcome their weaknesses.
We focus on our own development and have faith that everything else will continue to fall into place.
We emphasize physical, emotional, and spiritual development. We seek balance in our lives to find greater health.
We love to have fun! Happiness spontaneously comes out when we treat ourselves and others with kindness.
We make customer service our passion. We are in the relationship business,
Green said she learned a valuable lesson when trying to fill an open position at a rural location. She talked to the candidate about the beautiful nearby state parks, the amazing patients and the impact the clinician would make in the community. But after the doctor visited the location, she called Green back upset about how bad the fit was. “That was a learning lesson,” Green said. “I wanted to get a doctor for that practice. But at the end of the day, if it’s not a match, we’re wasting everybody’s time.”
It’s important to be transparent. If somebody likes city life, why would you want to send them to a rural area? “They’re going to leave,” Green said. “They’re not going to be happy.” Find out what’s important to them and be authentic about what you can offer. That includes the financials. If they request to see the numbers of the practice, show them.
Ultimately you must keep the doors open, Green said. “You might hire someone that you know is only going be there three months or have them do a part-time contract. Yet, they’re a butt in a seat.” Although not ideal, sometimes you need to have a stop gap.
And here is where the delicate dance becomes apparent. CDP has a strong mentoring and onboarding process. New doctors coming in go through a thorough, 10-week long mentorship program. Included in that program is a humanitarian trip, a week of
Jackie Brown is Executive Director of Human Resources for Community Dental Partners. Having earned a Bachelor’s Degree in business administration and management from West Texas A&M University, Jackie went on to study for an MBA at Texas Woman’s University. She joined the CDP team in 2019 as the director of dentist recruiting. Today, as executive director of HR, Jackie is dedicated to providing leadership and clarity, building relationships, and removing roadblocks for supported doctors and staff as she helps them connect to a bigger purpose. For her, it’s about more than just the work – it’s about the people.
Tiffany Green for over 12 years, has been a leader within the Human Resource space by creating impact from talent management and system implementation to employee relations and training & development. She graduated from Baylor University with her Bachelor of Business Administration in Operations Management and Marketing and the University of Texas at Arlington with her Master of Business Administration in Operations Management and her Master of Science in Human Resources. In her current role as Doctor Recruiting Manager at Community Dental Partners, she manages the full doctor and hygienist recruiting life cycle. She leads and supports the development of CDP’s new recruiting platform to create strategic brand awareness and highlight the value of CDP through multiple lead engagement and nurture strategies. She also enjoys spontaneous adventures with her family, natural wellness, living life with gratitude, and a good cup of coffee. Tiffany is excited to connect doctors and hygienists with opportunities to make real tangible changes in people's lives, while fulfilling her passion to make the whole world smile!
orientation, side by side days with more seasoned doctors who serve as mentors, and lots of CE training.
People don’t just want the welcome mat in accepting a job. They want to see where it can take them in their career. “It’s good to have career paths,” Brown said. “If you have career paths mapped out, and you know what it takes to go from a level one to a level two, from a level
two to a level three, and you know what it takes to go from a greeter to a front office one to front office two to a front office three, and you know what that dollar amount is with each of those steps, that gives candidates a clearer picture of how your organization can help them grow. “We want to make sure we have the resources in place to help them so that they feel they have some ownership in where they’re going and how they get to that next level.”
Can’t miss discussions from today’s DSO leaders.
Join Emmet Scott and Ken Kaufman as they interview industry leaders and distill their lessons into actionable resources on the DSO Secrets podcast to help you create a thriving business so you can change the lives you’re meant to bless and achieve your personal success.
How prevalent is embezzlement in the dental profession, and how can organizations combat it?
In this episode, Emmet is joined by Dr. Brett Wells, Founder of DentalHQ, and David Harris, Founder/CEO of Prosperident, to discuss how an in-house membership plan helps prevent embezzlement. Dr. Wells and David also share their 5 accounting best practices to ensure the success of your membership plan, fraud/ embezzlement signs to look for, how technology can help, and more.
Looking for creative ways for your group dentistry practice to overcome inflation?
Brenda McNulty, Dental Group Director, SupportDDS, and Callie Ward Senior Account Executive, SupportDDS, join
Emmet to discuss how technology can help mitigate the effects of inflation, including how it can help centralize and offshore workload with remote teams. Brenda and Callie define in-sourcing vs out-sourcing, dispel the misnomers, and discuss what technology can and cannot do. Other topics covered include the inflationary environment’s current state, financial implications, the great resignation, workplace culture, hiring, retention, and much more.
Inflation, and the culture of convenience, are coming to a crossroads in group dentistry. Emmett speaks with Dr. Hungate, orthodontist and founder of Simplifeye, to discuss how implementing technology that offers convenience to patients has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Technology can help mitigate staffing shortage issues and cause less friction for consumers. Dr. Hungate and Emmet discuss patient satisfaction, technology options, innovation, the current financial landscape, and much more.
