Team building has been a major source of management challenges in dental practices for many years. Now we are facing intense staff shortages. When we do find someone to hire, they are often less skilled than in the past. At the same time, dentistry has become more complex due to great advances in technology, requiring even more clinical and technical skills. How do you build a world-class team in this environment?
It starts with the hiring process. There are at least three things you should look for when hiring:
- Hire people who are rising on their energy curve.
Having nothing to do with skill sets, there are people who are rising in terms of their energy, dedicated to doing a great job, and others who are flat or declining. You want to look for people to bring into your practice who have great energy and will continue to have great energy going forward.
People with energy typically apply it to learning new skills and technology.
- Hire people who fit your culture.
There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to hiring dental team members. Every practice has a culture, whether the practice leadership intentionally created it or the culture created itself. It is desirable to find individuals who can integrate with the current team in a positive way and display the ability to have excellent interpersonal relations and a teamwork mentality.
If the culture is one of hard work, then you want to hire someone dedicated to hard work. If the culture is one of positivity, then you want to hire individuals who display a positive attitude. If the culture is one of caring and compassion, then you want people with those attributes. It is a mistake to hire people, even if they are skilled, who do not fit the rest of the team or the culture.
Sometimes practices are so desperate to get a person on board that they hire an individual who does not fit. This often results in disruption of the current team and inevitably leads to future staff turnover, forcing the hiring process to begin all over again.
- Hire for a sense of stability.
In no way am I suggesting that a highly qualified candidate should be ignored if they do not have stability in their lives, but to some degree, if you want to build a long-term team, you want stable people with maturity and professionalism. In today’s difficult labor environment, hiring stable people who have demonstrated commitment to either previous practices or to projects in their personal lives presents the best opportunity to build a world-class team.
The Key to Building a World-Class Team
Finding and hiring the right people is important, but they need excellent leadership. Leadership is not taught in dental school, and the truth is that even in the business world, most managers are not excellent leaders. Leadership is a skill that every dentist needs to master. It isn’t difficult to get started.
Answer these questions:
- Do you regularly talk about the practice’s commitment to its vision, mission, patient care, and customer service?
- Do you have daily and monthly meetings that include measurements of the practice to keep the team aware of practice performance?
- Have you assessed the skill level of each team member and determined the next skill they need to master or improve?
- Does every team member have 1 to 3 goals that they are to achieve each year with measurements attached for follow-up to assess performance?
The answer to these questions always needs to be affirmative when it comes to excellent leadership. Training the team in required knowledge can only happen if the leader has taken the time to assess what each member of the team needs to know. Each team member has a job to do and should have one or more performance metrics attached to that job for measurement.
Every practice can build a world-class team using basic hiring and leadership principles. Hire the right personality traits and create a culture with excellent leadership behaviors, and you will be rewarded with the world-class team you’ve always wanted!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roger P. Levin, DDS, is the CEO and founder of Levin Group, a leading practice management consulting firm that has worked with over 30,000 clients to increase production.
A recognized expert on dental practice management and marketing, he has written more than 60 books and over 4,000 articles and regularly presents seminars in the U.S. and around the world.
To contact Dr. Levin or to join the 40,000 dental professionals who receive his Practice Production Tip of the Day, visit www.levingroup.com or email rlevin@levingroup.com.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
