Building momentum within your team is one of the greatest challenges you will face as a dental CEO. You will not achieve the success you want in your practice if you think you can do it on your own. Having that team behind you is vital and you want that team to be enthusiastic about what they do.
Practice owners who are struggling often lack that enthusiastic team. They may feel they are doing all the right things. They have a vision of the care and the patient experience they want to deliver – one that is patient focused. They identified the core values they thought reinforced that vision.
The team seemed excited. Everyone was so engaged and worked well together creating that vision, identifying the values.
But somewhere along the way, that excitement fizzled out. The momentum you thought you had developed disappeared and your team seems to just be going through the motions. Everyone does enough to keep things going. But that desire to really excel is long gone.
What could have happened?
For many offices, the problem is how do they cross the Great Divide between the vision of care they want their practice to be known for and the financial data used to measure their performance as a team.
Let’s be clear…numbers matter! You need to know the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that drive success. KPI’s tell you so much about what your office is doing well and what facets it may be struggling with.
What is your case acceptance level? Do you know your hygiene production by provider, by provider per hour? Is your admin team adept at converting leads who call your office into patients who book appointments?
It is difficult to improve the financial performance of your office if you are not on top of those numbers.
The problem is fixating on those numbers may result in you losing the support of your team. You see, you built their excitement on the basis of a vision of excellence in patient care. Your office was going to be all about ensuring the patient experience was second to none.
But rather than measure and reward team members for their excellence in care delivery, all you talk about is money!
So now, you have lost credibility. You talked a good talk about care back then. But in the end, all that matters is money.
CEO’s understand how to cross that Great Divide. They realize that financial metrics provide so much more information than just the profitability of the practice.
Financial metrics can identify when opportunities for care are being missed. If your level of case acceptance is low, why are patients rejecting the care recommendations you provide? When you see your hygiene production numbers are not what they should be, are patients overdue for the appointments? If so, how is that impacting their oral care?
Those leads your admin team is struggling to convert – doesn’t that mean patients are missing out on the care experience only your office can provide?
Even when the conversation does turn to improving your financial performance, and it inevitably will, part of your focus can be on using at least some of that money to invest in continuing education or new, state-of-the-art equipment. In other words, the office needs that money to ensure you can provide the best standard of care.
Your mission to improve your CEO skills is to avoid leaving your team feel like you are beating them up over financial metrics. Rather, it is to maintain the momentum you built when you created that vision, those values!
It is about taking that financial data and converting it to the story of care and care opportunities being missed.
It is about how you bridge that Great Divide!
About the Author
Shawn Peers is the President of DentalPeers. DentalPeers is one of Canada’s oldest, continuous operating buying groups exclusively for dentists.
