It’s Okay to Spoil Your Team!

by Shawn Peers, Dental Peers

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In November, we focused on delegating tasks to team members and holding them accountable. As a dental CEO, you simply cannot do it all. You need to entrust some vital tasks to your team.

And as we head into the holiday season, a time of year intended to spoil our family members, it seems appropriate to ask if we should also spoil our team.

I will be up front and say go for it! Spoil away! And not just over the holidays.

Many of you might disagree. Many dentists are concerned that spoiling their team will result in their losing control over the team. Team members will take advantage of them. They will change their hours, call in sick, create office procedures for their benefit and not that of the practice.

How can you operate a profitable practice when the team is making the rules to benefit themselves and not your practice or your patients?

The truth is you cannot!

So then why would I tell you it is okay to spoil your team?

The answer is simple: handing control of your practice to your team is not spoiling them.

That is spoiling them rotten!

Spoiling your team does not mean letting them call the shots. You are still the leader. You expect performance in accordance with your priorities, rules and operating procedures.

Spoil them with your praise. Don’t be over the toppraise has to be sincere. Simple phrases like “thank you” and “great job” carry more weight than virtually any other combination of two words in the English language.

Create a great work environment. Provide them with the best tools that allow them to excel at their jobs, such as state-of-the-art technology and the best in training. Give them all the cool toys so they feel like kids in a candy shop!

Spoil them with generous compensation and a great benefits package. I understand that the labour market of the last couple of years has made compensation a sore topic with soaring salaries and huge labour shortages.

But smart CEO’s recognize there is no benefit to being bitter about the realities of the labour market. Those who were consistently generous before the world went crazy had an easier time keeping their teams intact.

By all means, adjust your compensation as needed to meet labour market trends. Just remember, those who strategically provide the best total compensation tend to attract the best team members!

And the best team members produce the best results for your practice and for your patients.

Therefore, as we head into the holiday season, be prepared to spoil your team just like you would spoil your kids!

But like your kids, do not spoil them rotten. Hold them accountable and reward them accordingly.

And now, we at DentalPeers, the Dental CEO Maker, would like to wish all of you the best of the holiday season.


About the Author

Shawn Peers is the President of DentalPeers. DentalPeers is one of Canada’s oldest, continuous operating buying groups exclusively for dentists.


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