As we’ve discussed before, building your team holds a special place of significance in your practice. Having the right team in place helps you make more money in less time because it allows you to delegate administrative tasks to others and focus your time on building your business and enjoying what’s important to you outside of your practice.
When we last talked about how to build the right team to transform your dental practice, we walked through finding and testing candidates to make sure they fit the vision and culture of the practice you’re building. This included things like identifying qualities you need in each team member, such as a strong work ethic or good attitude, and incorporating your practice vision and culture into your candidate search.
By evaluating team members and candidates to ensure they share your vision for your practice, embrace the culture of your practice, and have the personal and professional qualities you need, you’ll help ensure you have the right people working with you.
Once they’re on board, however, it’s critical that you keep them inspired and motivated to do their best work on a consistent basis.
Even the most positive, hardworking team members can grow frustrated and uninspired over time. Because of that, it’s important to be intentional about designing your practice so it helps keep your team members inspired and working hard.
Here are two things you can do to help inspire them so you can be confident they’ll help you deliver a WOW experience to each and every patient, turn those patients to raving fans, and allow you to build a practice that helps you achieve your personal and professional goals.
1. Create clear systems and processes.
Some people are surprised that having systems and processes in place actually helps inspire team members. They think having more rules reduces satisfaction. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s not that the systems and processes inspire. It’s what having those systems and processes does that inspires and motivates your team members.
Without clear systems and processes in place, you’d have to do everything yourself to be confident it would be done consistently well or train people over and over again to do things that need to be done in your practice. That would be frustrating for everyone.
On the other hand, when you have clear systems and processes in place, you can train people once or twice on following the systems and processes, and then you can be confident they can perform those tasks instead of having to do them yourself.
Clear and documented systems and processes let your team members know exactly what’s expected of them. This sets them up for success and ensures they can do their job consistently well. That’s what helps keep them inspired and motivated. (It also reduces frustration on your part because things will be done right the first time and every time.)
2. Make sure your practice is about more than just teeth.
If your team members share your vision and get involved with community or charitable initiatives, it changes how they view their work. They’ll see an impact beyond the dental care and when people ask them what they do, they’ll connect their work to that greater impact.
When people ask how they like their job, they’ll light up and talk about all the great things your practice does beyond the teeth.
To promote this, regularly give back to the community through things like charity drives, donated or low-cost services, and more. Get your team on board. Reward them for participating. Have fun with it by recognizing their contributions on social media. Let them know that their great work allows your practice to make an even bigger impact.
Connect their work to a bigger story they can be proud of. In my practice, openly acknowledging how much my great and Spanish-speaking team member Mayra’s connection to the Spanish-speaking community helped us serve Medicaid patients who weren’t being served like the greater population helped keep Mayra inspired and motivated because she knew she was making an important impact. It also inspired other team members who helped serve those same patients.
What will you do to inspire your patients?
The key to personal and professional freedom lies in your ability to build a practice that can run without you.
Without inspired and dedicated team members, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you’ll never be able to keep up, and you’ll never build a practice that helps you build the personal and professional life of your dreams. You’ll be stuck in the office all day, every day because you’ll have to do everything, every time.
Take a few minutes to identify how
you
can create systems and processes to help your team members take some work off your hands and to make their work part of something much bigger than fixing teeth.
Dr. Anissa Holmes helps dentists to build crazy profitable practices, inspired teams, and patients who are raving fans. She's the host of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast and the host of the book Delivering WOW, How Dentists Can Build a Fascinating Brand And Achieve More While Working Less!
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