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Howard Speaks: Coach Your Team to Success by Dr. Howard Farran

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Categories: Practice Management, HR and Accounting;
Howard Speaks: Coach Your Team to Success 

by Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, publisher, Dentaltown magazine

In baseball, the rule is three strikes and you’re out. You should be applying a similar rule when it comes to human resources issues in your practice, too.

 What’s the issue?

If you fire someone and this news comes as a surprise to them, you need to reexamine your ability to manage and lead a team.

Unless an employee has done something egregious, a first offense should lead to a warning, not an outright dismissal. You should identify the problem and give the employee an opportunity to correct their behavior, providing them with feedback and guidance on how to succeed.

It’s true that occasionally, no matter how many times you tell someone they’re not performing and meeting expectations, they just don’t get it. However, more often than not, managers want to avoid confrontation, so they don’t address the issues and instead avoid the person. That’s doing a horrible job of leading a team.

 What’s the cause?

An example: Your practice opens at 7 a.m. but your assistant rolled in around 7:10.

That might bother most dentists, but how many would bring it up right away? Chances are, you’d consider it a one-time thing and not say anything—but the incident would stick in the back of your mind. The next time it happened, it would make you angry, because you haven’t forgotten the previous incident and you also expect that your assistant “should know better” … but you still probably wouldn’t say anything, you’d just seethe inwardly.

But the third time it happened, you’d erupt like a volcano: “I can’t stand this anymore—you’re fired!” This person had no idea something like this was going to happen; they have monthly bills they need to pay and now they’re shocked, saddened and unemployed, all because their coach never showed up for the game.

Watch any professional baseball game and you’ll see how the coach is intimately involved during the entire game, standing at the sidelines calling in plays, timeouts, etc. Most dentists, meanwhile, retreat to their private office between every patient and shut the door.

 What’s the solution?

I think a better manager would call the assistant into a private office, explain the problem, and then open a Word document and leave the office while the employee types out in their own words what went wrong and why it will no longer be a recurring problem. Many times, you’ll come back to learn that she does this because she always stays an hour after the practice closes, while the other assistants fly out the door right at quitting time, and she doesn’t think that’s fair. This gives you the information you need to know so you can work together to address the issue and build a winning team.

Even in “right-to-work” states, firing an employee can be problematic from a legal standpoint. To protect your business, you need to demonstrate that you’ve given an employee multiple opportunities to correct the issue at hand, and you can’t do that unless you discuss it with them.

If you hate this part of the business, you need to delegate to an office manager who has the same authority to make plays that match their responsibility. You’re either the coach or a player, because you can’t be both. So, play ball ... and set yourself up so your entire team plays to win.
Discover the right way to address team issues
HR expert Paul Edwards discussed how to improve team performance in an article that ran in the June 2021 issue of Dentaltown, which includes a free downloadable corrective action form. Click here to go to Edwards' article.
 

Support these advertisers included in the January 2022 print edition of Dentaltown magazine.

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