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A Purposeful Life by Dr. John A. Wilde

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Categories: Practice Management, HR and Accounting;
A Purposeful Life 

It’s worth taking time to define what’s most important to your practice

by Dr. John A. Wilde

At age 53, during the prime of my career and after 26 years of private practice, I retired. Five years later, proud possessor of a newly transplanted and fully functional kidney and almost terminally bored, I returned to dentistry and started a second office from scratch. Helped tremendously by the reappearance of previously gratified patients, we quickly became fully scheduled.

Three months later, I treated my teammates and their spouses to a celebratory fete at the area’s finest dining establishment to commemorate our surprisingly substantial first-quarter profit. (Our only external marketing had been an announcement of our office’s opening that ran in the local newspaper for a week, yet we achieved the 1,000-patient mark in nine months.)

While profoundly appreciative of our accelerated growth and precocious fiscal achievement, I knew we were far from a complete office because any entity lacking a clearly defined lodestar will drift like a rudderless ship, blown by every wind of fortune, and we had yet to delineate ours.

A hard truth for some dentists to accept is that sometimes, you have to be the boss. It is your sole and lonely obligation to achieve a vision describing the office of your dreams, then plot a steadfast path to that achievement. As a blooded veteran of dental conflicts, I knew my happiness depended on defining, then creating, a like-minded team of mutually supportive friends dedicated to a common purpose greater than themselves. The challenge: How could this hectically busy group of five strangers, with none but our hygienist and myself having dental experience, rapidly develop an inspirational vision complete with mutually clarified values that would lead not merely to significant initial achievement but to sustained joy, peace and economic triumph?

I’ve always thought outside the box by scrutinizing unconventional resources, because analyzing the same dental information as everyone else is unlikely to create uniquely successful strategies. Jack Welch, the legendary past CEO of General Electric for 20 years, came to my rescue during my time of need. (There are worse people from whom one could solicit advice!) In his bestselling and still readily available tome Winning: The Ultimate Business How-To Book, Welch contends that mission communicates where a team is going, while values define which behaviors will best accelerate their passage.

Putting rubber to the road

To achieve our goal, I combined my much more modest experience with Welch’s genius and inspiration to devise the following staff meeting exercise. This strategy proved to be a powerful team-building, mission-defining and value clarification tool that accurately guided our path over my remaining 11 years of practice. No matter where you are on your unique journey, perhaps it can accomplish the same for you.

As an initial step, I sent the note seen in Fig. 1 to all staff. After also completing the assignment anonymously, I compiled our five sets of answers onto a master sheet to facilitate discussion.

Wilde_Building a dental team
Fig. 1

This initial task was only the beginning of 11 months, or 22 staff meetings, at least partially devoted to developing our office purpose. When completed, we hung a calligraphed version of this hard-earned document (Fig. 2) on each operatory wall in full sight of patients, and read it aloud at the start of every biweekly staff meeting for the remainder of my career.

Wilde_building a dental team
Fig. 2

This document’s first sentence defines our mission: to serve patients. Value clarification is as challenging as it is essential, but we exhibited the entire panoply of our shared beliefs in the remainder of this slender paragraph.

Others have asked if they could copy our statement, but I can’t overemphasize the critical nature of the developmental process. Everyone was involved, and we wrote and rewrote in our effort to elucidate. When we discussed disputes in light of which choice best suited our purpose rather than which fulfilled individual or selfish desires, a definitive and unanimous answer quickly became apparent.

I believe values aren’t good or bad, right or wrong, but are primarily choices. Despite this philosophy, the reality is that dentist–owners can’t leave, and just or not, their values must perforce be given greater significance. Our extensive dialogue revealed fundamental differences in our beliefs, which explained the discord we sometimes suffered. During months of discussion, two staff members chose to leave after realizing their beliefs varied from the majority. They took most of our disharmony with them, because people with divergent principles working together create perpetual dissidence. New employees entering an office with clarified, accepted and oft-discussed values quickly understand, agree and fall into lockstep … or leave.

The results will be worth the effort

Why devote this much time, effort and overhead to such a nebulous task? Maybe some dental teams form spontaneously, but I’ve always had to build mine. No matter how motivated, determined and energetic, a finite limit exists to what any dentist striving alone can accomplish. But an authentic team, guided and united by clearly defined and understood beliefs, is restrained only by the group’s imagination, desire and vigor.

Aristotle advised, “For man, a reasoning, purposeful creature with a final endeavor in life, the supreme final end of which everything exists is happiness.” Such an achievement is imperative for those determined to attain their best practice and lives.

Author Bio
John Wilde After working through eight years of higher education, paying 100% of all costs, Dr. John A. Wilde spent his next two years in the U.S. Army Dental Corps before beginning a practice from scratch in Keokuk, Iowa. He was debt-free at 30 years old, owning his home and the practice he’d designed and built outright. He was financially able to retire at 40 and fully retired when he was 53. He has published six books and written more than 200 articles. Contact: 309-333-2865 or jwdentist@hotmail.com
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