The “5-By-5” Solution to Better Performance

One of the more common mistakes I see in dental careers is to embark on a course of action without the context of a greater plan. I’m talking about dentists who really want to succeed and who are eager to put in the time and resources to advance in their careers, but they do it in a piecemeal, unfocused way—a course here, a course there, maybe a facility enhancement,  a new clinical technique or team alignment strategy.

These are all improvements that drive performance, but they don’t answer the central question: Driving performance toward what? Without a coherent, over-arching plan, you are left with a “tail-wagging-the-dog” approach to your professional development. You just keeping doing things to get better and see where it goes.

But of course true leadership is not just about managing today—it’s about being an architect of how things will be tomorrow, and that requires foresight and vision. How far off this that “tomorrow”? I feel that everyone should have a good sense of the overall arc of their career, right to retirement, but for the purposes of leadership planning, I think five years is right for most.  Five years out is far enough away that you are not constrained in your thinking by today’s realities, so you can dream. At the same time, it is close enough that you can break it down into action items where you can see progress before your eyes.  And that’s how you put improvements in the right context—by starting with a vision and saying, Ok, now what will it take in terms of team performance, patient flow, economics, case management, and clinical training to get there?

I realize that it’s easy to get lost in the details when contemplating these big questions, which is why a lot of people never get started. But the truth is, the framework can be really quite simple. I have broken it down into what I call the 5 by 5 Leadership plan. It’s all about planning for five factors—Time, Reinvestments, Economics, Productivity, and the Right Cases—over the course of five years. Use those touchstones to guide you and you will create a vision document that becomes a template for success—a living, working document that gives direction and meaning to everything you do.

If you want to go deeper with this subject, look for my upcoming online course, where I will go into much greater detail on how to plan for each of these five factors. But whatever approach you take, do yourself a favor and create that plan now—your future depends on it.