Creating a New Vision for Your Dental Practice

This extremely confusing and chaotic 2020 has invited us to take a step back, look around, and think things through.

As I addressed in my Spear Summit presentation this year, it is clear this so-called COVID era is characterized by a general perception in which the number of unknowns outweigh the knowns. While these have palpable economic repercussions, we would be remiss if we failed to acknowledge the complexity of the inherent emotional ramifications that affect every individual in every system around us.

Talking about this need for a new vision in dentistry led me to present on the issue during Spear Summit 2020. Additionally, with this new vision in mind, I introduced a new concept at a recent event for Spear Masters Program members – “F.L.O.W.,” an acronym for Focus on Letting Others Win, which I'll address later in this article.

It is in this spirit that I would like to suggest revisiting three distinctive aspects that integrate this new vision and to identify how intimately intertwined they should be in your practice's strategy for the end of 2020 and beyond:

• Understanding the changing needs of our patients.
• Nurturing our team (team is king).
• Focusing on consistent execution.

Changing needs of dental patients in the COVID era

If there has ever been a time to be careful and deliberate paying attention to understand our patients' needs, financial constraints and treatment expectations – it is now.

Furthermore, we need to embrace that those needs, and priorities, may continue to change. This means fostering and practicing the art of listening and staying away from educated guesses or assumptions when it comes to presenting and discussing options with patients.

In a previous article, I wrote about how to take three key challenges with patient communication in the COVID era:

• Reducing patient anxiety
• Maintaining engagement and trust
• Increasing future case acceptance

A useful recommendation is to customize our narrative depending on the patient's priorities. Often a good indicator to use as a starting point is their generational breakdown:

• Baby Boomer: 1946–1964
• Generation X: 1965–1979
• Millennials: 1980–1994
• Gen Z: 1995–2012

While it is considered common knowledge that behavior and consumption patterns differ from one group to the next, it is evident that they also respond to the pandemic and cope with what is happening in the world a bit differently.

In a nutshell, we need to improve our listening game.

Reverse mentoring and other strategies for your dental practice team

In any modern organization, teambuilding needs to be considered as an everyday dynamic priority.

The business world has become aware that every human-centered customer experience is dependent on human interactions, so we need to single out three buckets in the so-called value chain: employee-to-employee, customer-to-employee and customer-to-customer. Our patients' experience is ultimately shaped by every interaction they have with every member of the team.

In a 2016 article titled “Power of Renovation: 3 Steps to a More Successful Dental Practice” I talk about a rather unique exercise that consists of “firing everyone in my office” and then conducting a “rehire” interview with each staff member. At that time, I give them an opportunity to tell me why they should remain with me. What do they believe they bring to the table? Why is working in our practice the best option that they have?

The concept of everyone going through the firing and rehiring forces them to mentally go through a renovation stage as well. And that right there cuts the autopilot mode in a very deliberate way.

So just as important as understanding our patients changing needs, we need to take a step back and think that our team members are also extremely vulnerable to the emotional rollercoaster we are all living through. As I noted earlier, our team members may be affected differently depending on their generation.

In his book “Drive,” author Daniel Pink unveils that financial incentives may work for many people to accomplish simple, algorithmic, straightforward tasks. But it seems where tasks require conceptual or creative thinking, higher incentives can lead to poor performance. This notion has been replicated in studies made by sociologists, psychologists and economists.

Granted, money is a motivator in the sense that if people do not get paid enough for what they do, they will not be motivated but if they are paid a reasonable salary, there are three factors that research has shown to lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

“Any team's success is only sustainable if it stems from the sum of its members' individual wins, then the shared sentiment of being part of a bigger game can come to fruition.”

During this COVID-19 crisis, as millions of people were forced to work from home offices, it was demonstrated that such autonomy resulted in consistent positive outcomes across the business world. Sure, we need to be seeing patients at our practices in dentistry. But teledentistry is evolving and some practices are doing more consultations over the web, and that dynamic is likely here to stay.

When it comes to mastery, humans are wired to enjoy getting better at something, and the best way to improve what we do is by having the right guidance. What better place to receive the right guidance than within our team? As the Latin expression goes: “docendo discimus,” or by teaching we learn. Personally, being committed to dental education, I can attest that the best way of learning something is by teaching it.

Now, for this to work, we need to know our team and each other's strengths and weaknesses so we can figure out how we can all learn from each other. With this in mind, and as a team building strategy, an interesting concept is to implement the reverse mentoring strategy. This pairs younger employees with senior team members to mentor them on various topics of strategic and cultural relevance, such as the use of technology.

This concept is hardly new. In the late '90s General Electric CEO Jack Welch used reverse mentoring to teach senior executives about the internet. But modern reverse mentoring extends far beyond just sharing knowledge about technology. It allows the different generational groups to understand each other's mindset and therefore navigate more freely.

This is how we recently came up with the F.L.O.W. concept as an overarching team building principle. Any team's success is only sustainable if it stems from the sum of its members' individual wins, then the shared sentiment of being part of a bigger game can come to fruition.

The F.L.O.W. concept for dental team training and development

This F.L.O.W. concept connects with our third pillar of creating a new vision for our practice – focus on letting others win. The reputation of a company is based on the sum of all experiences. I wrote about this in “ Rewriting Mission and Vision Statements for Growth” and, to paraphrase San Francisco-based OpenAI research laboratory CEO Sam Altman, “the secret of having a successful startup is to build a product or a company that is so good that people will run to tell their friends about it.” Altman estimates that this simple task accounts for 80% of a startup's success.

Altman also said consistency is essential for any business to be successful. The experience can only be curated by the whole team, through the patient's interactions with the team.

Why should it be any different for a dental practice to be successful? A lot of things need to happen for patients to go out of their way and talk about their positive experience with their friends.

As we go to work in the morning to start a busy day, we should remember these three principles. Every member of our team needs to exercise the art of careful listening to fully understand the changing needs of our patients.

This way we can customized treatment without compromising results. Some patients will be reasonable and give strong consideration to completing their recommended dental treatments in fewer appointments because they want to avoid multiple visits, so we need to be ready to accommodate them. Other patients will be more cautious about spending on recommended oral care right now and be more welcome to phasing treatment.

Once we've designed a treatment plan, each member of our team can F.L.O.W. and deliver exceptional results by performing as a team and executing consistently in their roles.

Ricardo Mitrani, D.D.S., M.S.D., is a member of Spear Resident Faculty.