We all learn from our mistakes. At least we hope we do, otherwise they just end up being setbacks with no upside. It's the experience and insight you get from a failure that allows you to gain something worthwhile from the experience. Anyone who has lived long enough and ventured boldly knows this.Yet we also have a lot to learn from our successes, and oddly enough those are the lessons we are often more likely to overlook. It's in our nature to do a post-mortem after a bad day and ask ourselves what went wrong, and how. But when you have an exceptionally good day, how often do you ask yourself what went right, and why?
This is especially important to remember from a leadership perspective. As a leader, you naturally have to follow up on how mistakes happened and coach your team on how to improve. But it can be just as instructive—and even more inspirational—to examine the successes.
When you have had a particularly good day—all patients arriving on time, case acceptance at optimal levels, every patient leaving complete for payment and with their next appointment scheduled—take a moment to acknowledge that with the team. Then analyze how that success occurred. Were you using text messages to keep patients on time? What happened in the operatory that made patients say yes? What did the front desk people say to get the patients to commit to the next visit? Ask yourselves, "How can we take what we did to create this great day and make those behaviors automatic, so every day becomes a great day?"