The One-at-a-Time Approach to Building a Learning Environment

One of my greatest passions in life has been analyzing and teaching the principles of great leadership, which is why delivering my Leadership workshop was always such an incredible source of fulfillment.

It was also a source of great frustration, too, when I would check in with participants later and realize how many of them—dentists who had left the workshop pumped-up and ready for change—had found that within weeks  their practices had slipped back into old habits.

I called it Monday Morning Syndrome. Dentists would arrive back at the practice on Monday after the workshop with a head bursting with fresh ideas and a “things are going to change around here now” attitude. 

The problem was that, many times, the team hadn’t been there over the weekend and didn’t share the doctor’s enthusiasm—so they naturally resisted the disruption of their routines. Even in practices where team members did attend, there was often the impulse to do too much too soon, and without a clear implementation strategy, people would inevitably feel overwhelmed and would just drift back into the old tried-and-true way of doing things. Then in the future, when new and better strategies would once again come up, they could always say: “We tried that before. It didn’t work.”

This is why I believe a big part of leadership is prioritizing. You may (and should) have a complete vision in your mind of where your practice is going, but if you want to get real buy-in from the team you should have a systematic strategy for introducing changes.

Pick a focus—it could be a strategy for getting all patients routinely appointed ahead and keeping those appointments, or a focus on dealing with patients who have unaccepted but needed care. Then go deep with that one topic. Have team meetings about it where you brainstorm specifics. Set realistic goals—monthly, weekly and daily goals—and follow through until you have seen real lasting improvement. At that point, it’s a matter of what I call “putting the bumpers in place” so that you don’t backslide on those gains. Then it’s on to the next focus of improvement.

There are a number of advantages to this approach. First of all, it simply is easier to rally people around a single objective than it is to get them to embrace a whole slate of changes at once. It is also a demonstration that you have the leadership willpower to take an idea, and provide the right support and guidance to carry it over the finish line. Most importantly, by moving this way, one improvement at a time, through a change agenda, the team will come to see that this is a practice where we are continually evolving and growing. It is way to introduce innovation in a way that gets real and lasting results—which is always satisfying—without a lot of drama and confusion.

This is just one of the factors that goes into an effective leadership plan, and that is why my latest passion project was putting significant energy into a new video course, Challenges of Practice Leadership, which was released this week in our online Course Library. If you have ever looked at your practice and your team and wondered what to do and where to begin, I suggest starting here.