Dr. John Meis: Hey everybody, welcome to this week’s episode of The Strategic Thinker. I’m Dr. John Meis and I’m here with Drew Schaefer, how are you doing Drew?

Drew Schaefer: Great, how are you?

Dr. John Meis: I’m doing awesome. So, just we’ll go ahead and start our presentation here, and The Strategic Thinker is a weekly video, a little video blog post that deals with the issues that dental practices, group dental practices specifically and DSOs, run into. So, we use the Dental Enterprise Value Matrix, so these are the things that drive up value in dental practices. That’s in four quadrants: Cultural, Financial, Personnel, and Process. So today, we’re going to be talking about Personnel. And, the Personnel quadrant really has 4 main things in it, and one of them is doctor clinical and leadership skills. So, we’ve seen where doctor leadership skills are excellent, we have great performing teams. When the skills are weak, we have less well-performing teams. And, Drew and I are aware of different dental groups, one dental group we know of started to recruit doctors with the idea that, “All you have to do is come in and do your dentistry and go home. You don’t have to do any leadership, you don’t have to do any of that stuff. Just come in, do dentistry, and go home.” What did we find out with that experience, Drew?

Drew Schaefer: The results were always mixed, just based off the individual. And, there was a large diversity in experience and patient care, which really drove diversity in financial success as well.

Dr. John Meis: So, absolutely, and over time we found the ones that were good natural leaders tended to have the more higher-performing practices. The ones that were weaker natural leaders, you know, had less-performing practices. And so, we talk about this all the time, probably every week or every other week on The Strategic Thinker, and that is, in a group practice when you see a range of results you know there’s opportunity there. And, if you can identify what’s causing that range, it helps you dial in as to what you can do to help your teams develop so that they can perform at a higher level. So, when we talk about improving doctor leadership skills, here’s the thing: the doctor doesn’t get to choose to be a leader or not. They are a leader due to their degree and their position in the office. So really, the only choice they get is to be a good one or a bad one. And we, as leaders and doctors, we want to make sure we’re helping them make that decision to be a good one and help them to get the skills necessary to become that. So, we’re going to talk about 5 ways of improving the leadership skills of your doctors today. And, we’re going to start out with “know your numbers”. So, Drew is an accounting/finance guy, and so Drew, let’s have a little back-and-forth, a little banter here, on what kind of numbers you think are good for doctors to know.

Drew Schaefer: I think the first numbers that they need to be aware of are their own patient care numbers, as far as the number of patients seen, their case average, their acceptance percentages. And, before you can understand the full financial scope of your office, you have to understand your own inputs and how that results in revenues for your office. And, that goes along with hygiene performance as well, and being able to evaluate your hygienists and coach them to make sure that everyone’s getting comprehensive care and that the hygiene chair is leading to restorative opportunities. Then, what it leads into is pretty appropriate for this time of year personally dealing with budgets, if you’re a group that does budgets than this is a great opportunity to include the doctors in that process, if you don’t already. And if you don’t do budgets or any sort of forecasting, it’s a great time to start. And, it’s generally an educational process for the leadership team, but it’s really, I think, the best educational tool for doctors to learn how their actions affects top line, but also how there are inherently fixed costs in a practice, how they manage their teams and staff, and the dental supplies that they order, the labs that they use, how all of those different decisions they make on a daily basis truly affect the ultimate profitability of the practice. And, depending on any sort of compensation that you have in place for your providers to run a profitable practice, it could be a good opportunity to maximize that. If they’re bonus-ed off any level of profitability but don’t know what really drives profitability, then it’s really not a true incentive for them. So, it’s a great opportunity to take advantage of that.

Dr. John Meis: Yeah, so I like that. First of all, focus on your own performance, and these key stats in performance. So that might be, “What are we diagnosing? How much are we diagnosing? How much of that’s being accepted? And, how efficiently we’re providing that care,” would be some great numbers to know. Productivity per hour is not a bad number to know. So, focusing on your skills. And, one of the things we’ve noticed is that very few doctors understand the financial statement, understand really kind of the financial metrics that make things tick. And Drew, the way you set up the budgeting system I think is absolutely brilliant, because it engages the doctors to learn it, not from a lecture, but by actually doing it, working on their own budget. And, we’ve always operated under the principle that people support what they help create. And so, when people are helping to create that budget, they’re more accountable to it because they were part of the process of making it.

Drew Schaefer: Exactly.

Dr. John Meis: And so, it’s a great way to develop your doctors’ financial acumen is really engage them in the budget process, so that they begin to, over time - this doesn’t happen overnight, this doesn’t happen over one budget season, but it does happen over time - that they will become more and more financially aware and their financial acumen will improve. The next thing that I think is important for doctors is - for any leader - is to have great self-awareness. And, one of the ways of getting self-awareness is having personality assessments. And so, two of the ones that we’ve found helpful are DISC and the StrengthsFinder. It allows people to understand what they’re naturally good at, but it also helps them to appreciate the things that other people are naturally good at. So, one of the things that we find often is that we have our own personality, and take DISC for instance, there’s four categories of personality, each are different. And, what we naturally do as humans, kind of our set point, is that we judge people that don’t have the same personality as we do. And so, doing the DISC exercise allows people to understand the benefits of all the different personality quadrants and therefore, there’s less judgment. So Drew, I don’t know, I’ve never seen you take a DISC assessment, but just from knowing your personality, you’re a fairly high D, am I correct?

Drew Schaefer: (laughs) Yes.

Dr. John Meis: Okay. So for Drew, when things get more touchy-feely and more social, he starts to get uncomfortable and he starts to think, “Okay, come on, let’s get on with it. We don’t need this stuff. Let’s get on with it.” But, other people do need it, right? And so, we have to adjust. And, if you don’t have awareness of yourself and you don’t have awareness of other people, it’s hard to make that adjustment. Really, it’s impossible. The next one is “meeting facilitation”. So Drew, why don’t you give some of your experiences around meeting facilitation and the difference between someone who’s having a meeting kind of lecture vs. somebody who’s engaging the team in a meeting.

Drew Schaefer: Yeah, I think any office-level meeting, if it’s always a lecture, everybody’s just going to listen and come as, “Well that’s just orders and it’s just through a single viewpoint.” Whereas really, the beauty of an office and the different roles in it is that everybody sees things a little differently and can give different inputs to really help the office run most efficiently, to account for the different personalities and really feel like they’re a part of the process and a part of the result. And, it’s just a much more rewarding experience as far as being involved rather than just taking marching orders. And so, being open to team member input is going to lead to the most positive patient experience as well. And so, I think it kind of can vary depending on where people are in their career, much more tenured providers can come across as, “Well, I’ve been doing this for 30 years now.” And, things change over 30 years as well, and you have different people and different roles. And so, those tend to be more lecture-type. I think, at the same time, there’s more fresh doctors that don’t have the experience in meeting facilitation, they don’t have the confidence, especially coming more out of school if they don’t have any sort of guidance or anything like that, they can be thrown into an office where you have an office manager that’s been there for 30 years or a hygienist there for 30 years and they really more let others drive it and it takes some of the leadership and accountability off of them as well. So, there’s a good balance really that the office needs to kind of get to that middle point.

Dr. John Meis: When you have the kind of bossing, talking down to, lecturing type of meetings, the best you’re going to get is compliance, right? That’s the best you’re going to get. But, if you have a meeting that engages everybody, you can get to commitment. You can go way beyond compliance and get to commitment. So, the next skill is conflict management, and every dental practice has conflict. Every high-performing group has conflict. But, that conflict sometimes leads to better performance and it sometimes leads to worse performance and worse relationships depending on how that conflict is managed. And so, we think some simple conflict-management skills are really important for doctors to know. And, the last one is change management. If we’re going to make improvements in our practice, if we’re going to have a practice that’s learning and improving consistently, we need to be able to create an environment where change happens easily. And, change management does not come naturally to people, managing it requires time, it requires effort, and it requires a plan. So, having those change-management skills allow doctors to be more effective in making change. One of the things that we hear from doctors very, very frequently is they’ll go to a meeting, they’ll learn a lot of stuff, they come back and try to implement in their office, and they have a very, very difficult time. The reason they have a very difficult time is because they’re not very good at change management yet. And so, this is one of the things that can make a big difference in how rapidly a practice will improve their performance and their patient experience.

Drew Schaefer: Yeah, and I think dentistry is a lot more relationship-based than a lot of other industries that I’ve worked in. So, those last 2 in particular are more of an obstacle and take a lot more effort in dentistry than you might see elsewhere.

Dr. John Meis: Yep, for sure. So, I wanted to, as of this date, we are seeing a resurgence of COVID. Europe right now is looking fairly bad, many countries are now considering shutting down, and stay-at-home type orders, similar to what we had earlier this year. So, we have put together a group dental practice survival guide for COVID-19, and really for any disaster-type thing. It’s really a great recovery tool. You can get a free copy of it at SparkDentalNetwork.com/survival. And, for those of you who want to learn more about Spark, we offer a Discovery Call, and that call is with me personally. And so, we use 2 tools, the Scaling Scorecard and the Three-Year View. And by doing that, we can provide a lot of clarity as to what your future looks like, and it’s a great opportunity for anybody that wants to take advantage of it. So, you can go to SparkDentalNetwork.com/join or call the office at 866-277-2758. Drew, thanks for joining me on this week’s episode.

Drew Schaefer: Thanks for having me.

Dr. John Meis: And, we’ll see you all next week. Thanks, everybody!

Drew Schaefer: Thank you.

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