Team Goals (Part Two of Two)

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Transcript

Jonathan:

Hey everybody, Jonathan checking in here. And just so you know, this is a two-part episode. This is the second part of the episode. So if you've not listened to the first part yet, you want to go back and listen to it in the prior weeks. We should have it labeled on the episode title part one is and part two is, so you should be able to listen to that and see that in the title of the episode of this, what episode of episode it is. Thanks

Joseph:

We have this global pandemic that hits, dental offices are shut down across the globe for a good chunk of March. We would say, "Well, we didn't hit our quarterly goal for Q1 of 2020. Here are the reasons, it's because we were shut down for eight weeks." It was because we did emergency only, and all of a sudden we're able to kind of add some color around what's going on. One of the things that I've noticed is that the first quarter of 2021 has been really, really good for a lot of the practices that we help. Okay, well, what's going on there? Let's add some color to all of those different pieces. So I'd say at a minimum, you need to communicate that stuff quarterly. You, as the business owner, need to be looking at it at least monthly. And then if you've got folks that you can communicate on your team that can help you reach your goals, as frequently as you can looking at those, if that's even weekly or if that's monthly, but I would say at a minimum, you definitely want to look at it monthly. And you need to communicate with your team at least quarterly. At a bare minimum, I'd say twice a year.

Jonathan:

Yeah. And for our firm what we've done, we have that quarterly meeting. It's not only talking to the employee about the team's goals, it's also talking about the impact of that person on those goals, right? So it's also about accountability at that point. So how big is your capacity? How efficient are you being in getting these things done? How many clients have we had issues with that are underneath your care? For a dental practice, it could be like what you said, it could be, hey, our cancellation rates are still going up. Why are they canceling? Or whatever we implemented last quarter that we talked about in our last quarterly call or last quarterly discussion, apparently that change hasn't helped. It's actually hurt. And let's think about why that is, and think about something we can do to be able to make it work better going forward.

Jonathan:

And I know if you're a dentist listening to this, you probably have a team check-in. A lot of practices have a team check in every morning before the day gets going. I think that's fantastic to have that so you can be ready for the day. Systems are ready, hygiene's ready, office is ready, things like that. That's not the meeting we're talking about. We're talking about one-on-one, you're talking to that employee about where you're wanting that employee to progress to as a person, as a member of your team, as a member of the business and how they're accomplishing those goals and things like that.

Jonathan:

So yeah, I think that's a really logical way to do it. And the way that we did it was, we also did a weekly talk with the leaders and we said, "Hey, we're going to start at a weekly." And we have a tax team and we have an accounting team and we have an operations team. And we said, "Hey, everybody's going to do it weekly in the beginning." And if we find that, I think we started with, say it was going to be a 45 minute call every time, we said, "If we get in there and we've realized we don't need to be on a call for 45 minutes then we can change that to once every other week or we can change it to a 20 minute call." It's easy to decrease it once you start, but you've got to start and you've got to do it in order to be able to move forward.

Jonathan:

And another good tip I'm going to talk to you about, in terms of the finding the time to do these types of things, the best way to find time to do these types of things is to put it on your calendar and stick to it. I mean, that's it. I mean, I know it's hard to say, well, I didn't want to stay that extra 30 minutes that day, or I didn't want to take a 30 minute lunch or I didn't want to have to take a 15 minute lunch when I usually take a 30 minute one, or I didn't want to have to pay for the meal for the office, but I did, or for this person... That can be done. You can do those types of things. You can be creative with your time. If you search for the time, you will find it.

Jonathan:

Now the bigger your team you have, the harder this will be. If you're trying to find a 30 minute window or an hour long window for a hundred people, yeah, that's going to be tough to do. If it's five to seven, that's four days out of the year, four eight hour days if you have eight employees, if you're doing an hour at a time. Which, most of these things, they don't always take an hour. Sometimes if you have a lot of brainstorming going on with it, it might have that as well. But maybe that could be something that you do as a part of your team, and having the brainstorming piece of it and the way it goes too.

Jonathan:

So what else is there that people need to know in terms of how you approach these meetings, these quarterly meetings and do that accountability piece of it? Because like you mentioned at the beginning, we're in this world where we don't really like to be confrontational. We don't like to point out things that are wrong. Most of us like to build people up rather than tear them down. And we may be having blunt conversations, but the purpose is not to build down, its purpose is actually to build them up. It's just, you're building them up in a way that feels odd sometimes. So talk us through that.

Joseph:

Sure. Well, one of the things that, whenever I have brand new leaders that I'm talking to, or new managers or people that have kind of gotten thrust into this role of being in a supervisory position, which I'm sure many of our listeners will find themselves kind of all of a sudden thrust into this place, a really good book that's a quick read if you haven't read it is the One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. So have you read that book, Jonathan, the One Minute Manager, did you ever read that?

Jonathan:

I have. It was about seven years ago? Yes, I read it.

Joseph:

Yeah. So one of the things that they talk about in the One Minute Manager is getting a chance to catch people doing things right, and then address things and issues as they can. They [inaudible 00:06:16] little one minute meetings or whatever. So I'd encourage you to go pick up that book. So whenever we're talking about quarterly performance reviews or annual performance reviews, one of the things that I want to make sure that we're clear about is, that's not the time for you to air all of your grievances out with your people. Like, I've saved up all of this bad stuff for you and now I'm going to sit down, you have no idea what to expect, and I'm just going to just lay into you about all of the times where you screwed up Ms. Johnson's stuff, and Mr. Jones was in and you were rude to him and all this stuff.

Joseph:

So one of the things that I tell leaders is that there should be no surprises in your annual performance review. It should be a review of all of the things that we've talked about throughout the course of the year. It should be a review of all the things that we addressed and the changes that we made and the things that we fixed. So I would encourage you to address things as you see them come up, do it in a respectful way. If you need just kind of a playbook, the One Minute Manager, again, is just a quick read to kind of help you do that and kind of get a little bit of a playbook in order to do that.

Joseph:

But don't let the only time that you ever give anybody any feedback whatsoever is the annual performance review where you just lay into them. You'll have people that are just not happy with you or they're upset, and then they'll want to go work somewhere else. So it should be a review of all the things that we've talked about all year long. It should be a review of whatever, if you have specific metrics that you want to hit for your hygiene staff or for your front office staff for their collection rates, or our zero to 30 needs to be what percent versus 90 to 120 on our AR or our denial rate needs to be X... Look at all of those different metrics throughout the course of the year and update them quarterly on those. And then you can just review all the stuff that goes on.

Joseph:

And it's also a really good opportunity for your employees to tell you something that you may not do or may not have thought about. One question I used to add to performance reviews that I did whenever I was leading a large staff, is what unique skill or talent do you have that we're not utilizing? What is it that you wish that I knew that you can do that can help the practice? And they may say, "You know what? I'm really good at calming down upset patients," or somebody may come and say, "You know what? I really like helping children feel more comfortable in the office. You know what I've really thought about, is I really thought we should do X, Y, and Z."

Joseph:

One of the things in my CFO position that came out of one of these conversations just like that was, we had some logoed teddy bears made. And anytime we would have a child that came in and that child was really upset because they're being fit for this orthotic device, we said, "You know what? Here's your teddy bear." And it's not about the marketing and that kind of thing, here was just this little simple, easy thing that we did. And that all came out of an annual performance review. When I said, "What do you guys think we should be doing?" Somebody said, "What about doing some logoed teddy bears?" And I was like, "I've never thought about that before." Pretty low barrier to entry, it's going to cost us however much it's going to cost us. If we try it and it flops, it flops. And they ended up being this great thing that just was born out of having open conversations with your team and talking about goals.

Jonathan:

Yeah. It gets really easy as a business owner to get lost in your own head about all the different things that you could or could not be doing whenever there's a... You have a whole team of people that are in the same business that you are, and they have ideas too. They understand a lot of the things that you may get lost in at some point in time. So having these conversations can be difficult, but they can provide a lot more value on your end as the owner than you probably think. If we were to pull up some statistics about training cost and turnover costs per employee, like average amount of time, it takes to get someone trained inside of any type of business, the cost would be really, really, really, really large, not to mention the effectiveness per employee that are likely going to be happening inside of your practice.

Jonathan:

So I'm not even talking about those things. I'm talking about just having other people that are bought into the success of your business than yourself, which these conversations can hopefully influence that. As a business owner, you are typically the person that is on the largest hook for success or failure, but you can have people that will buy in with you in some ways and carry that cross and that burden with you. So having these crucial conversations, approaching someone who always has excuses about something, or they're just not getting the insurance checks processed fast enough, or they're just not turning into patients over fast enough or whatever it is, having those types of conversations with people are not fun.

Jonathan:

When we're talking about uncomfortable conversations, that's the type of conversations that aren't fun, because you're talking to these people about the things that they're doing every day, and you're having to come to them and say, "Look, I heard you answering the phone the other day, and my gosh, if I were the one that were calling this office, I probably wouldn't have wanted to book an appointment either, because you were kind of mean to that person. I don't know if you carried something in bad with you that day or what," but that's the type of thing that you've got to, as a business owner, you've got to talk to people about. And this would be something that, like you said, that wouldn't be something that would be in the quarterly discussion, that'd be something that would be done if you heard it, you needed to probably address it fairly shortly after.

Jonathan:

And then these quarterly performance things, having those discussions can be difficult. The difficult part is if they are not reaching what you set out for them, I guess. And we probably need to stop it at there, because I think that we could probably dovetail this into a very big conversation about how to set a proper team goal, and how to set proper goals on the individual level. And then have that come back to this episode about how you actually address those things and help coach those people through those things as the year goes by. Because like you said, one of the problems is the time management of like, if I've told my hygienist she needs to be able to cut down the amount of time it takes her [inaudible 00:12:44] being from an hour long visit to a 15 minute visit, it can sometimes be difficult, or I'm sure it's difficult to try, and if they're only able to do an hour still going forward to be able to coach them and to be able to get that to have that turnaround time be a little bit faster in some ways. And you, as the dentist, may not have the answers to that, but you may be able to find consultants or people or some type of resources that can help with those types of things.

Jonathan:

And so yeah, so again, this is a very big discussion. I'm going to try and pull it back into the talking about in the quarterlies, you go in, it's no surprises there. This is not a gripe session. This is a, how do we constructively build you up and how you fit into the overall team goal? So let me ask you this. If you have an employee that is not reaching those milestones or is not doing the things that you would expect of someone who is actively engaged in this mission of the company, how would you address that? Like, what if you had this assistant that just, they probably didn't care that much. It didn't seem like they were really trying a whole lot to get those patients to learn the procedures that you're trying to do on your patients so that you can be more efficient and do it better for the patients. Like, what do you say to someone that is in that situation that just doesn't seem to get it, or just doesn't seem to want to be a part of it? How do you address that topic for conversation and is this the appropriate time to do it in a quarterly conversation?

Joseph:

Yeah. Good question. I think that there's a lot of different pieces that are into the answer of what you're asking. How do we make an uncomfortable conversation comfortable? How do we actually get to dialogue? At what point do we get to the tipping scale that this is a coaching issue versus not a coaching issue? That's one of the things that I'm constantly asking myself, as you get a chance to lead people, as you find issues that come up is, is this a coaching issue? At some point you have a scale tip that this is not a coaching issue, that this is just the wrong person in the wrong seat on the bus, right? Go back to some Jim Collins stuff about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, the right people in the right seat, and then determine where the bus is going.

Joseph:

So there's quite a bit to be said about a lot of different ways to approach kind of this confrontation. You want to create an environment... Like at the end of the day, what do we want? We want dialogue. We want to have a conversation. If people are scared, if they're intimidated, if it's not a good way that you've approached them, they're going to go to their fight or flight mentality. And there's a ton of stuff that's written about all of this stuff that's out there kind of in the business books world. Because if they're in the fight or flight mentality, and they think that they're about to get fired, or they're really, really ready to just pick a fight with you about this and argue with you until you're blue in the face, their brain is not working on a deep human level, right? It's called the lizard brain, is what they're doing. And what we really want to do is we want to get to dialogue. We want to understand if it's a coaching issue.

Joseph:

Maybe a tools issue. Like, you and I were talking the other day about the tools that we have for our team. And do we have the right tools in place to ask them to perform at a high level, yes or no? Okay, well maybe, but let's investigate it. Let's further look into that. So is it a tools issue? Is your hygienists going to come back to you and say, "Well, I can't get it from 60 minutes to 50 minutes because I've got this tool that fails on me about 10% of the time. And that's why this always happens this way." Okay. Well, that's a pretty simple fix. Like let's just get a better tool. Like what is the tool that we need? And then all of a sudden that fixes that, because if you don't get to a place of dialogue, that's when people get really, really upset and they either go to silence or violence, right? They either totally shut down, they're not listening, or they're going to go to violence and they're going to erupt and say, "Well, you're just such a cheap old dentist anyway. I don't even have the tools I need..." They're going to go to silence or violence. So the goal with all of this stuff is we want to get to dialogue.

Joseph:

And then at the end of the day, as a business owner, you've got to choose whether or not this is a coaching issue or not. If it's a coaching issue, we want to help people get to where they want to be. Nobody shows up to work to do a bad job. That's not why they show up. They don't show up to work to steal money from people. Like, I just can't wait to go be a crook and take people's money from them. Nobody does that.

Jonathan:

Hopefully no one in your office does that.

Joseph:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. They show up to work because they want to help people. They want to do a good job. So how do we get from where we're at to where we want to go, and we want to be able to create some dialogue. I think that that's probably the biggest thing. And that's very, very challenging, especially if you don't like confrontation, especially if you've not ever led people. I had a good friend of mine that was a kind of consultant for me for a while. And he would talk about getting comfortable being uncomfortable, because it is uncomfortable whenever you've got to approach different stuff, or you've got to address different stuff. It's very uncomfortable. But as a leader, you've got to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You got to get to a place where you can have dialogue with your people. And you're not going to do that if they go straight to silence or violence, to use some verbiage from a program called crucial conversations, which is really, really good, by the way,

Jonathan:

I wonder if these quarterly meetings were called dialogue meetings, if that would help spur... This is when we talk about these issues. I mean, I think the traction book has, it talks about having just a list of issues. And we did that for a while as a company too, is we just say, "Hey, if you have any issues, put them on this tab of the spreadsheet." And every year, we're going to go through all these issues on the annual thing. And there were things that were issues that we need to address at some point, maybe they're not urgent to talk about right now, but they're issues. And let's talk through them and let's have this be a part of this meeting.

Jonathan:

And that's what we did for a few hours as a team, is we'd address all these issues that were coming up. And it was never that, Kathy's a meany head, it was that this software was really slow compared to the other softwares or computers were getting outdated or just things like that that would need to be addressed, but wouldn't need to be addressed right then and there. So I wonder if these were called dialogue meetings, if you could set those expectations. Because like I said, whenever you're talking to these people, or whenever you bring these issues up, it's really hard just to have it be a part of the year and it not just sound like a bitching and moaning. If you talk to somebody about these things during the day, and you're like, "Man, Nancy, you took way too long doing your insurance," all that is is you complaining at that point. But if you're having a dialogue of like, "Let's talk about how we can maybe have our insurance verification be faster in the day so you don't have to be working overtime," or something like that, you know?

Jonathan:

Having those be pre-set allows you, number one, to not have those issues bog up your day, every day. It also allows the employees to have a path to discuss those things with you as an employee. And sometimes people aren't perfect and they may have dialogues and issues that aren't really big issues, but at least you can hear them and consider them and you may be surprised. You may not think it's a big issue, and then after it's been communicated to you, you may start noticing that issue. Like, "Oh, that is an issue. I didn't think it was, but it is." And then you can start to address it and things like that. So really important to have that dialogue in those quarterly things. So is there anything else that you wanted to discuss in conclusion? I think this is going to be another two-part episode, episodes eight and nine of the Tooth & Coin podcast. Is there anything else that you feel like we need to address that we haven't, in terms of the communication in those quarterly meetings where you're talking to the team members about their progress, the team's progress and the team's goals, and then how that person's influencing it and how they're doing in reaching those things?

Joseph:

I think one thing that I would just kind of conclude with is something that one of our leadership coaches told us, and that's that it's worth it. It's worth it. This may sound overwhelming. This may sound uncomfortable. You may get to a spot where you're addressing things and it's uncomfortable, but at the end of the day, it's worth it. Is it worth it to make sure that everybody's rowing in the rowboat in the same direction? Yeah, of course it is. Is it worth it for our practice to meet our goals? Yeah, it's worth it. How do we get there? Part of it is having conversations with our team. So as you listen to this and as you get a chance to kind of reflect and see how it fits into your practice and your style of management ownership, just know that it's worth it. We get the privilege to lead a staff, to lead a team. We get the privilege to help people every day about what it is that we do. And getting that firing on all cylinders, it's worth it.

Jonathan:

Absolutely. All right, guys. So we're going to call that a double episode of leadership. And if you want to continue the conversation, go over to the Facebook group, by typing in Tooth & Coin podcast into the search bar and you'll be able to find the group, be able to join there. Come talk to us about times that you've had some of these conversations with people. Talk about what's worked for your office, what's not worked for your office. Any hacks that you have and ways to be able to make leadership inside of your practice better. Has this worked to engage our employees? Has it not worked to engage your employees? Why or why not? Different things you could talk about, it'll be really interesting to have you in the group. Until next time, bye.

Joseph:

Bye guys.

Jonathan:

That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth & Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com, where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country, and would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. And we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.

Jonathan:

And if you enjoy today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word tooth and coin to 33444. That's tooth and coin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Reply with your email address, we'll send you instructions on the Facebook group, we'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.

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