https://youtu.be/sqC6Wr8kr3Q?si=LoCrgVydl3GGlK1T

This transcript with our Jameson Files host Carrie Webber has been lightly edited for flow. To enjoy the audio, you can watch on YouTube or listen to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify.

Carrie:

Welcome back to the Jameson Files. I'm your host, Carrie Webber, and it's always so great to have our Jameson Files community joining in. Wherever you're viewing the podcast, you may be watching us on YouTube or on Facebook, or you may also be listening to us through iTunes or Google Play. Whatever you do, thank you for being a part of the community. And if you have friends in the dental industry that could benefit from the conversations we have here, please share and help us spread the word and grow our community. I'm really excited today because we're here at the Jameson offices in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and we have members of the Jameson coaching team here, which is awesome because we're all over the country, and we always look forward to those times when we can come together, and just like we encourage dental practices to do, work on our skills, work on the business together, improve our efforts, and grow and develop together.

And so that's what we've been doing today. And so in this episode, I have two members of the Jameson coaching team, Brenda Wittenbauer, and Suzanne Wardell, both of which are business advisors for Jameson, and have their own incredible history in dentistry. Something I always love to say is that the members of our coaching team all come from dental backgrounds and have that direct experience and empathy for all of you and the work that you do day after day after day. And so, thank you ladies for joining me for the episode. 

Brenda:

Happy to be here. 

Suzanne:

Yeah. Excited.

Leadership Lessons for a Successful Practice

Carrie:

So this is for business coaching. We wanted to take this opportunity to talk about on the business team, or in the leadership of the practice, what the pain points are that we are finding over and over and over again right now- the trending pain points, I guess we could say, that we're seeing in practices and then give you all some insights and hopefully some helpful tips on ways that you can address these areas in your practice if they're pain points for you as well. So, which one of you would like to take this on. What are you seeing in the trends of the practices that you work with, and what are the opportunities for practices to really put in some effort to improve? What are you seeing and recommending?

Holding Team Members Accountable

Brenda:

Okay. So hot points in my practices that I've been working with my teams all year–accountability or lack thereof. And how do we hold team members accountable? How do we not feel powerless in our own practice to hold people accountable for fear they'll leap. And that's the theme repeated in practices. It doesn't matter where you are, the pool for talented team members is so limited right now,  or so it seems, and they are settling for mediocre–afraid to hold people accountable– and it's a difficult situation and not one I want to see my doctors or my office managers in.

Carrie:

Yeah. And when you think about accountability and the lack thereof, how's that showing up in practices? Where are they finding the struggle when people are not being held accountable or that mediocrity is starting to rule the day? What’s that looking like?

Suzanne:

I see it so much in time management. It's always, “I don't have the time. I can't get that system done. I don't have the time.” So when I've come back six months later and we say, “What have we been working on?” Well, it's, “We didn't have the time to do it.” So working on that time management and what's “mission critical” for me to do today to be able to get that system done? What are some good “to do’s” and what's not really something that I need to focus on, but what's “mission critical"? 

Carrie:

I love that. Time management is always one of my primary issues, so you're not alone if that's your pain point. Accountability or lack of accountability, it may not necessarily be that you don't want to do it, but you are overwhelmed because we're not managing our time well, and I really like that–what's “mission critical"? 

Would you recommend that we start every day thinking through that and prioritizing that day? How are you encouraging team members that struggle with time management to take control of that aspect?

Choosing Our “Mission Critical Tasks”

Suzanne:

That's great. And it's coming up with tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four things of what we need to do. And tier one are your “mission criticals,” and they're usually the hardest things that you have to do, so you want to push those down the list because you want to pick maybe those tier three things, which are fun, and we enjoy doing them, but they aren't necessarily what's going to make my day go smoothly or have a system run smoothly. So I've got to really focus on what I have to do today so that the airplane won't crash. You know, not, I can stay up in the air and everything will go okay, but what's going to make the plane crash? And then I've got to think about what that “mission critical” task is. And if you have more than two or three on your list, you're probably not going to get through them all. So try and keep it condensed and focus in on that. 

So if you're working on patient retention, it's got to be that I'm going to call at least one or two patients today. If I say, “I've got this list and I'm going to call all these people,” it's not going to happen. So decide to call one person in the morning and one person in the afternoon and make that manageable.

Brenda:

I like that.

Carrie:

I like that– attainable.

Suzanne:

Yeah.

Utilizing the Rule of “10 Over 5”

Brenda:

What I tend to see happen is that they have their list of tasks that they have to do, their systems they are accountable for, and their least favorite get pushed away. Collection calls–those never happen, and yet that's a vital part of the practice to keep the money in. So I really stress that we all have the same 24 hours, right? Nobody is different. So how are we going to use that eight hours that we have in the practice to the best of our ability? And it has to include mapping out your day, your week, so that you touch all of your systems. So you need to have chunked into time blocks, and you need to schedule it. 

I am a big proponent of protected time for those critical systems and team members are really nervous to implement that. They feel like they can't go for an hour and work uninterrupted and leave their teammate to fend for themselves, and yet if we don't block that time we get behind in our systems. 

So what happens is those systems that were operating really well, once we focus on some of those that aren't, those ones that were operating really well now start to dip down in their performance. So you can't take your eye off anything. So you really have to manage your time effectively and plan it out. I do the same sort of thing, Suzanne, especially with doctors. Every Sunday night, I want you to do 10 over five. That means pick out your top 10 things for this week. You have five days to get them done. And start with your hardest.

Carrie:

I love that. Start with your hardest. Wait, say that again?

Brenda:

It's 10 over five. So every Sunday night, you can let it go, you can plan it out. You write down your top 10 things that you have to get done this week. You start with the most difficult on Monday when you're freshest. Get those done. And obviously, delegate, delegate, delegate wherever you can. But if you chunk it into small achievable tasks, you feel good. You don't feel like, “Oh, I'm never gonna get through this.”

Not Being Ruled by the “Tyranny of the Urgent”

Carrie:

Yes, just pick two balls. It doesn't have to be that you're calling the whole list. Pick two because you're making progress. When we were meeting earlier today together as a group, we talked about progress over perfection. And progress is progress. We simply need to get in the rhythm of momentum of “we're making progress on this very important piece of the puzzle.” To your point with collections, for example, and I love it because I say this all the time, that we go to the easy and sometimes irrelevant tasks on your whole list of responsibilities because they are easy and because you did things, you feel like you've been productive–actually, you're being busy, you're not being productive. And we all want to avoid the hard stuff.

Chuck Blakeman talks about how we often find ourselves getting caught up and focusing on the tyranny of the urgent instead of the priority of the important. And that's when this time management piece, especially in the business team, happens a lot. We've got so many irons in the fire and so much happening throughout the workday that we very easily let this go. And it's such a pivotal piece of hitting goals. We're making progress or improving the things that need to improve in a practice. So, such great points. 

Keeping Team Members Accountable with Frequent Check-in Points

Brenda:

Let’s talk about the lack of accountability. So I have every intention as a team member to get to my system. Things happen and I don't. If nobody's ever checking in with me until it's too late, until we can't make payroll because we didn't have enough money come in… There needs to be connection points scheduled in. I believe in that. I tell all my office managers, you need one-on-one with each team member to see where they're feeling successful and where they're struggling, where they feel challenged too much in a way that they're not feeling like they're thriving or what resources can I get you? We have to have check-in points,