Show Intro

Want to create an amazing culture yet you find yourself frustrated with how to lead and develop your team?

Join Allison and Shawn as they explore this topic and share some key takeaways on how to create a culture of excellence in your practice!

Transcript

Shawn Zajas  00:39

So today, we're going to talk about a culture of excellence. And I know I'm excited, and I think you're probably excited for the same reason. Because if there's anything that's just been the largest cause of frustration, or headache, or just drama, in my office, it's been one, it has to do with just my team, when it has to do with something in the office where I'm not addressing something, or I've been avoiding it, or there's just some some drama that's blown up. And I know that has been the single greatest cause of stress over the last 11 years in mean doing business. So I don't know if it's, if it's similar for you,

Allison House  01:21

oh, it's totally true. So I have always wanted to have a culture of excellence. But I started my practice 19 years ago with just me and a team member. And it's just been a roller coaster, with team. And team is really the big foundation of your, your office, and how the culture of your offices. And so having things that just spin out of control with the team members just makes you crazy.

Shawn Zajas  01:47

I couldn't, you know, put it any better. Because, you know, whether I've been working with salespeople, or whether I'm handling some of the office, or you know, are the managers, you know, in our office, or some of the creatives, like they're all different people, and how to communicate with them, how to get them on the same page, how to make sure we have, again, that this kind of cohesive culture where we're able to get things done, we're able to all enjoy being around each other. It just makes a difference. So I know one of the things we were talking about is for a young dentist, maybe they're five years in practice, maybe they're 10 years in practice, what might be common, that they don't necessarily even know maybe what to do about it, or how to fix it. But I guess what could be some of the frustrations that they're encountering with their team.

Allison House  02:41

So in the first 10 years, the way I managed my team was probably not productive. So the assistant would forget to fill up the water, or she wouldn't set things up correctly. And instead of mentioning it to her, or giving her some instruction, I would just quietly see until I would just be furious. And then I would call her in my office and I would list all the things that she was doing wrong. Well, you can imagine. That's the worst feeling ever. It was demoralizing for her. I was upset. It was just such a poor way to handle it. And yet, I feel like that's the way I've been taught and all the business books, I read that you pull the person into your office and you tell them how it is. And I would say I was watching my dad coach. My dad is an Olympic weightlifting coach. Okay. And so about six years ago, I was watching him coach, and I realized that he never waited till the end of the session. He didn't wait to the end of the week to give feedback. You gave people immediate feedback so they could change. And that's the way I run my office. Now as I coach people, it I think it's made a big difference.

Shawn Zajas  03:46

Well, it's interesting, because the context of coaching, it would make sense if like you said, Olympic weightlifting coach or Olympic weightlifting, yeah. So your, you know, the person that you're coaching is doing something wrong. And they're at risk of I mean, depending on what lift they're doing, really injuring themselves or harming themselves. Especially I can imagine if they're doing a deadlift, or they're doing a clean, and they don't have the right form or technique. You don't want to say he's liable, but maybe he is liable if he doesn't say something because they can really harm themselves.

Allison House  04:23

But it's more than that, first of all, yes, they can harm themselves. So you got to teach them correct form. And my dad always says, the better your form is, the more you can lift. And that's true. And the other thing is, you don't want to get into a pattern of doing the lift incorrectly. And so when I translated all that to dentistry, it was easy to say that if I let this assistant for six months, not fill up the water bottle, and then I pull into my office and yell at her for not pulling up the corner of the water bottle. Let's just insanity. Yeah, I let her get into a habit and I didn't address it. She had no idea. And now it's going to be harder for had to change. Whereas if I just did it the first day, we would have solved it, there wouldn't have been an issue.

Shawn Zajas  05:06

You know, so I mean, implementing this, you see it with your, your dad, and you realize like the light bulb turns on like, wow, approaching it from a coaching perspective seems like it's gonna be more life giving, how was that actually trying to walk that out in your practice?

Allison House  05:24

There's some verbal skills that I had to have, because you still don't want to pull your student aside and yell at them in the middle of the day, you know? Yeah. So I, I really started watching the way my dad was talking to people, because he's this phenomenal coach. And he would say, first thing, I really like how you did this. And now I want you to try doing this. And so I would just start saying things like that, you know, the assistant was not sectioning properly. And I would say, so I appreciate that you're doing this. But next time, I want you to try and put the section here, or I want you to lay on the cotton roll, so you don't tear their skin up, or, you know, it's just a next time, I want you to try this. And the other thing I learned is that sometimes I had to be vulnerable. And that gave them permission to ask me questions. And it gave us permission to have a relationship. So, you know, sometimes things didn't go well. And I pulled assistant aside and say, You know what, I messed up there. And I'm not going to do that again. And I want you to hold me accountable. And that worked. You know, they they really got on board,

Shawn Zajas  06:34

and it gives them some sort of safety, or yeah, just feeling okay with being able to be honest about with you, like, Look, I'm not proud of the way maybe I handled that, because now you're opening up the door, because like you said, you're modeling that. And that's what you're now expecting of them. So just yet just create this, this open lines of communication.

Allison House  06:56

So one of the things that I would say, I would use the word decay, and then I would use the word cavity. And the patient would kind of give me this quizzical look, but I'm just off on my little rant. And so I pull this, as an aside, said, I didn't do a good job there. Can you help me? Hold me accountable. So then I go off on a rant again with the next patient. And the system would step in and say, a cavity and decay are the same. So all of a sudden, the patient understands from a layman's standpoint, they helped me, it just works. But I had to ask for that. They couldn't just jump in. They were comfortable jumping in until I said, help me.

Shawn Zajas  07:34

So this is like on the side of okay, I am starting to do coaching with my team. And it's working great. Think back to, again, deer in the headlights, you didn't necessarily you didn't have that epiphany moment of oh, let me try a different approach. Like how bad was it at certain times, like, Oh,

Allison House  07:52

my God, I still have nightmares. So I started my practice. And there was one day when I walked in, I have a waiting room full of patients. And there is no employee there. Not one. Not one.

Shawn Zajas  08:07

Okay, sorry, I'm looking at you like, this doesn't make any sense. Like, for real? No one's there. But you and all these patients that need to be seen? Well, actually,

Allison House  08:15

they were standing outside the door because I had to unlock it. And they're sitting in my waiting room. No rooms are set up, because my assistant was running an hour late. Wow. And that was the only play I had at the time. And it was it was just awful. So I never want to be in that situation. Again, that was just the worst. And it's funny because the assistant would tell me things like, you know, she's having car trouble, and her family's having issues. And so my heart would just bleed for her. But the reality is that I was running a business and I couldn't pay her unless I made money. So I needed her to be on the same page with me.

Shawn Zajas  08:51

So there was this tension between, you know, no one's no one's taught you this. You learned again, dentistry, you graduated, now you're on your own starting. And you're realizing you genuinely you care about people. So you you want to hire someone that you can care for. And part of this culture of excellence is is caring. But if that's at odds with how do I draw no firm expectations or just clarity of of what you're needing, because it isn't just hanging out time with a friend. I mean, this is a business you're running. And did it not hurt the business when she showed up an hour late, and your patients are stuck outside your practice?

Allison House  09:33

It was terrible. So I learned first of all, that I didn't want to hire a helpless wave. Again. Somebody who was sad and dependent on me. I wanted to hire people that were strong, and that really wanted to be here and be good at their jobs. So that was part of what I learned that I needed to hire people like that. And then I needed to have somebody that wanted to learn and I needed to do Teach. And that made a huge difference. And I also was willing to learn from them, you know, hire people with really great skills, then learn from them, too.

Shawn Zajas  10:08

You know, and I think that's a great distinction you just made about people that want to learn. You know, I didn't realize how frustrating it was for me meeting with so many of my employees, and we'd have a one on one conversation, and I would have wanted to connect with them and wanted to find out, hey, like, what, what, how do you see yourself in the next year, and I was probing and wanting to find out just to get on the same page, so I could kind of support their growth outlook, their growth mindset, some sort of area that they could maybe get developed in at work, maybe that's taking more responsibility for the inventory, something and you don't know how many times I get met with just blank stares of like, well, you can lead me into something, you know, and it's like, oh, no, I, I would love to lead them into something. But I wanted to know, just what was their passion? Like? Did Did they have a desire for learning? Did they want to be the best? And if? And if so, in what ways? Could I come alongside that and nurture that, but I didn't want someone that didn't care about learning. I didn't want someone that didn't care about excellence, and you know, bettering themselves. And one of the things I realized about school is like, the real goal of school is to teach people to self educate, and to teach people to be able to have that empowerment of, hey, I now consumed this one curriculum and learned marketing, learn dentistry, well, now I have the freedom to be able to construct my own curriculum whenever I want to, to learn what I want to learn.

Allison House  11:35

So in dentistry, though, we have team members that don't have that level of education, you know, they have either they learned on the job, or they have just a couple months education. So you're starting with people that don't have that love of learning sometimes. And you have to create it. And once just a Tony Robbins always says if you're not growing, you're not you're not productive, you're not feeling good. I mean, part of the, the process of growing is the enjoying growing. It's not necessarily the end product, right? The process, it process feels good. Yeah. And so when you start somebody on that path of growing, they feel good, they feel really good and empowered, and they want to do more. But sometimes you have to start somebody in something and teach them Oh, it would feel good if I was growing.

Shawn Zajas  12:25

So kind of just like painting the picture for them. Or, like, I mean, I guess how have you done that? Because, again, I can think about these these times when I'm in these meetings, and I'm looking at them. And I'm realizing in a similar way, a lot of the employees that I'm talking about, may not have even also had a four year degree because what we're asking them to do didn't require that, you know, I'm not talking about the higher level, you know, type people that I'm able to entrust with, you know, a lot more. So, I think, I think there's that commonality. But I didn't know, I didn't know what to do. So what how like, what steps did you take to start getting them to like learning?

Allison House  13:04

I mean, you start teaching them from day one, and about dentistry. So I wanted them to be able to talk to my patients about dentistry. So I was constantly Can you see this on the X ray? Can you? Do you see what I'm doing here? We're writing notes together at the end of the day, this is why I did this. Do you remember seeing this? Well, suddenly, they're they're learning and they can talk to people. And that feels really good to be able to talk with some knowledge to patients and to their friends. So so clear,

Shawn Zajas  13:37

you have a passion for dentistry, that my job like I love it, like it is so obvious at what point though, do you see in an employee of yours that that passion isn't there? And does that like if that ever happens, where it's like they've learned or two, three months in? Is it difficult for you, if you recognize, they don't share that same passion? Because it's probably so easy for you to share it with your team. You know, you love dentistry, it's real. And you're getting to, again, train them according to what's just authentic for you. Has there ever been a time in last 19 years when you realize that a team member just didn't care? And if so, what do you do?

Allison House  14:13

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's happened had, I had this one employee that I've hired and fired three times, same employee. Wow. And I love her. We're still friends to this day. The first time I heard her was 18 years ago, and she worked for me for a year. And she is so clinically good. She knew how to talk to patients. She was great in the back or he was perfect. I mean, she was wonderful. But she could not get along with other team members. And she would just be so mean girl, she would say nasty things to them and she would be rude. And finally, I got to the point where I just can't deal with this. I mean, she's just hurting the entire office in the morale even though she's so clinically good. So I let her About, and it was trauma for both of us big trauma. So about five years later, she calls me, and we're chatting. And she's like, I really would love to come back to work for you. I really liked it. And I'll be good this time. Sure. And she was she was great for a year, she was great with other employees. And then she was she went back downhill. And I don't know if something happened in her personal life, or that changed her. And I had to fire her again. Oh, wow. So I've hired her a third time. But I hired her in a very different capacity. She comes in and temps for me sometimes, because she's clinically fabulous. But she just cannot get along with my team members. And if ever there's a problem with team members, and she has to go,

Shawn Zajas  15:46

well, that's quite kill me. Well, why don't we dive in a little bit more to what coaching kind of looks like in this method? Because again, I can imagine, I know the first even just five years of me dealing with employees, I didn't approach it that way. And one of probably my go to strategies was avoidance. And a great kind of,

Allison House  16:13

or you just do it yourself. Yeah. Oh, that's true. That's true. That was one of my favorite strategies, I will just do it myself. Because I know better than everybody.

Shawn Zajas  16:20

Yeah. Which then you know, learn to entrust other people with you, you're not able to delegate, you're not able to, you know,

Allison House  16:26

you're exhausted, right. And your job is to do the dentistry, you want to be able to do the dentistry and not be exhausted because you were mopping the floor.

Shawn Zajas  16:35

So one of my business inspirations is this guy, Brendon. And one of the things he always says is avoidance is a great short term strategy for I think, pain relief or something like that. But it's a great long term strategy for like, pretty much like misery, like meaning like, in the short term, it's great to avoid pain, the long term, it's terrible, because doesn't you never actually fix anything. So here I am, and I'm seeing issues. And I think it's just like, I wasn't empowered to know what to do when I saw issues. So I have a feeling there's probably lots of dentists, young and old, that probably are in the same place, you know, maybe they need to correct the course in their practice, maybe they just need to address a real toxin in the office.

Allison House  17:16

What's funny, because sometimes you don't know what it is that's making you miserable. You're looking around, and you know that this is not working. But you can't like put your finger on it, you know that this employee is clinically good. So that seems okay. But there's this negative underlying in the office, and you don't realize that the team members are not getting along. It's there's this negative underlying all the time. So you have to create this team culture. And one of the ways I mean, we've learned all this now, where you have a huddle before you start. And I think that's the expectations for the day, and took me a long time to figure out what does that huddle supposed to look like? But it's setting the expectations, you know, what is today gonna look like? How are we going to make this flow, right? Some people will do a huddle at the end of the day, I for one want to get out of here. So I'm actually having a huddle. But there are dentists that do that, and it works for them. I also have a meeting twice a month, where we do something called habitudes. Okay. And we're just totally out of the box. But it's it's some vulnerability about leadership. And we are we're leading our team, we're leading our patients. And so we talk and I am vulnerable.

Shawn Zajas  18:29

So this is a meeting you're having with all of your staff with

Allison House  18:33

all my staff. I bring in lunch, and it's twice a month, and we have a two hour meeting twice a month, some people do it more often. And if I could afford to I probably would. But this is what works for me. Yeah. But you have to have those team meetings.

Shawn Zajas  18:49

What do you feel like that enables or contributes to the culture of excellence, because I can imagine, again, it's a time when you're vulnerable. So that allows them to feel like they're able to be honest with you about issues that's going on, because it gives you a good pulse on on how they're feeling.

Allison House  19:05

So it used to be that we would have a team meeting, and we would all come in here and pitch each other. Yeah, so that was and it wasn't productive. At the end of the meeting. We all just felt terrible. And we were angry with each other. That wasn't good. So I found habitudes. And it's just a little book. And I don't work for them. I'm not selling anything. But it's a little book on leadership. And you open it up and there's a little story. And then we would talk about whatever it was about the story. And one of the first one I remember was hosted hostesses. And so we would talk about how we're, this is our place and we're hosting. And then we would talk we would read the questions and sort of answer them. But it's not a you did this wrong. It's a well from here on out. I think we should try this because of based on what we've just read. There's lots of things you can do that way but it can be there. This, here's what we're gonna talk about. And it's not going to be that you did something wrong. It's in the future. Let's try this.

Shawn Zajas  20:06

Let's great. So we're, this is what we're wanting to develop as a team. This is kind of what we're seeing, like the direction we're heading in instead of just looking at areas that people aren't doing well,

Allison House  20:19

because it's not fun. It's not fun to just sit there and look at your weaknesses. It's fun to say, hey, what if we created a strength here? And that's fine. It's fun to set the course.

Shawn Zajas  20:30

So I hear you talking about, again, how to use this Coaching Habit. And I'm thinking, Okay, I see something wrong with my office manager. And let's say it happens today. And all I've done in the past is I don't, I don't say anything. So maybe what you describe the silence eating, and I go home, and I tell my loved one about it, and I vent. And now I feel better to go back in the day tomorrow. But how to what do I do in the future when something like that happens, because I really don't know what to do? What would you say to that dentists that's just struggling?

Allison House  21:04

Well, it depends on what what's happening. Some things in place, gotta go. At the end of it, you can't talk to a patient like that you can't treat members of your team like that you're gone. But some things are just a little tweaking. Like, my front desk person was texting back and forth. And it's in we've and I just happened to be looking at it. And I didn't like the way she was texting. And she thought she was just being very firm. But the language she was using seemed to a patient to a patient. Okay, the language she was using seems really strong, abrupt and rude. Me. Yeah. Yeah. She didn't realize it. So I went up and wrote her a couple of scripts on, you know, when a patient says they're going to cancel, or they're going to be 30 minutes late to an hour long appointment.

Shawn Zajas  21:51

But how did you bring that up? So you, you saw that, instead of saying, Oh, my gosh, you know, Amanda, whoever hypothetical, like, no, that's terrible. Like, how did you even approach that in a way that meaning if I don't review that I have the confidence that I can start a conversation that's, I feel like is like the base of it is some some sort of criticism, something that I'm wanting to bring up? That doesn't mean just even that coaching mindset, you already have it, but I'm trying to get you to see, I don't even know how to have that conversation. So

Allison House  22:25

the conversation is not, I don't like the way you're talking to people. It's giving her skills so that she can grow. So instead of coming up and saying, I really don't like this, I wrote a bunch of scripts. And I said, So when somebody says you're gonna be 30 minutes late, here's what I'm thinking we should say. And then I gave her the script. And then I had her talk to me about what if she was going to be able to say that, okay, and sometimes she would change it, and to even better, it was there, but it wasn't at the forefront? And then I would ask her, you know, well, how do you? How would you handle it? If you were going to be 30 minutes to your doctor's appointment? What do you want them to say to you? So it's not this negative? It's how do we construct what we want to say? Is there resources? Can we create something,

Shawn Zajas  23:10

and it even sounds like your approach is like, honoring her and her ability to like, contribute to try to create something together. It wasn't just like, again, this is what you did wrong. This is how you should do it, you know, and I'm gonna monitor like, in some non life giving way to you as a co creative process, where it sounds like it was like, Hey, how can we make this better? Right?

Allison House  23:31

How can we make the patient feel empowered, and still set the boundaries in our office, and it doesn't have to be the way she's doing it. But we could create this together. So that's a lot of it. Other things I do is when something breaks down at the end of the day, with, like walking a patient out and then patient didn't get called and we didn't get the referral done. Then I talked to the pay, I pulled the employee side and we start talking about Well, I feel like this system is breaking down. So what do you think we can do to make the system work? That is gold. It works, because suddenly it's not about them? Because it isn't. It's really about the system. And every year, realize technology changes, I change ploys grow. So the system has to be revamped. So this system is no longer working, which we do.

Shawn Zajas  24:20

So I'm just saying, that's amazing. Because a lot of people might feel like me, where it's easy to see when, I don't know, some system or some protocol isn't followed to the tee. And all of a sudden, it's like, why isn't that person being called? Why are they why isn't this happening? And my, it's so hard for me not to see like just black and white. So it's like, well, they need to be accountable because they didn't do what they were supposed to do. And here I feel like you're not making it about the person. You're making it about, well, like if this is something that you're starting to consistently notice something must be wrong about the process. And even if it's not just even saying, Hey, how can we look at because if they turn around and say, look, the process isn't wrong, I can really step up my game. And now they're owning it, right? They're owning it. But you're not saying, I'm wanting to hold you accountable. No, it's this. I feel like it's just this beautiful strength to lead in such a way that again, you're not trying to touch your team or catch them when they're doing mistake. But finding a way to together invite them into creating a solution for something that seems like is off

Allison House  25:26

stage and catching them with a mistake. It's okay, this, this referral didn't get called What's the breakdown? What do we change? Oh, we text people now. Okay, well, let's, let's try this. And then sometimes things don't work. And we just have to acknowledge that you have to give room for people to fail to that, oh, we tried the system that didn't work. What do we try now? And so you keep growing and changing? And once an employee feels like they're part of it? Yeah, I think they're on board. I go, let's do this in fat.

Shawn Zajas  25:58

No, this is really awesome to be talking about. You know, for our listeners, we're going over just a culture of excellence. And it's something that I believe we're probably going to do kind of a little mini series on. So I knew even the next episode, we want to talk about firing. And when to know you should fire someone, maybe what some of the red flags are, what some of the cautions are. And we're really excited to get into that topic. But there's just so much to unpack in this whole area of just again, creating a culture of excellence. So you can do what you love to do, which is dentistry, but also caring for your team. And knowing that you can practice in such a way that you're having life. They're having life, they're growing, they're feeling like they're needed, and the contributions that they're making matters, they can be proud of them. And it's just this great win win win for everybody, the patient wins, because you guys are all together and in loving, dentistry, loving taking care of patients, instead of having nightmares at night, because everyone's just on each other's back, you know, you no one's doing what they're told, you know, patients are falling through the cracks, because systems are breaking down. And you don't know how to address any of it, which, which I guess is probably like, worst case scenario is this unraveling of everything you've come to build, or you're trying to build if you're a young dentist, and you just don't know what to do.

Allison House  27:25

It's been trial by fire for me. I mean, I have, I feel like I've made so many mistakes, so many expensive mistakes. But yeah, I've worked on this and worked on this. And so I feel like I'm at a point where I like my Coaching Habit. And that's working for me in my office. But that doesn't mean 10 years, I want to learn something new. So it's a process of growing. So if you're, you're in a position where you're still seething and calling somebody at the end of the day, it's a process, you just keep working at it.

Shawn Zajas  27:55

So we'd love to hear from you guys. Just what some of your struggles might be some of your challenges when it comes to creating the culture of excellence that you care about. And we're excited to have been able to share just you know, foundationally, an approach that we think is really great, which is just this coaching mindset, and hopefully you could hear how much it's helped Alison and her journey. And again, we're just excited to have you guys along for this journey of ours. And as Dr. House was mentioning, as we continue to discover better practices and everything that we're going to share with you. And if you have those, let us know we'd love to hear what's working for you.