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In this episode, we’re called on the carpet with the boss, Jane Yule one of the Office Co-Administrators at MyCare. Bob and Jane discuss the Four Block Roles of Managers:  FC3, or Face-to-face, Communication, Coaching, and Command. It’s a great conversation about the role of a manager in a practice. Join us for insights from a passionate and talented manager.

Bob and Marnie have been working together as a dentist and chairside assistant for 24 years. Here Bob and Marnie discuss the Four Block Roles for assistants: STF2, or, Support, Treatment, Financial, and Face-to-face. Through the lens of the Four Block Roles, Bob and Marnie explain what it takes for an assistant to do their part to ensure a great patient experience. It’s a great opportunity to hear some practical insights from a veteran chairside assistant.

Here Bob and Kat discuss the Four Block Roles for hygienists: FCTD, or Face-to-face, Comfort, Treatment, and Diagnosis. Through the lens of the Four Block Roles, Kat guides us through her process for a patient visit from escorting the patient to the operatory to explaining their options for a needed crown. It’s a great opportunity to hear some practical insights from MyCare Dental’s resident Hygiene mentor.

In this episode, we talk conflict and conflict resolution. When you’re in business, conflict is everywhere all of the time. Well, whose fault is that, and why do they still work here? Right? Well, not exactly. Change makes conflict, differences make conflict, and the inability to communicate creates conflict. What’s more is that, because change and discomfort go hand-in-hand with growth, everyone interested in growth is on a doomsday joyride straight through the minefields of conflict. That means that getting comfortable with discomfort and making your peace with the reality of conflict is a necessary part of your evolution. First, so you can manage it for yourself, and second, so you can lead your team through it by creating structures for open and transparent communication. After illustrating some examples of the consequences of avoiding conflict, we cover the process of coming to terms with it, eventually seeing conflict as a necessary and ultimately constructive organic force. Bob recounts his growth from feeling reactive and uncompromisingly driving to being able to connect with his team, understand them as people, and manage conflict constructively by recognizing the complexity of each person’s personal stakes and motivation. By progressively improving his ability to manage external conflict by seeking to better understand the people he was in conflict with, he gained personal insight that allowed him to reach a new level of communication: transparency. Last, we talk about transparency as conflict resolution strategy and driver of a smiles-and-laughter culture and touch on the other side of the coin: how communication is nonlinear and needs to be organized in order to make it effective.   Key moments: [3:30] Conflict is where people reveal what they actually need in order to move forward. [6:30] avoiding, preempting, or rushing through conflict all come from a negative judgement and definition of conflict. Eventually you drop the judgement and see that conflict is just the label we use for the process of getting a group of people on the same page. [10:00] Acknowledging discomfort, upset, or difficulty is the first step toward resolution. [12:00] Leaders are expected to be adroit with conflict. Good leaders are good at managing conflict. Good systems for communication help constructively guide conflict resolution strategies and share those strategies consistently across the whole team–because uneven skill with conflict across the team is a reality that must be addressed. [15:00] A period of chronic conflict based on differences in priorities and intentionality led to the creation of the team overlay key. The lesson was that because each person’s motivators and personality were components of their perspective, keeping these aspects in mind helped Bob create consensus and achieve initiatives. [19:26] Next step in conflict as a lens on interpersonal relationships: subjective reality and learning how to create consensus. At the end of your revelations about other people, you have revelations about yourself that propel you forward through. [26:15] Transparency as next-level conflict resolution. An illustration of the value of “sharing your numbers.” [35:01] What is usually not understood or acknowledged by employees is the discomfort inherent in giving a raise on the part of the owner or supervisor. [36:01] Usually the owners are the only people who live in the financial reality of the business. It’s helpful to share the numbers in order to integrate the whole team into the financial reality in order to mitigate the inherent conflict in the different positions with respect to pursestrings. This prevents “whack-a-mole syndrome” for things like raises and bonuses; everyone will understand the “rules” for those things when there is transparency about the numbers and a structure in place for such things. [38:00] Avoiding conflict about money is a direct limit to growth. [45:00] You gotta be a little deluded to start anything. This is why first-time entrepreneurs run into a special kind of conflict: when the real world meets your untested assumptions with conflict. [48:00] Media and conflict: TV news and conflict as voyeurism for conflict-averse people. Politics as a language for avoiding statements, thus avoiding conflict. Avoiding those policy conflicts creates a world where the truth is not discussed. This is an example of the ultimate endgame of conflict avoidance. [52:45] Framing everything as a debate has been the cultural climate. The greater culture influence conflict styles–and conflict resolution styles. [58:34] Intimacy can make conflict worse because you have familiarity that causes you to make assumptions. Often conflict between intimates is best seen as an opportunity to uncover unmet needs. [101:01] You can’t just say you care, you have to communicate it. You do this by showing that you understand and showing that you care. [106:30] Behavior is communication that we can’t verbalize effectively. Unstructured communication is only one step above this. A carefully orchestrated system of communication is how owners communicate their openness to their team, and it’s how they make sure that time isn’t wasted and that meetings accomplish the goals they are intended to. Failing to plan is planning to fail, and failing to plan your communication structure is planning a “bitch-and-chew” session. [112:10] Conflict is uncovers treasure. Buried conflict is even more valuable to uncover. A communication structure is the tool that uncovers buried conflict. [116:00] That great culture people want is a result of a great conflict resolution environment, and this comes from a clear system of communication, that allows clarity to be transmitted between all members of the team. A culture is a function of the resources available. Make good resources available. [120:00] You actually have to care. They have to know you care. [127:25] Just like in integrated marketing, where everything you do is understood to be a marketing communication, everything you do to communicate that you care and are listening is part of a climate of conflict resolution. Mentions: DISC team overlay key [Growth Platform tool work in process]

We recorded this episode as we were still recovering from the whirlwind that was chrisad’s No Limits XII in Las Vegas. Always a great and rare opportunity to observe groups of dentists interacting outside of their natural habitat, this year we came back home with a lot to think about. From the day they decide to start a practice, a dentist has to make lots of decisions every day; care decisions, team decisions, business decisions, and personal ones, whose consequences affect multiple people in complexly surprising ways. Dentists tend to be people who love to perfect things, and based on the people you meet at an event like No Limits, it’s obvious that the often small, intimate nests of interdependencies we call dental practices are the setting for some amazingly passionate efforts toward perfecting the execution of dental care and perfecting the business side of dentistry. Sharing the stories and insights of those efforts to perfect–even when they fail–is the true delight that happens when you get dentists together talking shop. But that intimacy and interdependency–and even the perceived perfectibility itself–of dentistry can have a downside, and managing those downsides is a part of the enterprise.  To be a dentist is employ a whole team of other people whose careers hinge on your decisions and your performance as a practitioner. And meanwhile, are we motivating people with money, or are we rewarding them? How come the more we investigate money, the more we realize that our conversations about money are usually about something else? Clarity on money as a motivator at the 11-minute mark gets you warmed up and settled in.   We talk about the whole thing, the good and the bad, the family and the feuds, and take a little time to talk about leadership, compensation, and the concrete reasons why things like purpose and values are worth taking serious–before a hailstorm interrupts everything and we call the game for weather. Key moments: [9:20] What we talk about when we talk about money: Money as communication: proof of successful leadership. Motivating with money or rewarding? Money as an incentive for employees above the living wage line. [16:13] Collegiality among dentists: meeting in the middle of a dark hallway [30:37] Your decision to be a dentist accidentally made you responsible for a bunch of other people and their careers. [31:00] Perfectibility and dentists as a group. [52:00] Spontaneous fun is fun, but you’ll have to craft your culture if you want those smiles and laughter.   Mentions: Chrisad No Limits http://chrisad.com/no-limits-xii/   Feedback loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics   Kolbe Index http://www.kolbe.com

It’s potpourri time as we cover trends and developments in pricing and return policies as a key aspect of building rapport and trust with consumers in the post-internet era. It all connects to changes in the perceived value of information, and we discuss the factors that have lead to the greater potential value of information including smarter organizations which leads to more efficient density and ease of transmission. All the talk about new technological capabilities naturally lead us to talk about how they connect to dentistry, and we unveil our grand vision of capturing and organizing all of the knowledge we can get our hands on to create a body of knowledge that will be debated, curated, improved, and revised socially through the community of colleagues we’re assembling with Growth Platform and the bootcamps. This generation of dentists is the first one whose knowledge won’t retire and die with them, or be passed on only to the small number of protegees they have a personal mentoring relationship with. If you’re late in your career and still practicing in some way, the opportunity to contribute to something great is here. The prospect of the community we’re building gets some exploration. Bob talks about how having a community of dentists to talk to would have saved him from hiring consultants, and mitigated the isolation inherent in the business, and how managing change is the fundamental challenge to growth.    A theme that weaved its way through the conversation was the interplay between the old and the new approaches separated by different levels of technological adoption--and, naturally enough, the differing approaches and values of the younger generation and their elders. Where the younger generation can offer up their native familiarity with technology and their emphasis on adaptability, their elders can share their wealth of proven experience and connection to the past. Big topics on the Growth Platform Podcast this week. Join us!

  Is it always appropriate to talk about the prospect of ownership with a prospective associate? Is ownership the goal of every first-year dental school graduate, or merely the traditional way to speak to deeper desires that we have no script for talking about? Job security, mentorship, having a voice in the direction of their future, and paying back student loans are key drivers for first-year associates that aren’t based on arbitrary, traditional conversation scripts. Too many times we go to great strange lengths to avoid talking about money. The good news is that even when principals aren’t in the market for sharing ownership, relationships built on open and transparent communication can support conversations that create win-win arrangements with associates. Be sure to keep listening for the story of the associate who worried about making too much money. In this first Growth Platform Podcast, Bob and Robert talk about associates, and end up opening new ground on an evergreen topic in conversations about being an employer: What We Talk About When We Talk About Money, and in the process they find concrete examples of why it pays to talk about Vision and Values, and introduce a new mode dealing with ownership.