Eight Great Team-Building Techniques

You’re a dentist, a practice owner and a team leader—but not necessarily in that order. If you’re like most of your colleagues, the demands of hiring and training a dental team can be much more daunting than your other professional responsibilities.

The problem is that your staff is made up of people, who come to the office with their own unique characteristics, emotional ups and downs, different experiences and sometimes-unrealistic expectations. You, on the other hand, probably have little or no formal education in building and maintaining a team.

There’s no real shortcut to acquiring team-building expertise. Developing the needed skills takes a considerable amount of time and effort. There are, however, a number of techniques created and proven effective in the business world and adapted for dental practices by Levin Group. Here are eight of the most useful ones:

1. Enable your team to envision the future you see for your practice.
People work harder and get better results when they have a sense of purpose. It’s up to you to provide it, in the form of a vision. More than just wishful thinking, your practice vision must instead be a solid, attainable definition of your dental business in the future—typically three years from now. Write down your practice vision, introduce and explain it to your team (including any new team members when they join the practice), and bring it up repeatedly at staff meetings of all sorts. It will inspire everyone to move your practice closer to success every day.

2. Define 10 specific goals that the team must reach in order to fulfill the vision.
You’ll help your staff move the practice toward the vision by giving them more precise guidance about what they must accomplish. Write out clear-cut goals, assign responsibilities among team members, set deadlines, establish ways to measure progress… and get to work as a team.

3. Let team members know exactly what’s expected of them individually by providing detailed, accurate job descriptions.
It’s hard to please the boss when you have only a vague idea of what the boss wants you to do. It’s also unfair to hold staff members to a standard that hasn’t been shared with them. These are the reasons why well-run businesses have written job descriptions for all team members, detailing tasks, systems to be used and responsibilities (including goals, as discussed in No. 2). Taken all together, your team’s job descriptions, if properly written, define every non-clinical aspect of practice operation. They show not only what each individual must do but also how team members will coordinate with each other.

4. Conduct individual performance reviews at last once every year.
People need feedback about their work if they are to improve. As the practice leader, you should be providing a certain amount of this every day, but you should also sit down one-to-one with each staff member for a thorough discussion of job performance. The job description will be on the table during this meeting, guiding you and the employee step-by-step through a review of responsibilities and how well they’ve been handled. The review also provides an opportunity to talk about the team member’s views and aspirations. Think of it as a conversation, not merely you commenting on the individual’s performance. Good leaders understand their employees, and performance reviews contribute to this understanding in a major way.

5. Provide excellent management systems for your team.
You can’t expect excellence from your team if you give them outdated, inadequate systems for doing their jobs. As team leader, take responsibility for providing the right tools for your staff. Unless you’ve updated or replaced them within the past 3–5 years, your systems almost certainly have significant bottlenecks that degrade staff performance and morale. Putting effective new systems in place will not be easy… but look on the bright side. Once you’ve done it, operational efficiency at your practice will improve significantly.

6. Use scripts to guide staff interactions with patients.
The success of your practice depends in large part on how well you and your staff communicate with patients (and prospective patients). With the right words, you can establish trust, build value, close cases, generate patient referrals, keep patients scheduled, maintain a high collection rate, provide superior customer service, etc. Excellent scripting enables you to do all this, and more. Even team members with limited verbal skills can say the right things confidently if they have excellent scripts to guide them.

7. Commit to a robust, ongoing staff training program.
Whether learning to work with new systems, mastering scripts, acquiring additional skills in off-site seminars and workshops, or simply “shadowing” an experienced coworker, all team members need training. As team leader, you should work with your office manager to develop an annual training program that incorporates both individual and group training activities.

8. Hone your team leadership skills.
Your personal behavior has a strong impact on staff members. For effective team building, come to the office every day prepared to:

• Act the way you want team members to act. Leave personal problems at home, exhibit calm professionalism, and go out of your way to make patients happy. Your staff will follow your lead.
• Demonstrate that you’re open to change. Be flexible, adaptable and open-minded, encouraging team members to innovate and improvise.
• Keep the lines of communication open. When team members feel free to speak their minds, you get the full benefit of their ideas for improvement.
• Make decisions quickly and move on. Decisive leaders instill confidence.
• Delegate routine decisions when possible. This frees your time for production while increasing team members’ self-confidence.

Building an effective practice team—and keeping it on track as inevitable changes occur—can pose serious challenges for any dentist. However, if you master the techniques discussed here, you’ll soon become as capable in team leadership as you are in dentistry.

Click here to download a free Practice Performance Matrix™, along with instructions about how to rate your practice and interpret your score.

Dr. Roger P. Levin is a third-generation general dentist and the Founder and CEO of Levin Group, Inc., the largest dental management and marketing consulting firm in North America. As a leading authority on dental practice management and marketing, Dr. Levin has developed the scientific systems-based consulting method that increases practice production and profitability, while lowering stress. A keynote speaker for major dental conferences, Dr. Levin presents more than 100 seminars per year. He has authored 68 books and more than 4,000 articles.