Dentists, Can You Relate To This?

OK, so what does this have to do with dentists?! Well…..lots. Although my primary focus is helping dentists develop their business skills, I often speak to groups of dentists and staff combined, which is great because the business of dentistry affects the team – until the entire team embraces and values the business side of dentistry, a practice cannot run like a well-oiled machine. In order to embrace it, the team must understand its true function and that means understanding that the business of dentistry is experienced differently, depending upon who is doing the experiencing!
When it is the employee’s experience, the perspective can be quite unique. This is because the employee has way more information than the patient, but less than the dentist! How so?
Seeing Only Parts of the Big Picture: The employee sees a fragmented version of the overhead costs (such as one supplies-invoice at a time), and of the revenue (gross billings versus net). They are not privy to the big picture; the financial statements. They may not know about debt-servicing, capital investment, overall overhead, salary costs etc. The employee sees what labour and materials are involved in an individual procedure, but don’t see how that fits into the overall financial status of the practice.
 Risk and Responsibility: This I know….the person who is bearing the full weight of risk and responsibility of a business will experience that business very differently from anyone else. No matter how much of a team you all are, the business owner must measure every move, every decision, every action against risk and reward. An employee’s input is essential and valuable and I am a huge advocate of collaboration, however, that is a gathering of information in order to make an informed decision, not a joint decision! An employee’s perspective is not going to be the same as your own.
Assumption: The other side of the coin brings me to the reason for the cartoon. An employee who interviews for a job very likely has made a natural, reasonable, perhaps unconscious assumption; that the business-owner who is interviewing them is in that position because of a burning desire to be a boss – an entrepreneurial spirit, excited and capable, with a high level of training and acumen in business management and leadership skills. This may be somewhat unrealistic. :-/. Dental employees get about as much training as the dentist – about a couple of hours!! (An exaggeration, perhaps, but sadly not much of one!).
This unspoken assumption and lack of awareness of the employee perspective is the root cause of many misunderstandings and confusion. It can be completely avoided if employees understand the situation and contribute to the learning, if dentists take the initiative to develop their basic business skills through training and the entire team develops their knowledge of the true function of the business of dentistry, values it and embraces it as a catalyst to their work.