Ep #174. The Value of Growth: How to Build a Team That Never Stops Improving

In this episode, Julie explores what it really means to have growth as a core value in your dental practice - not just as a word on a wall, but as something your whole team genuinely lives.

Whether you're a practice owner or a practice manager, this episode will challenge you to think differently about learning - and give you practical ways to bring that thinking into your team.

Interested in taking your personal, team, and dental practice to the next level? Contact Julie and Ameena today to explore the possibilities for growth and success!

Visit our website, Dental Business Mastery, at https://dentalbusinessmastery.com.au/, and book a complimentary, obligation-free Discovery Call to discuss your specific needs and goals. Schedule your call here: https://tidycal.com/3l298p1/30-minute-meeting

If you have any questions or would like more information, feel free to contact us via email at info@dentalbusinessmastery.com.au.

Transcript

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You are listening to the Dental Business Mastery Podcast, where you discover management insights and strategies for your successful dental practice. There are also interviews with key people in the industry who have advice and services to help you and your team achieve great success. Welcome to this episode of the Dental Business Mastery podcast. Today I want to talk about something that I think is one of the most powerful commitments that you can make in your dental practice. It's possibly even one of the most important things you can do in your own life, but let's talk about the dental practice situation. And that is making growth as one of your core values. And I'm not talking about, oh, that sounds good, let's that put that in our documentation within our practice, let's print that up and pop it on the wall in the staff room. I mean, how do we genuinely live it, breathe it, and build it into the way we do things at our digital practices? And what benefit can that actually have? What do the outcomes actually look like? So, first of all, let's just quickly touch on values. A lot is spoken about values, but rarely do we come across organizations that truly live their values out. So it's still one of those things that is a little bit out of reach, it feels like. Not because we don't know how to do it, just because of lack of time, not the right people, all of the reasons. We've often gone into dental practices and asked them what their values are, and some of them do actually say growth. And then when we dig a little deeper and find out how they actually make that value of growth alive in their dental practices, there's no systems or way of thinking that is changed because of that particular value. And that's because even though consciously all of your team members, if they were asked, okay, we're going to develop the value of growth in this dental practice, do you know what that means? A lot of people would be able to rattle off what that actually means. But do they understand what it means from their own perspective in terms of what role they would play within the organization to live the value of growth? Your values are really your decision-making foundation. They are the filter through which every process, every action, every interaction should pass. And when they are truly alive in your practice, they are not just words, they are a way of being. They're directing our behavior. For a value to be truly lived, two things need to happen. Number one, every person in your team needs to understand what that value actually means. And secondly, they need to know what it looks like in their role. What does growth mean for a receptionist? What does it mean for a dental assistant? What does it mean for a practice owner? And when we can start getting great clarity around all of these areas, the value stops being just a word on a poster on a wall and actually starts being something real and alive within your dental practice. So, why do I think growth is such an important value to have in every dental practice out there? Not just some, but all of them. Well, let's talk about growth. It is something that I'm truly passionate about. And if you've been listening to this podcast, reading my blogs, if you're a student of the Practice Manager's course, then you know that I have been a devotee of Tony Robbins for about 35 years. A lot of younger people aren't even sure who he is, and I would encourage you, if you haven't heard of Tony Robbins, to go down the rabbit hole and investigate him. Watch his videos, read his articles, jump on his website, powerful stuff. He's got great books, all the things, audiobooks, wonderful space to delve into. And it's an acronym for constant and never-ending improvement. C-A-N-I, constant and never-ending improvement. The underlying idea in this is that we never truly arrive. We're always on this journey of continual improvement. We'll never get to a point where we've learned everything and there's no more to learn on a better particular skill or a particular topic. We never get to a point where there is no more improvement to be had. There's always improvement to be had. That the journey of growth never ends. And actually, this is a beautiful thing to sit with. We are all improving all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. Doesn't matter what role in the dental practice you play, when you think of the systems inside your dental practice, when you think of how your practice is being managed, when you think about the experience you provide to your patients, when you consider how we're managing complaints and how we're celebrating and how we're improving performance, everything is constantly improving all the time. In essence, this is the core of evolution, isn't it? That as human beings, we have evolved to our current state of development. We'll never get to the point where we're perfect human beings, but we are certainly more perfect now than we had been in generations gone by. Always improving. Tony Robbins has also said something that has also stayed with me because it resonates to be quite true in my life. What makes human beings the happiest? Is it success? Is it money? Is it love? And he says no. The thing that absolutely makes us the happiest as human beings is progress. Progress. The feeling of moving forward, of becoming, of getting better. And so this links so tightly to the can I journey, the constant and never-ending improvement journey, that when people are on that journey, consciously taking action every day to constantly improve, they will be achieving progress and they will experience greater levels of happiness. It kind of makes sense to me. When you think about it through that lens, building growth into your core values isn't just good for the practice, it's good for everybody's happiness within that team as well. Now, one of the biggest obstacles that I see to genuine growth in teams, in practice, owners, in me, in all of us, is when you get to a point where you've you've kind of lost that curiosity. And what I mean by that is that you're no longer interested to hear about how this could be improved, how you could improve the skill you're rolling out, or how other people roll out that skill and achieve great progress. You're never no longer really curious about all of that. And it could be because you're tired from work and family commitments and all the things, maybe your health isn't 100%, so you just don't feel kind of bold enough to go down the path of and maintaining that path of curiosity. And some of the comments that we say to ourselves is, I've been doing this for 15 years, I know how this works. No more curiosity about how it could be done better. What about the thought that we think to ourselves when we hear of a new way of rolling out a particular process for our practice? And we think to ourselves, oh, I've done that before and it didn't work. Did that eight years ago, it didn't work, no longer curious about how it could possibly be rolled out in a more effective way. Now, as a consultant, I come across this a lot. Team members who are resistant to learning because they have been doing a particular role for a long time and they feel that they've got it covered. Practice owners who have already tried a particular approach, and because it didn't land the first time, we're just going to write that off as a thing that doesn't work here. And here's the challenge I want to put to you. Think about a topic you know really well, something you feel confident in. Now ask yourself, quite honestly, how much do you think exists to know about that topic? If you think about marketing for a dental practice, oh my God, the amount of stuff to learn about marketing and the growth in that space as well, especially with AI and all the things. You think about all the things there is to know about marketing, a dental practice. And you have got them some of these thoughts. So we've tried SEO, we've tried Google Reviews, we've tried putting different signage out the front, we've tried going to the local family fairs, we've tried all of these things, they just don't work for our place, our location, our patient base. We've tried Facebook advertising and all the things. Now think about and contemplate how much do you think you know about that topic? And so, how much do you think there is to know about a topic? And then how much do you think you know? And it's such a tiny sliver. And no matter how much research you do, it still feels like it's a tiny slither because the more research we do, the more we study something, the more we realize how much we don't know. And so when we can be truly honest with ourselves and realize that the knowledge gap is significant, and that it is in that gap where growth lives, then sometimes we can be encouraged to remain in that space of curiosity about everything, not just the new stuff coming to the fore and the new stuff that we feel like we should be learning, but the stuff that we already feel like we know. And so that's one of the enemies to growth is that loss of curiosity. Another obstacle to growth, which can be quite subconscious, some of these things, is the stage of incompetence that we feel when we're learning something new. Now, I don't know if any of you have heard of the four stages of competence. Stage one is unconscious incompetence. This is where you don't know what you don't know. And I often use learning to drive a car as a great analogy to describe these four stages. The unconscious incompetence space is where you are unconscious, so you are unaware of your level of incompetence of whether you can do this task or not. And when you're a little child, never sitting in the driver's seat of a car, you are blissfully unaware of the complexity of learning to drive a car. So you're unconsciously incompetent. This is ignorance is for this kind of space. It doesn't bother you. We're unaware of it all, so there's nothing there to upset us. Stage two is where this upset starts to kick in, and that is consciously incompetent. The time during a skill development that we become very conscious of how incompetent we are. And for that, that would be a learner driver sitting in the front seat, the driver's seat, for the first time, realizing, oh wow, it's pretty difficult to learn how to put the right amount of pressure on the brake, on the accelerator, to indicate while looking around and keeping my steering wheel steady. Driving in traffic and merging into 100 kilometers an hour onto the freeway. I have become wildly aware, very conscious, wildly aware of how poor I am at this skill, how much I need to learn. And that stage two level of competence is the most uncomfortable. We hate not knowing what to do. We feel like we're in the deep end of the pool, we're floundering. We haven't yet developed any skill that we could be, that we could have a sense that we're progressing. But then, using the car analogy again, we get enough practice under our belt and we become consciously competent. We are very aware, but we are starting to develop the level of competency that we can drive around and not freak out, not have to think so carefully about the amount of pressure I'm putting on the brake. We're moving places, we're progressing. We still need a whole bunch more practice. We're still thinking very carefully about everything that we're doing. But as long as we put our current learning into action, we are putting the appropriate amount of pressure on the brake, the appropriate amount of pressure on the accelerator. We are looking around, maintaining our speed and keeping our steering wheel firm when we're trying to merge lanes, etc. So we've so we are competent. We can drive from A to B, no dramas, but we are consciously thinking about every step. We couldn't have a friend in the back seat conducting a gossip session with us while we're driving. We would be saying, be quiet, be quiet, I'm trying to concentrate here. And then eventually, with enough practice, we move into the fourth stage of competence, which is unconscious competence. We are so competent at the thing, we don't have to consciously think about it anymore. It's now part of our second nature. I drive from point A to point B, I don't even think about it, I just jump in the car and go. I can listen to a podcast while I'm driving, I can look around the scenery as I'm driving, I can think about what I have to get done during the day while I'm driving, and there's no dramas because everything else has become second nature. So, stage two of the four stages of competence is one of the big challenges to growth. Because even if I had asked you, do you like learning and growing? Your conscious brain would go, absolutely, it's what we're here for, learning and growing. But then if I said to you, do you embrace and seek out opportunities to feel consciously incompetent? You would be like, Are you crazy? Who likes feeling that way? No way, that's too uncomfortable. So this is the thing with growth. Everyone is on board with it as a concept. But when we start to identify what it requires of us personally to actually live this value of growth, that's where we can start to come across the barriers. And we need to address these barriers in order to make this value of growth alive and well in your organization and in your own life. Another barrier. What else is needed in order to learn and grow? What is always present in any path to learning and growing in your life? Making mistakes. That's how we learn and grow. How did you learn to walk? How did you learn to eat? How did you learn to spell? How did you learn to do maths? There are mistakes all over your past. It is riddled with mistakes. And it's through the mistakes that you learn. Buckminster Fuller, somebody that Charles follows avidly, and he was a man that lived a very, very full life, and he actually achieved 47 honorary doctorates in his life. So an absolutely brilliant man. He said about mistakes. Everything I have learned in my life, I have learned through making mistakes. Because it is when you make mistakes that you learn what isn't and are left with what is. When we're little toddlers and learning to walk, mistakes are fine. We fall down, our parent is still there going, It's okay, stand up, try again. But then for some reason, when we get into school and we make mistakes, then we're sent to detention, then we've got red ink all over our test that we failed, failed, failed. Big red crosses. We're not learning quick enough. We're not paying enough attention. We've got all this potential that we're not tapping into. But when we recognize and truly bring into our hearts that mistakes are a path to learning, then what's that going to look like in your dental organization? Mistakes give us knowledge, they trigger our creativity on how to do it better next time. They build resilience. Man, we need to embrace mistakes, otherwise, we'll feel battered down all the time that we're not perfect. It gives us courage, it makes us wiser. Mistakes are not something to be ashamed of in this dental practice. They are something to be genuinely grateful for because they fast track our learning. Another challenge to living out the value of growth in your organization and in your life is the need for practice and repetition. It's linked with mistakes because what do you do after you make a mistake? You do the thing again but slightly different. And then you make another mistake in a different aspect of developing that task. And then you do it again with a slight modification. Practice and repetition is our evolving development of skills. Think about again how you're learning to drive, how you're learning to walk, how you're learning to ride a bike. If you think about if I was teaching you how to write a unicycle, I could tell you exactly how to ride a unicycle if I knew myself. I could tell you exactly what to do. I could give you a book training you in how to write a unicycle. I could give you a practice manual filled with lessons on how to ride a unicycle. Is that going to teach you how to ride a unicycle? No. What will teach you how to ride a unicycle? Getting on the cycle and practice and repetition, falling off, readjusting, practice and repetition, falling off, readjusting, practice and repetition. Until eventually, at one point, you stay on the unicycle. Now at that moment, you stay on that unicycle, you can now write a unicycle. You have now developed the skill. But what has been building up to that has been failure. Failure, failure, failure, mistakes, mistakes, mistakes, all the way up to success. And we hate those feelings. But if we love those feelings, man, we might be on board with greater levels of growth and skill development. Another challenge around having the value of growth roll out in your organization and in your world is feedback. Do you want to learn and grow? Absolutely. Do you want to get better at what you do? Absolutely. Do you want to progress? Yes. I've got some feedback to give you on what you're doing right now, could be improved. Can I share that with you? Oh gosh, that feels a bit uncomfortable. I'm not so such a big fan of that. Again, feedback is one of the pieces of data that we need in order to grow and learn. We spoke before about the some knowledge of a particular topic that is available to be learned being so extraordinarily vast, and the amount of information that we actually know is this tiny slither. What is feedback? Feedback is tapping into the vast knowledge. Reframing what feedback means to you, reframing as a team what feedback means to team members and the practice changes everything. When you start to see feedback as information that fast tracks your growth rather than a reflection of your worth as a human being, it becomes something you actively seek out rather than avoid. Usually within a 20-minute drive of wherever you are, there is a Toastmasters group that gathers every couple of weeks. And their whole purpose is to get comfortable with public speaking. And so when people join Toastmasters, they join up knowing that they're now going to start a learning journey. There's going to be a lot of practice and repetition, and there is going to be feedback to help us progress in the skill of and the comfort of public speaking. At the start, hearing the feedback after you've stood up and given a five to seven minute presentation is difficult. But then when you apply that feedback, and at the very next speaking event that you are up there in front of everyone and you feel that you've progressed already, just into your second speech and you've already progressed. Like for example, my feedback was don't say so many ums and ahs and slow down. My little my mentor that you get within Toastmasters said, if you slow down by itself, don't focus on the ums and ahs, just slow down. That takes care of the ums and ahs automatically because you're thinking about the words to say next. So I did that the very next speech. I stood up, showed the improvement, was acknowledged for the improvement, and then was given an additional, different thing to focus on for my next speech. That's swift progress. And that's highly motivating. And so extraordinarily swiftly, as a member of Toastmasters, you go from, oh, I'm really uncomfortable with the feedback side of this. Within a couple of meetings, you're like, I'm really on board with this feedback side of things because I'm loving the sense of progress. I love getting better so quickly. This is wonderful. And that kind of environment can be fostered in your dental practice organization. Enormously powerful. So resistance comes up to growth in all sorts of different ways. Here are all the reasons why that won't work, resistance. How about avoiding it altogether, just quietly and not getting around to doing the thing? Oh, I know it's important, but in the future, in the future, tomorrow, not today. Perfectionism, enormous challenge to growth. Oh, I can grow in that space, but I'm waiting for it to be perfect. I'm a perfectionist. What about waiting for the ideal conditions? I've got to get a better team, I've got to get a better practice, I've got to get a better patient base, I've got to be in a different location for all that to work. What about I don't have time for this right now? I'm too busy. That's just not me. That's just not the way we do things here. Does it all sound does some of that sound familiar? We all do it. The first step is just recognizing it for what it is. So, how do you actually make growth a lived value in your dental practice? Here's how I think about it. So, number one, start with yourself. You cannot build a culture of growth if you are not committed to it personally. Commit to your own can I journey? Listen to podcasts, read books, read articles. And when something really lands for you, share it with your whole team. It is all about bringing in the perspectives of the outside world in, filling that awareness gap between all the things that are to be known about something down to the slither that you know. And if you can imagine your monthly team meetings, maybe the first 20 minutes are getting all the housekeeping done, but maybe the next half hour could be sharing some insights and then discussing as a group of the latest book, article, or podcast you've become aware of. And so, with that process, you're starting with yourself. So you're doing the learning, you are embracing more information than you had before on how to do this thing, develop this skill more effectively, but then you're sharing it with your team. So everyone is contributing to it, encourage them to do the same thing, contribute to these team meetings, these sessions, this sharing of information. So all the things that each of you learn becomes part of the collective knowledge of your practice. Once you yourself have stepped into that realm of growth, of can I, of recognizing all the things that resist your journey of growth and addressing them, and you're making those shifts and changes for yourself, then invite your whole team on board. Talk to your team about what growth means, discuss it as a group. What does it look like in practice as individuals within this organization? What does it mean for their roles? Invite everyone, discuss it as a group. Do we make this as one of our core values? What are the benefits of that? What does that then mean for all of us? Certainly, absolutely make it part of your recruitment. Just as reliability is a very important characteristic that you want to make sure directs help will help direct your recruitment of new team members. We want someone professional, we want someone reliable, we want a team player, we want someone who cares about patience. But we also want someone who wants to grow. Look for evidence in their resumes that they enjoy growing. Maybe in it may not be in their resume, but certainly speak to them about it during the initial telephone conversation interview and in an in-person interview. What are your thoughts around self-awareness? What was the last thing you did to develop a new skill to gain greater levels of self-awareness? Show me that you like growing. Sport is a wonderful way of recognizing if someone knows what it takes to develop new skills. Because with sport, physical achievement, there's a lot of failure, failure, failure, failure, failure until you achieve success. So they'll naturally be open to it. You want to attract people who are curious about better ways of doing things, who love to embrace a challenge rather than say things like, I don't like change, who are genuinely excited about just the idea of improving. And to be able to improve in a supportive environment where mistakes are okay and embraced, where everyone's given the chance to practice and repeat in order to develop a skill that we're open to new ideas all the time, that that concept excites them, you've got a great candidate in front of you. When growth is embedded in your culture, it starts to repel people who aren't interested in it, and it attracts the ones who are. So if you can read a job advert and there's a section on it around growth, and we do things to continue developing our skills. We have people coming in, we contribute great ideas when something is identified. We raise it and see if we can improve. We're changing all the time from that perspective. Then people who are not interested in that will not apply for your ad, which is exactly what you want. You want the filter in place. You want to filter out the people that aren't appropriate for your workplace, aren't a good fit, and you want to make sure that the people come in are the ones that are excited by the things that you speak about in that ad. Imagine what your team would be capable of when you have got, as part of your team culture, that if someone makes a mistake, everyone goes, Beauty, how can we learn from this enthusiastically? That we are boosting each other's confidence up constantly because we all know that we're capable of more and we're excited by that concept, where there's not one team member that says, I know it all, and I don't need to learn anymore, that everyone's like, How can I be better? How can we be better? That they're actually seeking out feedback because it's such a progress-achieving task to be able to say, I just managed this patient. They had a complaint, this is how I managed it. Can I get some feedback from others? How I could have done it better. Because I love getting better in this environment, it's all great. Just imagine what your team would be capable of. Oh my gosh, it's crazy. You can always also keep growth as a live value in your organization by building it into some of your current structures. So every morning huddle, if you have morning huddles, just have what we can improve on today? What happened yesterday that wasn't totally helpful that we can improve on today? Dentist A was running late consistently through the day. What can we do to help have that not be an issue on coming days? Do we need to make the appointment times a little bit longer? Do we need the dentist to become more aware of that? Do we need the assistant to be able to keep an eye on the clock for the dentist because they lose track of time? What are all the things that we could do to just be better in that one little area? We had a patient complaint yesterday. What I learned from that in my management of it was this that patients don't mind if we're running late as long as we give them enough notice. Or when a patient does complain, I felt a little bit reactive to that, and I should have just been on the patient's side with that. So that's something I learned yesterday, just in case everyone else would like to know about that, because we have got this environment of growth and development, and we're all interested to know and applaud and celebrate when learnings and awareness is happening. When you are learning something new as a team, maybe you've developed a new service that you're implementing into the practice, when you're onboarding a new team member, give them that opportunity for practice and repetition, practice and repetition and actually doing the things themselves to learn. Remember, we're all on a unicycle. We can read to the cows come home how to do the thing, but it's only by doing the thing that we learn how to do the thing. So recognize that. Give people the space to make mistakes, give them the space to practice and repeat and evolve and get better and progress. Another very important part of this kind of growth environment is to hold people accountable. So identify the standards of your practice and make sure all your team members are trained up to those standards. And when anyone is falling behind on those standards, bring them in for a respectful, supportive conversation that holds people to account. How can we help you improve? How can we help you progress? Because as a team, we can't progress if we've got half our team members not willing to be on the journey. Have your team meetings be restructured so they are learning opportunities, not just housekeeping. Seek out feedback actively. Start a culture where you're asking each other, how can I do better? Can you imagine if a dental practitioner came to the receptionist or the dental assistant and said, You've observed the way I treatment plan patients and have that communication with them in the surgery? How can I be better? Powerful. A receptionist says, How can I be better when I am managing phone calls? Dental assistants, how can I be better in supporting the practitioner in moving through the appointment time more efficiently? The practice owner, the practice manager, asking the team members, how can I be better at providing the environment that is appropriate for you to grow and get better and thrive and deliver your best performance? See how things just shift when we open ourselves up to growth and live growth. Bring it back to your home situation. Can you imagine if your loving spouse came to you and said, How can I be a better spouse to you? Amazing. Opportunity for growth, opportunity to progress, opportunity for better, for happier outcomes. When you build a genuine culture of growth in your practice, everything gets better. Patient care improves, team relationships improve, your results business-wise improve, and the people in your team and you become more fulfilled because you are achieving one of the reasons we are here in the first place to grow and learn. Progress is what makes us happy as human beings. So give your team and yourself the gift of it. Make growth your value and then live it. If you are interested in doing more work in this area for your dental practice reach out anytime, this is such an exciting space to be in. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, then I encourage you to head over to Amina and my website, dentalbusinessmastery.com.au. You'll find all the information that you need. If you would like to gain our assistance in helping you and your team achieve great success. If you would like to find out more, you can also email us directly at info at dentalbusinessmastery.com.au. Thanks so much for listening.