Lie #10: Good staff are hard to find

This is our tenth post in the Biggest Lies in Dentistry series. Things the dental industry repeats to itself until they sound true. See the full series here.

One of the biggest myths in dentistry is that good staff are hard to find. They aren’t. There are good people everywhere.

The problem is that most practices don’t have a system for finding them, developing them or keeping them. Instead, they wait until someone quits, panic, throw an ad online and hope the next person who walks through the door solves the problem.

That isn’t a hiring system. It’s damage control.

Hiring isn’t something you do when someone quits

It’s part of being an executive. You should always be looking for people.

Every day you meet people with great attitudes, strong communication skills and a willingness to learn. Those people may not be looking for a job today, but someday they will be. The practices that consistently build great teams are almost never hiring out of desperation, because they have already been building relationships before they needed someone.

What a good employee actually is

The next mistake is how we define one. Experience is nice, but it isn’t what makes someone successful. I would rather hire someone with the right attitude who wants to learn than someone with twenty years of experience who thinks they already know everything.

Good staff are trainable, have the right attitude and are aligned with the philosophy of your practice. Everything else can be taught.

That also means we need to stop confusing mistakes with bad employees. Someone who makes mistakes while they’re learning isn’t bad staff. They’re learning. Bad staff are people who refuse to learn, refuse to improve or simply aren’t aligned with the direction your practice is going.

Those are two completely different things, and too many practices treat them as though they’re the same.

Nobody learns a profession in two days

Hiring the right person is only the beginning.

Every dental practice has different systems, different expectations and different standards. Even someone with years of experience has to learn how your office operates. That doesn’t happen by handing them a manual, having them shadow another employee for two days and hoping everything works out.

Think about how you became a dentist. You learned one procedure at a time. Someone demonstrated it, supervised you, corrected you and gradually gave you more responsibility as your competence increased.

Staff learn exactly the same way. They need training that builds one skill at a time. They need someone available to answer questions, correct mistakes and make sure they actually understand what they’re doing before moving on to the next step.

If you’re correcting the same problems six months later, don’t blame the employee until you’ve looked honestly at the training.

Somebody has to own this

This is one of the reasons I put so much emphasis on having a trained office manager. Most dentists simply don’t have enough hours in the day to produce dentistry while continuously recruiting, interviewing, training, supervising and coaching people. Those responsibilities don’t disappear because you’re busy. They still have to be done, and if nobody owns them, they simply don’t happen.

That’s when practices end up in the same cycle over and over again. Someone quits. Everybody scrambles to fill the position. The first reasonably qualified applicant gets hired because the office can’t function without them. They receive very little training because nobody has time. They struggle, become frustrated and either leave or get fired. Then the practice starts the entire process over again.

After living through that enough times, it’s easy to convince yourself that good staff don’t exist.

They do. The system for finding and developing them doesn’t.

A job, or a future

Leadership doesn’t end once someone is trained. People need to see a future. If the best they can hope for after several years is another dollar an hour, you’ve given them a job.

Most people want more than that. They want to become better at what they do. They want more responsibility. They want opportunities to grow. They want to know that when the practice succeeds, they share in that success.

Bonus systems, additional training and increasing responsibility aren’t expenses. They’re investments in the people you’re asking to build your practice with you.

The decision nobody wants to make

Good leadership also means making difficult decisions. Every practice eventually hires someone who doesn’t belong on the team. Sometimes they have the wrong attitude. Sometimes they refuse to learn. Sometimes they simply aren’t aligned with the philosophy of the practice.

Keeping them because you’re afraid you won’t find someone else usually creates a much bigger problem. Your best employees notice everything. They notice who works hard, who doesn’t, who is held accountable and who isn’t.

If you tolerate poor performance long enough, resentment replaces teamwork, and eventually the people you most want to keep begin looking somewhere else.

One more thing

Before you decide you can’t find good people, take an honest look at the job you’re asking them to do.

In a lot of practices, the front desk position is three jobs stapled together. Greet patients, run the schedule, and spend a significant part of the week fighting with insurance companies. Then we wonder why the person burns out in fourteen months and why the next applicant doesn’t look impressive.

Some of what we call a hiring problem is really a job design problem. Not every task in your practice has to be done by someone sitting at your front desk.

There are good people everywhere

Being an executive is a job. It isn’t a title.

Building a great team requires continuous attention. It requires recruiting before you need people, training instead of hoping, coaching instead of criticizing and investing in people instead of simply paying them.

The question is whether you’ve built the kind of practice where good people can succeed. If you do that consistently, you’ll eventually stop saying you can’t find good staff.

You’ll realize that building them was your job all along.

Part of The Biggest Lies in Dentistry. Read the full series here.

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