Focus on Your Strengths & Delegate Your Weaknesses!

The 5 D’s: Design your plan. Drop everything else. Delay everything you can’t drop. Delegate. Do.

Let’s focus on the 4^th D; Delegate. Let’s look at this issue together as if we were standing on the moon starring back at your dental office on earth. Can we at least agree on one thing, someday you will be passing on.

Ray Kroc started McDonald’s in 1954, died in 1984, yet today McDonald’s has over 33,000 restaurants in 118 countries. Sam Walton started Wal-Mart in 1962, the year I was born, died in 1992, yet today Wal-Mart has 8,500 stores in 15 countries. Today Ray Kroc and Sam Walton are gone but through their management teams and systems both men are still managing successful innovating profitable empires from their graves, yet you are alive, have only one dental office location, and still can’t delegate to anyone on your team to take over the responsibly and authority to run anything?

 

Why? Because you are a social animal. Like a dog, cat or an ape, you are hard wired at birth to organize your social group of monkeys without tails into strict hierarchies of organized control through fear, intimidation and violence.  Every organization evolves this way. The military has a 400 pound gorilla on top named The General, then delegates down the chain of command to the Captain, Officer, Private grunt. Religion does the same with Pope, Cardinal, Bishop, Priest, Altar Boy, Parishioner.
Much of our behavior is hard wired at birth and if we do not understand it we cannot be successful because a lot of success runs counter intuitive to how we were hard wired at birth from our 3.6 billion genes. Take “Lazy” for example. People are “lazy” at birth because the only reason we are here after billions of years of evolution is because we mastered how to burn less calories than we consume. When you see a lion eat an antelope in Africa what does he do next, jumping jacks and sit-ups, or does he roll over and sleep for 3 days? Your brain says sit on the couch and chill, while success says work harder and read more than anyone else for a decade and you will rise to the top of your game. Logic says avoid risk, success is counter intuitive because it demands risk for reward.

 

When I see a stressed out dentist, almost every time it is because they are not getting the support they could be getting if they delegated more to their team, and I mean, a lot more. So your staff runs out the door at 5:00pm while you stay behind in your office overwhelmed about your overhead, your cash flow, and trying to make payroll, let alone the bills. Should you focus on the bills or focus more on marketing? You know new patient flow equals cash flow. What about all of this new technology? Would CAD-CAM lower my lab bill even after I paid the monthly lease? Will insurance companies pay for the new 3-D CBCT or kick it down to a 2-D pano fee? What should I do? Should I just log onto www.dentaltown.com and surf 3 million posts all night, again?

 

How would Ray Kroc solve all of your problems, today? He’s dead! How would Sam Walton solve all of your problems, today? He’s dead too! They would delegate.  Most dentists have an amazing team and don’t even know it. You never have given your team a chance to rise and shine. The more purpose you give your team members, the more you delete to your team members, the more they all have a mission, and the more the more they will work every day with blood, sweat and tears.  You already have a happy to be a filling fixer, patient preparer, saliva sucking Dental Assistant, so why can’t you add Marketing Director to the title?

 

Every dentist is book smart or they never would have earned a Doctorate Degree in Dentistry. But the dentists who are also street smart usually make all of their dreams come true. Street smart farmers in Kansas where I grew up can fix any tractor with duct tape and WD-40. Street smart dentists can do everything faster, easier, higher in quality with lower cost. Why do so many dentists have to spend $5000 to fly to a course in an airplane, stay in a hotel, eat out at restaurants, miss their family for the weekend just to learn how to prep a veneer or occlusion?  Street smart dentists fly to the course via photons through the internet and do online continuing education on http://www.dentaltown.com/Dentaltown/onlinece.aspx. Our amazing, brilliant, genius Online Continuing Education Director Dr. Howard Goldstein DMD has put up a full curriculum of over 183 courses and they have been viewed over a half million times. The courses range from free, to $18 a credit hour, with a few a little more. The largest university on earth is the University of Phoenix Online www.Phoenix.edu because it provides the most value, education, for the lowest cost.

 

We have a full curriculum on everything you and your team need. Tell your new dental assistant marketing director to watch all 10 online CE marketing courses on dentaltown first so they can learn from the very best in dentistry. No need to reinvent the wheel. You can also see what the other 163,456 Townies think of them and their marketing ideas. You might want to have your whole team watch them together. Spring for a pizza and sub sandwiches and have a lunch in. I watch most of them on my iPad so I can lounge anywhere I want around the house.

Anesthesia (4)
CAD-CAM (7)
Cariology (3)
Cosmetic Dentistry (11)
Dental Ergonomics (1)
Dental Hygiene (1)
Digital Radiography (2)
Endodontics (10)
Ethics, Jurisprudence, and Malpractice (2)
Fixed Prosthodontics (4)
Health and Medical Topics (7)
Implant Dentistry (16)
Infection Control (3)
Laser Dentistry (2)
Marketing (10)
Minimally Invasive Dentistry (1)
Oral Medicine and Pathology (5)
Oral Surgery (4)
Orthodontics (9)
Pediatric Dentistry (1)
Periodontics (8)
Personal Finance (1)
Photography (2)
Practice Management (20)
Public Health (1)
Removable Prosthodontics (5)
Restorative Dentistry (33)
Sleep Medicine (3)
Substance Abuse (1)
TMD and Occlusion (7)

I always say you only mange 3 things: People, Time & Money. People are over 80% of the equation whether you are talking about your dental office or the Miami Heat who just won the big championship game in part because of the HR move to attract and retain LeBron James from Cleveland and other very important HR moves and decisions.
You may encounter the Peter Principle after you give a team member more responsibility and duties. The Peter Principle is the reality that team members will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence, meaning that they should never have been promoted in the first place. Now they have been promoted and are in over there head, so if their ego permits they need to be demoted back down to where they were before, but due to emotions and complex human feelings, when you do this they usually jump to another tree branch, scream, quit and then eat a banana.

 

But this is what you have to go through to realize that when you take endodontics and performing dentistry more serious than HR (Human Relations) then you will live in a constantly overwhelmed state of mind. Do you enjoy business stress? Why do YOU bear most of this stress. Why can’t you raise your hand and ask your team for help?

 

Everyone knows you never skimp on payroll when you own a NFL football franchise or a NBA team, yet so many dentists I know thinks they are over paying on payroll. You are only overpaying on payroll if you are not getting value for what you are paying for. The Miami Heat made money paying LeBron James $17.54 million, especially considering the Los Angeles Lakers pay Kobe Bryant $27.8 million.

 

Maybe delegating more to your staff will make you have an honest discussion about your team members.  Maybe you don’t have any LeBron James or Kobe Bryant’s on your team like I have HoGo’s, Jan’s and Lorie’s. Maybe you think and say you want to win the big game and be successful but your actions don’t match your words because you are not attracting and retaining star players. Is it because you skimp on payroll? Is it because you are a control freak and won’t trust them enough to turn them loose and set them free? Maybe you need more Dr Phil and less Dr Farran. Relationships are built on trust, respect and love. Are you treating your team members the same way in which you would want to be treated if the roles were reversed?

 

Hire people who are disciplined in their own right. The second you need to manage someone, you have made a hiring mistake.  Manage systems, not people. When you have disciplined people, you do not need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you do not need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you do not need excessive controls. Delegate. I know you can just do it.