Is your dental practice running smoothly without your constant supervision? In this enlightening episode, we delve into the heart of effective leadership with Dr. Sarah Blair, a seasoned expert in guiding dental practice owners toward efficient and engaged management. Dr. Blair candidly discusses the pitfalls many leaders encounter when they aren't actively involved with their teams, especially when it comes to key responsibilities like patient interactions over the phone. Through her insights, you'll discover how attentive leadership can turn potential lost opportunities into lasting patient relationships.

Dr. Blair also shines a light on the often-overlooked back-office inefficiencies, using supply management as a prime example. Drawing from years of experience, she shares practical strategies to bolster team performance by focusing on comprehensive training, streamlined systems, and the critical importance of setting clear expectations. As the episode wraps up, Dr. Blair invites listeners to connect with her for more tailored advice, ensuring that leadership gains aren't just theoretical but actively applied to foster a thriving dental practice.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

• The impact of active leadership on team performance and patient engagement.
• Strategies to enhance patient communication over the phone.
• Common back-office inefficiencies and how to address them.
• Importance of clear expectations and consistent training for team effectiveness.
• How to transform practice management with effective systems and leadership.

Tune in now to unlock revelations that will transform your dental practice's leadership dynamics!

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Sponsors:‍

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Oryx: All-In-One Cloud-Based Dental Software Created by Dentists for Dentists. Patient engagement, clinical, and practice management software that helps your dental practice grow without compromise. Click or copy and paste the link here for a special offer! https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/oryx/

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You can reach out to Dr. Sarah Blair here:

Website: https://www.indiepractices.com/

Sarah's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarah.blair.961993

Indie Practices Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IndiePractices

Top 10 Team Management Solutions: https://www.indiepractices.com/digital-resources

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If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Episodes, ask me on these platforms:

My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/

The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

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Michael: Hey, Sarah, so talk to us. What's one piece of advice you can give us this Monday morning.

Sarah: All right. So my piece of advice is to be aware that the work that your team is doing when you're not around probably isn't as good as you think it is. That's a little controversial to hear. It's not what everyone wants to

Michael: So, well, First let me clarify a few things. first by not around. I don't mean you're on vacation. I mean that you're just not present. So it means you're busy, you're distracted, you're not paying attention. that's what I mean by when you're not around. And I also want to clarify that this is not anti team by any means.

Sarah: We are super pro team. We love teams. it's just that there, is a disconnect between what the leader should be doing and should be providing and what the team is actually receiving. So I've been a team member myself. I was a dental assistant. I worked at the front desk. So again, we're super pro team.

This is more of a leadership concept here.

Michael: Okay. Gotcha. So is it more in the sense of like, Hey, we're doing what we're supposed to be doing clinical work, right? Talking to the patients, being with patients, but then we don't know, really know what the front office is doing. They're doing busy work, but not productive work.

Sarah: That's a great way to put it. Yeah, the truth is that your team is almost certainly underperforming some areas if you're not engaged managing. So as coaches, we get to see and hear this a lot. owners don't always want to hear this news, but we get to look at the metrics and we get to listen to the phone calls and when we look at these data points, we can see that the team is not performing as well as The way that the practice owner has been hoping or the way that they have always believed that their team is performing.

Michael: So why does this happen? Is it from the beginning, from the get go, is it happening like that? Or is it more like they fall into a lull and now they're not performing as good, but they figured a way to, make it look like you are.

Sarah: We actually have the top 10 list of all of these key areas.

The ways that teams typically underperform, and the ways to address it. And we're going to have that on our Facebook page. It'll also be on our website and under the resource library. So we probably wouldn't get through all 10 of those today. And like you said, some of them do apply early on. Some of them can apply to long term team members that have maybe started out super energetic and fired up and things have drifted off into a different place at this point.

So basically as leaders. We're failing our teams if we don't provide guidance, AKA training and systems, clarify expectations, monitor the results and hold the team accountable. So as we like to say inspect what you expect.

Michael: Okay. So then What would you say are the most common that you've seen time and time again?

Sarah: primary one that I would say is on the phones. So we're seeing, really common things happening on the phones that owners are totally unaware of. They're trusting and hoping that their teams are doing a great job. In fact, sometimes they genuinely. Believe that their team is doing a great job and it can be really frustrating and disappointing for them when they find out that's not the case.

So I would say phones and what's happening on the telephones is One of the biggest areas, and luckily for us as coaches, one of the areas that we're able to document and observe the most closely is the way, especially incoming new patient phone calls are handled

Michael: So then when you're listening into these phone calls, where do you see them drop the ball the most?

yeah, so the most common theme is just Reactively answering the first question of course is usually do you take my insurance or how much does this cost? And so they just go directly into the nuts and bolts of answering that question without building any connection building trust without building value for the practice and talking up the doctor in the practice and why you're going to love it here.

Sarah: They go right into the nuts and bolts of complicated insurance plan, something like that. So not taking control of that phone call right from the beginning is where we see team members fall off the tracks most often for this. And again, this is a, leadership issue because the team members don't have the training, the systems in place.

to have those successful conversations with new patient callers to get them into the schedule. So it's not a team problem. It's a doctor problem.

Michael: Providing the guidance. Could you Sarah give us like a script to that reaction? So like let's just say it's super common, right? Or it's hey, you take my insurance

Sarah: usually people it's a lot of nose. It's a lot of going down rabbit holes and oh we don't play some plants here. You'd have to go see a Surgeon, it's a lot of roadblocks You And a lot of denial. So I think a lot of team members are afraid. To give unrealistic expectations so they shut things down right away and consequently the patients are like, okay, I guess not coming in.

it's so sad and I hear, we just hear hundreds and hundreds of these calls all the time where it's like a dead end. It's a roadblock. It's a bottleneck in the conversation. So instead, so we have to take that tough question. Sometimes I like to envision it as a brick or something that if somebody's handing you this object, you have to take it.

It's not what we'