Momentum Dental Business Consulting, LLC
"Pearl of the Month"
Pertinent comments on the practice of
fee-for-service dentistry.
by Michael Perry, D.D.S., President
Managing Dental Practice Employees
Much of this month’s pearl comes from management guru Peter Drucker. I refer you to the chapter entitled “Picking People — The Basic Rules” from the book “The Essential Drucker.”
The initial paragraph states: “Executives spend more time on managing people and making people decisions than on anything else, and they should. No other decisions are so long-lasting in their consequences or so difficult to unmake. And yet, by and large, executives make poor promotion and staffing decisions. By all accounts, their batting average is no better than .333: at most one-third of such decisions turn out right; one third are minimally effective; and one-third are outright failures.”
When Mr. Drucker used the word “executives”, he probably wasn’t thinking of dentists. He was probably thinking of managers who work in corporate America. Since most of us who own dental practices perceive we have no one else in our office to assign the title to, we are by default the resident office executives, assigned by default the jobs of hiring, firing, and managing employees. And whereas most executives in corporate America have formal training in these duties, most of us have not. Because of this, our batting averages are almost certainly less than what Mr. Drucker states.
During my 25 years of practice, I have been through a number of phases in my quest to work with the right employees. In the first few years, I was the same age or younger than most of my staff and assumed that if I acted like one of them, they would want to perform because I was a cool boss. During the long middle phase of my career, my strategy was to inspire my employees to work hard by showing them I could work even harder then they. After stress from this strategy took its toll, I then resorted to using increased compensation as the universal antidote for all staff problems. None of these strategies worked very well.
If only the powers-that-were in dental school could have taught me Peter Drucker’s basic principles for managing employees. To paraphrase:
1. Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.2. If I put a person into a job and he or she does not perform, I have made a mistake. I have no business blaming that person. It is the duty of the manager to make sure the organization’s people perform.
3. People do not readily accept as their boss someone they do not respect.
4. Think carefully through the job assignments and make sure the appointee understands.
5. The one “don’t”: Don’t give new people major assignments, for doing so only compounds the risks. At first read, these principles may seem overly simplistic. I too see them as simple, but in my experience, the underlying idea in these principles is often missed in dental practices. Note that all of these principles place the onus and responsibility for performance on the manager, not the employee. If the executive is doing everything correctly in managing the employee, and performance is still not occurring, there is only one conclusion: the manager has chosen the wrong person for the job. The chosen employee either lacks the mind set or skill set to perform.
Leading and managing an organization are two different jobs. When thinking about a private dental practice, the leader and manager are usually, but not always, the same person. The leadership role in a practice could be titled “President” and the manager role “Chief Operating Officer.” As I’ve stated in other articles, the dentist/owner in a solo practice must be the President. It is not true, however, that dentists who lack the desire or the skill set to be the COO in their practice need to be trapped in that role. I maintain that they simply need the motivation, leadership skills, and organizational help to assign that job to someone else.
Each dentist and practice are of course unique. If you have questions about executive positions in your practice, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
(For more information about Momentum or Dr. Perry, visit the Momentum web site at www.momentumdental.com or e-mail Dr. Perry at drperry@sonic.net)
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