Three Points of Clarity to Improve Dental Team Communication and the Tools to Get You There

What is one of the most challenging issues for a dental practice owner? What raises the most concerns and causes the most frustration in the day-to-day life of a dentist? Based on my experience working with hundreds of practices, the answer is usually dental team communication issues.

That’s not to say that most practitioners have bad teams. In fact, I would say that most of the clients I work with genuinely love their teams and think of them as family. But that’s the thing with families—the people you love the most can also be the source of the most anxiety in your life. As practice leaders, you depend on the people around you because you can’t really carry out your vision of providing great dentistry without the support of an aligned and committed team. To be truly successful as a practice, you need to have philosophical buy-in from everyone who represents the practice name.

How do you get everyone on the same page and supporting the same goals with the same sense of purpose? Is there some magic formula for achieving ideal dental team communication and alignment?

Dealing with team issues means dealing with individual people and all their idiosyncrasies, which means there will always be an element of unpredictability when it comes to addressing team issues. Nevertheless, there are specific tools you can use to help you systematize the process of team alignment.

Creating team alignment through clarity conversations

Let’s examine what we are trying to achieve, and that can be summarized in one word: clarity. Just about every issue that arises in team dynamics — or in just about any relationship, for that matter — can be traced back to a lack of clarity. Look into any relationship problem, and you will usually find that somewhere along the line, someone was not clear about something.

In improving dental team communication, we can focus on three specific tools and points of clarity:

1. Clarity For job expectations

Although it might seem obvious what a front desk person, for instance, needs to do in terms of daily duties, having well-defined and clearly documented expectations for the essential tasks of a role is a bedrock starting point for alignment.

To get clarity for job expectations, we have developed a Role Scorecard for each of the major roles in a practice. This a simple document that outlines the Core Competencies that are required for the role, as well as the Key Outcomes that are expected for anyone performing the role. It’s kind of like a next-level job description document, in that it is useful when you are hiring for a role and need to identify key attributes and expectations, and at the same time is a great tool to use with existing team members to document certain “non-negotiables” for what you expect and what the job entails.

2. Clarity for the big picture

For a team member to become truly aligned with the vision and priorities of the practice, they must see beyond their own task-based checklists and understand how their role contributes to the practice’s larger goals.

Getting clarity for the big picture, meanwhile, means taking these objectives that are defined in the scorecard and putting them into the context of how that job fits into the vision and goals of the practice — and for that, you need a Value Role description. This is all about getting a team member to see not just the “what” but also the “why” of their role. To use the front desk example again, a job description might list “get patients appointed” as a responsibility. The value role, on the other hand, focuses on how your performance in managing the schedule helps support success in patient acceptance and retention. It’s about taking a step back to see the big picture and understanding the implications and rewards of your actions on a larger scale.

3. Clarity for the future

An emphasis on growth — for both the practice and each individual on the team — is what drives great teams to produce exceptional results consistently. Everyone on the team, from the leader down, should regularly ask themselves the two words that propel a person through life with purpose: what’s next?

You must have a plan. It’s easy to fall into a “this is the way we do things” habit and to find comfort in our routines, but continued success means continual growth — for the practice as a whole and for each person on the team. That’s why we developed a Growth Conference resource to help guide the development process in a regular, one-on-one way.

What is the team member excelling at? Celebrate it! Where can they find growth opportunities? Identify it and provide specific guidance on what they can do next to continue growing within the practice. This is a tool to use every quarter to maintain momentum with each team member and keep them excited about their own possibilities, as well as the possibilities for the practice.

Implementing dental team communication tools

So, where do you go to find these tools and to get guidance on how to use them effectively? Spear has just released a video course titled Systematizing Team Management: 3 Tools for Creating Alignment. In that course, I walk through each of these tools, one by one, section by section, explaining the theory behind each one and how best to implement them with your team.

To preview this Spear Online course and the tools mentioned in this article, please click here.

Improving dental team communication and implementing these tools is one of the most essential things a practice leader can do. After all, due to the way a practice operates, you don’t have many opportunities, as a practitioner, to oversee and guide individual team performance daily. That’s why you need to systematize the process as much as possible, so that everyone has absolute clarity on what they need to do and their specific function. At the same time, you focus on providing excellent clinical care.