Develop a High-Performance Dental Practice Team

The first step in developing a successful, high-performing team is to develop trust among its members. The ability to trust one another is a crucial part of a team's foundation. It isn't necessary for all of your team members to love or even like each other, although that can help, but they must demonstrate a mutual respect for one another.

Train your team members to actively listen to each other and acknowledge each other's concerns. When they are able to better understand where other team members are coming from and know that they will have each other's backs and fulfill their agreements, it leads to a high level of trust. In order to win together, your team members need to know that they can count on one another.

It is common for people to attempt to avoid conflict, but this can be damaging to a team's dynamics. Although many people simply don't want to deal with conflict in the workplace, conflict is a completely normal and arguably unavoidable component of working together. The key is to train your team members to handle it in healthy ways. As the practice leader, you should take a proactive approach toward creating an environment in which your team members feel comfortable bringing up issues and differences of opinion during team meetings. This is vital to the cohesion, morale, and performance of your team.

To help accomplish this, establishing conflict norms can be invaluable. This involves having a team discussion to decide how conflict will be handled in the workplace, including what language is acceptable to use, when and where it will be handled, etc. With an agreed-upon process for handling conflict in place, addressing it becomes easier, and team members are able to move forward together without harboring resentment or engaging in ongoing drama. By shifting the focus to generating ideas and discussing how issues can be solved in a manner that achieves the goals of all team members, a huge weight is taken off of the shoulders of the owner or practice manager who previously had to serve as a referee or judge for every situation involving conflict.

For those extraordinary situations in which a mediator is still needed, seek out a coach who can help you learn how to properly facilitate conflict resolution so that your team members can address issues in healthy ways that allow them to move forward.

Ensuring individual accountability, which should be an integral part of any practice owner's business plan, is an essential element in helping team members achieve their individual goals and those of the practice. Everyone should understand what they are accountable for and how that accountability will be measured with respect to key performance indicators. The results of such evaluations should be shared so that each team member is aware of how well he or she is performing as well as how well the entire team is performing. To clarify, this should not be an exercise of blaming and shaming. The members of high-performing teams don't point fingers at each other or throw each other under the bus. Instead, they hold each other accountable in a supportive way.

During team meetings, your team members should report on how effectively they feel that they are doing their parts. If anyone on the team feels that a member is not doing his or her part, they should speak up and hold that team member accountable. This is actually a sign of respect. It shows the individual that he or she is respected too much for the team to let him or her slip and not offer help. One way to facilitate this is to remind team members about specific commitments that they have made and ask them if they were completed as instructed and in the requested time frame. If team members respond that they did not perform as expected, simply put, they didn't live up to their commitment to the team. Instead of sweeping these failures under the rug, ask these team members what further commitment they are willing to make regarding completing the task appropriately or timely and what help they need from you or the team to do so.

If we let our team members slip away from fulfilling their commitments without addressing these situations and offering support, we are telling them that this behavior is acceptable. That's dysfunctional. Billy Martin, a five-time manager of the New York Yankees, once said, "When you have a team that accepts losing, you have a losing team." This applies to all teams. When your team members are not held accountable and poor performance is tolerated, your best performing members will ultimately quit, and only your poorest performers will remain. Don't let that happen to your practice.

Developing a successful, high-performing team isn't an easy task, but it can be accomplished if you take the appropriate steps, including the following:

• Trust one another. Trust allows team members to be transparent and vulnerable. Without trust, people may hide their mistakes and are likely to fail to communicate effectively for fear of reprisal. Members of successful teams can handle the truth.

• Engage in healthy conflict around ideas. Constructive debate and discussion are vital to problem-solving in any practice. Without it, you might end up chasing your tail and revisiting the same annoying issues. That's not an effective way to run a practice, and it can lead to long-term problems.

• Commit to decisions. When team members opinions are heard and valued, their commitment to supporting decisions, even ones they might not have originally felt were the best, significantly increases. Getting their buy-in is vital to gaining their support, particularly when you aren't there to monitor them.

• Hold one another accountable. When the entire team has signed on to the decision or plan, it makes it easier for them to hold each other accountable. In an environment without blaming and shaming, teammates can hold each other accountable in a supportive way.

• Focus on achieving collective results. If team members can make their bonuses without helping or supporting each other, why wouldn't they be entirely self-focused? What gets rewarded gets done. If you want to foster teamwork, reward the behaviors that drive the results that the entire team is striving for. One metric to consider is patient experience scores. Everyone in a dental practice has an impact on the quality of the experience of its patients, and practices with high patient experience ratings see more referrals and enjoy greater treatment acceptance.

Whenever I lead Leadership and Team Problem-Solving Learn-Shops, at least one person will claim that he or she is so new or inexperienced that his or her role doesn't play much of a part in the team's success. My response is always that "a football team can't win a game, let alone a championship, if the quarterback has a lineman that continually misses his blocks." I once heard former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz tell a story about one of the team's full contact practice scrimmages. The quarterback and others were complaining that a lineman needed to be taken out of the game because he kept missing his blocks. Holtz took the player out and told the offense to run the play without putting another player in. Of course, even after several attempts, the quarterback couldn't hand the ball off let alone pass it because a defender was immediately all over him. At that point, Holtz told the whole team that when a teammate isn't performing well, instead of getting on his case, they should help him to perform better. His underlying message was that every role on the team was vital to its success. As they say in acting, "There are no small roles, only small actors."

Frank Manfre is the founder of Breakthrough Consulting Associates in Atlanta, Georgia. He has led Leadership and Team Problem-Solving LearnShops for the US Army, the Georgia University System, and other for-profit and non-profit organizations.