192 Training Dental Team Who are Not Good With Patients

Well, hello, everyone. And welcome to another episode of the Delivering Wow Dental Podcast. Today, we're talking all about training a dental team member who's not good with patients. So question for you. Have you ever had a team member that was afraid to talk to patients or was not outgoing or really building connections with your patients? I can tell you, I certainly have had that throughout the years. And so I wanted to share some insight and tips to be able to help you navigate this if you find that you have introverted team members or team members who are just not making that connection. So, in particular, what I'd love to discuss today is really looking at behavioral styles, and how can we assess all of our team members to be able to understand their behavioral styles? And what's really interesting is, as you start to get deeper into understanding and learning how this works, what you will discover is that the same things that apply with our team members in terms of behavioral styles also applies to our patients and why they make the decisions that they make.

It also applies to our family and our friends. And so, what we're talking about today is really looking at different behavioral styles. And what's really interesting is a lot of times we may look at a team member and saying, "Wow, they're not making the connection with our patients," and we start to really investigate why this is happening. And some of it is really just inherent. They may be an introvert, but digging deeper into behavioral styles, it's really interesting because we start to look that there are actually four main types. So you may have heard of DISC assessments. And with this, there are four main types. There is the D, which is the dominant personality style. They tend to be the leaders. They tend to be people who are okay with taking risks. There's also another behavioral style, which is the I. The I is going to be the person who's very outgoing. They are the life of the party.

Really interesting with the I, what we tend to see is sometimes they are not very good with follow through. Not always, but that's something that we typically see with the Is. And also going back to the D, they definitely are that dominant personality, and as a result of it, sometimes they can come off as being pushy. So as we start looking at the S style, the S style are people who are very, very connected to other people. They're very sensitive. They have a lot of strong feelings of connection with people. And the flip side of the Ss is sometimes they are taken advantage of, because they're so kind, they're so loving. And then you have the C, and the C behavioral style is someone who is very detail-oriented. These are people that typically are going to be accountants. They're the type of people that may be surgeons. And the flip side of the Cs is sometimes they are very, very serious, and sometimes they are really slow as well to make decisions.

And so, as we start looking at behavioral styles and the roles of our team members and the roles that they occupy in our practice, it's really important that we really understand where they are in terms of a natural behavioral style. And what's really interesting is sometimes when we get into a work environment, we have an adaptive style. But what I've discovered over the years is, I remember in the early days wanting to have, for example, social media done in my practice. And I gave that task to someone who had more of an S style, so there were very calm natured, definitely an introvert, and they really struggled to be able to ask people for video testimonials. And we switched it up and we gave it to a team member that had more of the I style, very outgoing and very excitable and loved talking to people. And all of a sudden, it was really, really easy for her to make that connection and to get those video testimonials.

And so as we again start looking at building out our team, one thing that I always coach on to my clients is to think about what you have a lot of, and also to look at gaps in terms of behavioral styles. And so if you have a team that is full of I, you're going to have a lot of fun in your practice. There's going to be a lot of extroverts. And something to think about and consider is, again, that flip side of it, where if you're having so much fun and it's the life at a party, we need somebody to be serious and get into the weeds and get things done and make sure that everyone is being held accountable. And so, if you have a team that has an imbalance, thinking about your next hire and which role or behavioral style you're going to put in. The same thing, if you have a team that everyone is very, very sweet, very, very emotionally connected to patients, and they're very, very soft-spoken, and you don't have Ds on your team, strong leaders, then you can have weaknesses there as well.

And so it's really, really interesting how this whole thing works. There are lots of different assessments. We have a particular one that we administer within our Accelerator Program, as well as for our coaching clients in our Mastermind, and it's been really, really insightful to get feedback from doctors saying, "Oh, now I understand why my hygienist, who's very outgoing, struggles with writing chart notes." And so, as team members start to understand their behavioral style and team members understand each other better, then now what will happen is that, as you are assigning tasks to be done, again, maybe it is building a new marketing campaign, maybe it's making a decision to start doing Loom videos to go ahead and document the processes that are happening in your practice, maybe you're making checklists of what you do daily, weekly, and monthly, that particular task would be really easy, creating a checklist, for someone who's a C. You give that to a different team member, they may struggle with it. And so, as we start looking at getting into peak performance and high performance and scalability of our practices, we want to know, what are the strengths?

What are our weaknesses? We want to understand who's good at what. And the other thing that we can start looking at when we really start diving into this and really looking at how can we improve the performance of our teams is also looking at, what is it that each individual team member loves to do and is good at? What is it that they like to do? And they're good at? And then below the line were the things that they don't like to do and they're not good at. And so, as we start looking at that, it's going to be very, very nice to see the results that starts to happen in your practice once you start to assign tasks and really put people in their area of strength and put people in the area of their natural high behavioral style. And once you start doing that, now you're going to have a team that's really working in synergy and working together, again, all for the same goal, to be able to grow the practice very quickly.

So hopefully this helps you and serves you. I absolutely love digging into the psychology of what happens to make practices grow, the psychology of what makes patients make a decision to come into our practices. It's pretty exciting. And so if you haven't yet done behavioral styles, I highly recommend that you do the assessment within your practice. If you're wanting help with it, of course, this is something that we help practices with all the time within our programs. And so if it's something that you're interested in, feel free to reach out to me on Facebook or to have a look at our web site at deliveringwow.com. All right, guys. So that's pretty much it for today. Hopefully, this serves you and we look forward to chatting with you again, really, really soon.

Thanks again for listening to today's episode. Now, the next step is to join our free Facebook group, which is the Delivering Wow Hangout. Inside of that group, you will be able to mastermind and share with dentists and team members. And to join us, go to dentalbossmovement.com.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering Wow Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.