202 Outlining the Effective Team Meeting

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. So excited to be here with you today. Today, we're going to be talking about effective team meetings, why you should have them, how you should have them, and the components of an effective team meeting. Now, the first question that I want to ask you before we even get started is, are you having consistent team meetings? The majority of people that I talk to, they are actually not having team meetings. They are saying, "Well, we meet once a month, and at the end of the month, we'll review everything," or, "We meet quarterly," or even some practices say that they're meeting annually. And the reason why you definitely want to implement an effective weekly meeting for your team in addition to your team huddles is that now you can actually have a time for your team, if you're the doctor, to come and have your devoted attention, where they can ask you questions.

And that way, you're not getting bombarded with questions throughout the week, you're able to look at your metrics in the middle of the month as it's actually happening, and you can actually make changes based on what is happening, what's not happening. You can also look at actually having a new team initiatives that are getting started, whether it's a marketing campaign, maybe you decide that you want to implement a new service, and so now it's a time to come together collectively as a team to be able to decide what is it that you're going to be working on? Who's going to own the task by which date? And what's also really effective and powerful inside of a team meeting is that it does allow you and your team to be able to connect, not only professionally, but also personally. Inside of our Platinum Mastermind, one of our foundational tools that we look at when you're joining for the first four months is to help you to make sure that you are effectively having a team meeting.

And not just following an outline, but you're actually having accountability. It's actually a tool that will allow you and your team to be able to come together and change "I can't" statements. "I can't have multiple $10,000 days." "We can't have effective team meetings." Whatever the issues, it's a way for you to be able to come together, have that accountability, and again come together collectively so that you change those "I can't do it" statements to "how can I" and you are looking at, how can you do it together? So as you are looking at implementing a weekly meeting, the one thing that you want to look at before you even get started, if you've listened to my last episode on the podcast I talked about, before you start looking at putting in systems, before you start working on the business, you really do need to be able to connect with your team. You need to be able to have that way to be able to open up and be able to communicate, to understand outside of what's happening in the practice what's going on personally.

Because, ultimately, if you have a team member that may be having a family issue, maybe they have a parent who is aging and is not doing very well. Perhaps you're having stress at home with a child or within your marriage. These things actually do affect our practice. And even though we say, leave that stuff at home, it's really important to really understand that we are connecting with people in our practice and that life is actually happening. And so a lot of times when we actually know what's happening, we understand why our team may be showing up in a way that's not ideal, or why even the doctor as well? I mean, we're all people, and so when you're able to connect in your meeting, the very thing that you do at the very beginning is say, "What went well this week? What went well this week at home? What are you proud of?" And you may find somebody who says, "I'm really excited I got to spend time with my husband. We had a great weekend together. It was amazing."

Or they may say, "You know what? I had an opportunity this week to be able to help a patient. Who's been thinking about treatment for a few years and we had a conversation and they decided to move forward." Now what happens is that the doctor can celebrate and acknowledge the team. Lots of times our team members are doing great things, we don't even know it. And so it allows us to be able to really show that appreciation and to let them know that we really do

care about them, and we see and we notice and we recognize their efforts. From there, inside of our team meetings, what we want to look at is we want to be able to look at our numbers for the last week. So what is our doctor production per visit? Our hygiene production per visit? What is our case acceptance percentage? Are we hitting our goals or not? And, again, if we are, celebrating our team.

If we're not hitting our goals, we want to be able to, again, within that meeting, have a conversation about, how we can make sure that we're actually coming together collectively to be able to hit the goal. And there's typically about 10 different metrics that we recommend that you're looking at weekly. And once you do, you're going to start to see some pretty significant changes happen inside of your practice. The other thing that we want to look at within our meeting is we want to look at, what are the things that we're working on, not just this week or not just this month, but what are we doing quarterly? A lot of times you may hear people talk about creating a 90 day plan or creating a quarterly plan, and that's all really good and fine, but what accountability is there to make sure that you're actually hitting it? And so, as you're having your meetings every single week, it's a great opportunity to check in and say, "How are we progressing to actually hitting our quarterly goals?"

And if you are progressing, and it's not just the doctor goals, by the way, the doctor may have their personal goal, maybe they want to be able to increase their personal case acceptance, or maybe they want to be able to start doing more high level services, maybe they want to be able to grow and have a new associate, that's one thing that's really important to them by the end of the quarter, but the team members also, we want to make sure that they have their quarterly goals as well. So that could be, again, how many $10,000 cases are we going to close? And maybe the practice right now is not doing any, and so that allows you to understand where you need to focus, and that would be case acceptance training or focusing on making sure that you're actually doing procedures that will allow you to be able to generate those higher revenues, whether it's going to be sleep apnea, placing and restoring implants, et cetera.

As we start looking at what else we're doing inside of the meeting, we have an opportunity to actually go in and anything that we said that we were going to do in the last week, maybe you have decided that you want to have your team do KPI calendars, which is one of the things that we help practices implement, well, now you can say, "Who's going to own downloading the template? Who's going to go ahead and collect the daily, weekly tasks that everybody is writing down and place it in the template? And who's going to make sure that it's printed out so that now we see that in the break room and now the office manager and the doctor has a copy?" Well, what we want to make sure is that these tasks are not actually being done by the doctor. Again, as I spoke about in the last podcast, the best use of the doctor's time is actually doing the dentistry. And so we really want to make sure that pretty much every other tasks that can be delegated out to another team member is actually being done.

And so now that we are delegating it, we have this opportunity to be able to check in with our meetings that we're having every single week and say, "Did it actually get done?" If not, the team can say, "Well, it didn't get done and this was my challenge. I had a challenge with this." And so now you can discuss it as a team and you can get back on track and you can now actually get that task actually completed. Really, really powerful. As we start getting further down into the meeting, we also want to make sure that we have time to discuss any issues that we have that are happening in the practice. Maybe we have a new service that we're implementing, but patients are actually not scheduling. We need to discuss, what's the issue? Is it verbal skills? Is it mindset? How can we correct this? Maybe it's clinical competency of the team or the doctor.

Now we're able to look at, "Hey, guys, let's go ahead and plan a CE trip. Let's go ahead and talk about that trip. Where are we going to stay? How many days are we going to close the office? Who's going to go ahead and book the flights?" Right now, you have that opportunity to be able to discuss that within the actual meeting. At the end of the meeting, we also love to be able to

say, "How was the meeting?" And the team can actually check in and say, "We had a great meeting," or, "You know what, it was a good meeting, but we didn't start on time. And so if we had started on time, we would have rated it to be a 10 or 100. But because people showed up late, we're going to go ahead and give it an eight out of 10, or an 80%."

So as you start looking at building out your meetings and effective meetings, and these are some tips that you can use to be able to implement your weekly meeting. But I 100% recommend that you go ahead and put in a weekly meeting inside of your practice, and that way you can now have a way to be able to connect as a team, to be able to check in on your quarterly goals, to make sure that you are discussing any issues, and to really look at your practice week by week so that you can change the dynamic of the month. So hopefully that helps you. I absolutely love sharing these tips and tools with you inside of our podcasts. And if you know that you're looking to be able to get help with growing your practice, I invite you to reach out for a free practice strategy call by going to our websitedeliveringwow.com. All right, guys. That's it for today. Take care. We'll chat soon, and keep delivering WOW.

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