Change and the fat dentist
By Dr Marc Cooper
Most practice management programmes are ineffectual. That’s right; useless, a waste of time, not worth a plug nickel. Stop spending your money. Practice management programmes don’t work.
The best analogy is a quick weight loss programme. You take pills, reduce carbs, and exercise like crazy for a short period of time and drop a lot of weight. But in a very short period of time, two things return – old habits and the weight. You feel disillusioned, a failure. You become resigned. You give up. Nothing has changed. Nothing. In fact you’re still fat. It’s exactly the same with practice management programmes.
Five months ago you registered yourself and your staff for a supposedly incredible practice management programme. The programme was in a great location. It would be nice and warm there at that time of the year and this winter has been especially nasty. You’d be staying at a great four and half star hotel for less than a three star. You could bring your spouse and write it all off. Some of your dental school buddies were going. So what if the whole thing would cost you more than $10,000. So what if you lost two days of production. So what if you needed to pay the staff for their time besides their travel, food and hotel expenses. You needed to make real changes in the office and this programme would do it for you.
The programme was being led by a dynamic and well regarded practice management guru. She’s been in every dental magazine. She’s always on the circuit. She was great at the ADA meeting last year when you attended her two hour programme. She’s been on the cover of Dental Town, written for Dentistry Today, Dental Economics and Inside Dentistry. She’s got a great website. You know the staff is going to love her. You’re absolutely positive, this is going to work.
You and your staff attend the programme and now everyone is totally excited. After the first day, at dinner you and the staff talk about all the things you’ll do to change the practice and yourselves when you get back to the office. You’re ready to go. The staff is bubbling over with enthusiasm. But within just a few short weeks after your return, everything is the same as it always has been – nothing changed. Nothing.
Typically in dentistry, the programmes at meetings and conferences are organized as stand-alone events. They have a life of their own, disconnected from the practice’s day-to-day operations. The dentist or the dentist with the staff attend these trainings but then go back into the same environment, subject to the same leadership, the same measurements and the same management approaches as before. If new things are implemented from the training, they have a very short shelf-life.
Or, you hire a practice management consultant who comes to your office once a month and sits down with you and the staff. Every time he’s there, and for a few days after he leaves, things are better. But it never lasts. You try to implement the changes he recommends. You try to do the communication ‘thing’ he advised. You try to hold staff meetings that mimic his model. And still, two weeks after he’s gone, it feels like nothing has really changed. But hey, you’ve signed a contract, you’re paying big bucks, and maybe next time when he comes, it will finally take hold.
After each training programme or onsite consulting interaction, you and the staff can immediately detect a lack of alignment between what you and your staff have supposedly learned and how things really are in the practice. Even though the misalignment is clearly recognized, it never gets discussed. In a very short time, you’re back to where you started.
I get calls from organizations, study clubs and educational centres to conduct training programmes to help people become better leaders, managers and owners. It is great marketing and it’s good money. It gives me good visibility in the industry and I get to be seen as an experienced practice management consultant. But I am under no illusion. My presentation will have little, if any, lasting impact on the performance of the hundreds or practices represented in the audience.
Sure, my presentation will be entertaining. Certainly, people will have insights and learn new things. Yes, people will see what’s possible. But it will soon fade into the dusk of ‘another good conference’ and ‘I picked up a few pearls’. And after a few weeks, most, if not all, will be forgotten. Hermann Ebbinghaus determined that 90% of what you learn in a classroom setting is forgotten within 30 days. And a majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours after.
What you don’t understand is that training should be the last step, not the first. Training should be the final step in a committed programme for lasting change. Training is useless as the first step, especially when it’s used as a substitute for real change in your own thinking and your own behaviour. Change has to occur within you first, before it can occur in the staff and the practice.
So, if you want changes in your practice, you must establish credibility by proving you are prepared to change yourself. It takes discipline. It takes repetition. It takes confronting and breaking through the fear. It means taking risks. It requires commitment, failing and picking yourself up again and again. It takes a willingness to not look good once in a while. It takes strong, sometimes hard-nosed coaching. But you need to realize, until the changes are anchored in you, no training or development programme will work. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
How right he was.
Read the article as it appeared in Apex
Dr Marc Cooper is President and Chairman of The Mastery Company. He has been a consultant to the health care industry for over 25 years, at the practice management level as well as at the corporate and organizational levels. Dr Cooper has been an academician, basic science researcher and practicing periodontist. For the last seven years, The Mastery Company's work has focused primarily on dentists in private practice using its exclusive online technologies and transformational methodologies. He is co-inventor of Mastery online practice management surveys and assessments - proven tools for dentists to appraise the performance of the human assets of the practice - staff, patients and themselves. In addition, he is the author of three books, Source: The Genesis of Success in Business and Life, Mastering the Business of Practice and Partnerships in Dental Practice; Why Some Succeed and Why Some Fail.
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However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
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