5 Tips to Building a Strong Leadership Team for your Dental Practice

A strong leadership team that is composed of several (or many) key members of your team, is critical to growing your practice in a sustainable and productive way.

These strong teams are composed of serveral (or many ) key members of your practice team and include members who have identified their own potential to lead by how they have responded to the challenges / opportunities that you have intentionally provided them to test their response.

We see this leadership team first as a vehicle to share the burden of leadership and the workload of practice ownership.

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, is surrounding yourself with a group of people who will help you think through important decisions, ideas, and opportunities. When this group of people has the freedom and encouragement to challenge your thinking as needed, then you have a much greater chance to achieve peak performance.

The cover story of the March-April 2021 Harvard Business Review illustrates this idea perfectly.

“Persuading The Unpersuadable” by Adam Grant begins like this:

The legend of Steve Jobs is that he transformed our lives with the strength of his convictions. The key to his greatness, the story goes, was to bend the world to his vision. The reality is that much of Apple’s success came from his team’s pushing him to rethink his positions. If Jobs hadn’t surrounded himself with people who knew how to change his mind, he might not have changed the world.

Steve Jobs insisted for years, that Apple would never make a phone. Once they did, he insisted there would be no outside apps. Can you imagine a world with no I-phone and all of the functions that the various apps bring? Can you imagine how much the I-phone has brought to the growth and profitability of Apple?

I do not believe that anyone changes another persons mind. I believe that we can influence another person in such a way that they decide to change their own mind. Regardless of how talented, creative, and convicted Steve Jobs was, he still had holes in his game. And just like Steve, so do you and I. That’s why we need great people around us who are equipped and empowered to speak the truth, engage important issues, and then take the solutions and run with them.

According to best selling author, Daniel Pink, human beings have 3 primary motivations in their work:

1. Authority
2. Autonomy
3. Mastery

Becoming a key leader on your team will give that person the vehicle to experience those rewards that Daniel Pink is speaking to.

Some Ideas For Building A Leadership Team:

1. Identify the key people on your team.
2. Grow their skills through coaching conversations, feedback in real time, and training.
3. Challenge them with increasing responsibilities.
4. Intentionally seek their voice and listen deeply to what they have to say.
5. Become more trustworthy, learn how to build relationships of trust, and trust each person  to perform.

The benefits to you include:

• More energy / balance / enjoyment for your life.
• Increased capacity for your practice through shared workload.
• Attracting more people that seek that kind of opportunity.
• Increased performance for you and your team.
• More meaningful work for everyone on the team, especially you.

 

If you are interested in going deeper on this concept and others to help achieve Peak Performance in your practice, our next cohort that starts October 2021 of the Leader to Leader Group Coaching program is open for registration.

In the Leader to Leader group coaching program, we meet you where you are and help you get to where you are intended to be. This involves addressing any urgent issues (happening a lot these days!) and then helping you, your team, and your business become a more robust version of yourselves.

We focus on specific competencies found in highly effective leaders who serve the highest performing businesses. Click here for more details on this leadership program and mastermind created just for dentists, physicians and healthcare professionals.