Reader Question: Marc,
I read your book, “Mastering the Business of Practice” — it’s the best dental practice-management book I have ever read. Seriously. It was like you were reading my mind. What it failed to describe, though, was how your consulting actually works, what your consulting does.
I’ve used other consultants before. What’s the basis of your consulting and how does it differ from other consultants?
“With no awareness of the power of context, we continue to beat our heads against the same wall.” — Tracy Goss, Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1993
My answer about what distinguishes my work in the world of dental practice-management consulting is simple. Although my work is based on numbers of time-tested disciplines and practices, contemporary as well as eternal, my consulting arises from one basic principle: context is decisive.
Given this principle, my main intention is to alter a dentist’s context. There are many tangible processes, concrete steps, and structural procedures I provide, such as strategic plans, authentic visions, a working budget, monthly targets, etc. But altering a client’s context is the most fundamental and critical aspect of the consulting engagement.
Most consultants treat symptoms, not the underlying cause of why a practice under-performs. In treating the symptoms, consultants implement incremental change, which is never enough or long-lasting.
In my work, dentists who want lasting success require a fundamental shift in their capabilities.
To achieve this shift, dentists don’t need to improve themselves; they need to reinvent themselves.
Reimagine Your Success
Reinvention is not changing what is. Reinvention is creating what isn’t. A butterfly is not an improved caterpillar — a butterfly is a totally different creature. That’s what I mean by reinvention.
In order to achieve reinvention, a dentist must first recognize, then be responsible for, and finally alter the underlying assumptions and premises on which he or she bases their practice decisions and actions. But how do you reveal your underlying assumptions and premises? It’s like seeing your own eyes.
I reveal a client’s assumptions and premises by facilitating their ability to recognize his or her current context. The context is the sum total of all the conclusions that a dentist has reached about running a dental practice. It is a product of their experience, their interpretations of the past and of their culture of private practice: unspoken and even unacknowledged conclusions about the past that dictate what is possible for the future.
Reveal Your Current Context
Once this is accomplished, once a dentist uncovers their current context, he or she must confront what’s next. That requires that the dentist have the chutzpah to break new ground, confront their past and to break away from their outmoded view of dental practice. Lots of risk. Lots of change. Lots of discomfort.
It is not uncommon for dentists to first hold tightly onto what they already know. But they realize if they continue to cling to what they have already done, they will continue to get what they already have. If they don’t change, they’ll keep themselves stuck in a poorly performing practice. What they need to do is risk operating consistent with a powerful new future. But this is terrifying, reaching beyond who they know themselves to be — beyond their past, outside their personality, clear of their psychology.
In order to make this break from their present way of thinking, a dentist needs to be willing to undergo a wrenching shift, which promotes internal conflicts and authentic soul-searching. But when a dentist authentically reinvents him or herself, if he or she truly alters the context, it not only creates the means to alter the entire culture of the practice and to achieve unprecedented results, it also allows them the ability to sustain these changes.
What happens when a dentist changes their context? Here’s my analogy. You inherit your grandmother’s house. Unknown to you is one peculiarity — all the light fixtures have bulbs that give off a blue rather than yellow light. You find that you don’t like the feel of the rooms and spend a lot of time and money repainting the walls, reupholstering the furniture and replacing the carpets. You never seem to get it quite right, but you rationalize that at least you are improving with each thing you do. Then one day, you suddenly notice the blue light bulbs and change them. Now everything you did looks poor.
Context is like the color of the light, not the objects in the room. Context colors everything in the practice. Actually, context shapes what we see without our being aware of it. My first job is to help the dentist see that the light bulbs are blue.
After you recognize and become responsible for your current context, then the next step is to create a “new” context.
That means you need to change your thinking and change your actions. I accomplish this through my exclusive transformational technologies, using language as the medium for this transformation. This technology is far too involved to talk about here. But in essence, my clients stop listening to themselves and start talking to themselves.
Rethink your Leadership Language
By thinking with and in a different language, a language of leadership, a language of ownership, and a language of manager and management, they change themselves, which becomes the new context of the practice.
There you have it. Let me give you an example. Try this: first, consider what you think leadership is. Write it down. Now evaluate yourself as a leader. Write this evaluation down.
Next, think a new thought about leadership. You’ll see you can’t do this by yourself. You’re stuck in concepts, which are all past-based. You are stuck in what others have told you about leadership. You are unable to see beyond what you already know. The thoughts you have are the ones you’ve had before; therefore the future will turn out like the past. You have hit the boundaries of your context of leadership.
Now try this. Try on a new thought. Try the thought that leadership is a verb rather than a noun — a totally different context for you to consider leadership. It changes everything about leadership. You no longer have to be charismatic, eloquent, brave or outgoing. All you need to do is act.
Operating from this new thought that leadership is a verb, you can now take different actions not based on your past, say different things, feel different feelings — all because you changed the context from “leadership is a noun” to “leadership is a verb.”
You see, I don’t just work on the practice, its systems, structures, protocols, and policies. That’s what other consultants do, and some do it quite well. I also work on who you are, because you are the context within which your practice occurs.
— Marc
