Reader Question: I’ve seen a serious decline in my business. Revenues are spiraling and receivables are growing. There are a couple dentists in a neighboring town who seem to be doing pretty well. How are they doing it?
A: Although we observe many practices getting weaker, as evidenced by diminished results and decreasing revenues, there are still practices that are getting stronger in spite of the changes in the economy. What is it about these successful practices that differentiates them from the pack?
Successful practices are somehow able to attract and retain a great staff, while other practices still experience high turnover.
Successful practices have somehow become more efficient, generating strong team performance, while other practices have increasing fractious staff relationships and an increase in staff members who can’t, or won’t, get along with each other.
Successful practices are able to attract and retain new patients even though people are generally concerned about their time and finances, while others practices go begging.
Successful practices are making the necessary changes to prosper, i.e. increase access, more flexible financing, greater word of mouth marketing, and strict expense management while less successful practices are firmly stuck in the past.
What is it about these practices that allows them to sustain their success and make changes? What is at the heart of these practices that drives such outstanding performance?
If you’re thinking excellence of care is the answer, you’d be wrong. Or physical environment, wrong. Leading edge technology, customer service? Wrong, wrong. These elements are important, and if they aren’t attended to, it would certainly affect performance. But the successful practices as well as the unsuccessful practices have these elements well-established and managed.
So what else is it? What differentiates successful from unsuccessful practices especially in these unstable economic times?
Core Values are Key
In practices that are able to sustain success, we find that their “core values” are aligned – the core values of the doctor, the staff and the practice. When the core values are totally aligned, success is almost invariably the result.
In practices that are struggling now, we have discovered that the core values of the doctor, the staff and the practice, are all over the place. In less successful practices, the core values the dentist professes for the practice do not line up with his or her personal core values, revealing hypocrisy and a lack of integrity. A common example is the dentist declares a core value of “excellence” and then doesn’t return a crown to the lab when it doesn’t meet the highest standards. Or integrity, when the dentist doesn’t follow through with what he or she said they would do.
When it comes to the staff, the same phenomenon holds true. When dentist and practice core values are out of harmony with the staff’s core values, high performance, authentic commitment, and teamwork are rarely achieved.
My observation about “mutual” core values in successful practices matches the seminal work of Richard Barrett in his book Building a Values-Driven Organization. We completed a survey presenting a list of 25 core values for both staff and dentists with one question: “What are your top five core values?”
We discovered that the more closely aligned the core values of the dentist and the staff, the better the performance of the practice – in every category. Revenues, new patients, cancellations and no shows, staff and patient satisfaction, or the ability to make change happen; the more aligned their core values, the greater the practice performance.
Core values determine how you see the world, how you relate to others, how you decide. The more disparate the core values of the dentist, the practice and the staff, the less able is the practice to perform and interact successfully with patients and each other. And in times of uncertainty, high stress, and reduced revenues, the more out of alignment the values, the less able is the practice to handle it.
For us it’s clear: the more aligned the core values, the more successful the practice. And when core values are aligned there is greater potential for an increase in power, effectiveness, teamwork, integrity and results.
— Marc
