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June 10, 2008

By Amy Morgan, CEO, Pride Institute

As a woman dentist and the leader of your practice, you have the power to create a culture of positive growth. How? By delivering feedback (formally and informally) that helps your team learn, continuously improve, and become more self-directed. Using effective, nurturing feedback skills makes a tremendous difference in your team's growth, and the good news is these skills can be learned.

The most important feedback opportunity is the meeting commonly known as the performance evaluation. How many of you would enthusiastically agree if I asked: "Don't you love delivering performance evaluations?" Do I hear dead silence? That's because performance evaluations are perceived at best as one-dimensional, boring, judgmental events that often create blame, defensiveness, and very little change. If we follow that up with a scary second meeting, the "salary review," you can add tears, quitting, and general dismay to the whole experience.

So let's start by lighting a match to the term "performance evaluation." The label implies a subjective judgment made by the boss of the individual's effectiveness with no input from the employee. The newer term, which is much more collaborative and supportive, is "growth conference." Growth conferences are formal coaching sessions in which both dentist and team member review how the individual's knowledge, skills, and abilities have contributed to the practice's prior year's success, and define new personal goals to focus on for the coming year. The dentist and team member share their thoughts on the individual's strengths and challenges and co-create an action plan for continuous improvement. Accomplishment of the action plan is recognized with acknowledgement and potentially rewarded with a merit increase during the next salary review.

If the term "performance evaluation" connotes a one-sided judgmental event, then "growth conference" sets the stage for a different experience. Growth refers to the natural process of development in all of us. All organisms in organizations change, grow, and mature. This means that if you want your practice to improve, the individuals in your practice must grow as well. Growth to an individual team member can mean an increased capacity to initiate and implement new tasks, abilities, and skills as well as an expansion of his or her role in the practice's strategy for future growth.

The word conference implies something very different than a dictatorial meeting where an employee sits in a chair and is "talked at" for several hours by the leader. A conference is a dialogue, not a monologue. It's a meeting where information is exchanged about best practices, diverse views, and innovative ideas on supporting goals, vision, and values.

If you can combine both "growth" and "conference" and utilize that to the maximum, then you will have a formal feedback experience that results in individuals who are truly empowered to focus on the future enhancement of themselves and the organization.

An ideal growth conference:

• Builds the bridge between team members' actions and the practice's vision and philosophy
• Sets clear standards and expectations for the future performance of job duties and responsibilities
• Provides the criteria and benchmarks to determine the individual's appropriate salary increase for the future as well as the potential for reward and recognition
• And most importantly, creates a platform for providing continuous feedback, coaching, and training

Now, if that is the ideal for formal feedback, then what gets in the way? I have seen some grave growth conference "no-no's" over the years and perhaps some of you have been guilty of perpetuating these on your poor team. Let's clearly define what not to do in your growth conferences so that you can avoid the frustration of conducting ineffective, unpopular meetings. Here come the no-no's.

No-no #1: Growth conferences cannot be based upon vague, subjective judgments and feelings. Do you pepper your growth conferences with comments such as "I just don't feel like you are happy here" or "Why can't you be as motivated as the other team members?" Well, congratulations! You are delivering a judgmental evaluation and that plus 25¢ will get you nowhere; it is really damaging.

No-no #2: Growth conferences are not sneaky opportunities to express pent-up disappointments or resolve conflicts with your team. If you are having a problem with a team member, you should not be conducting a growth conference with them; you should be having a counseling session to confront and address the issues. By keeping confrontations out of growth conferences, the more positive an opportunity you have to really focus on your team's potential vs. their challenges.

No-no #3: Many leaders conduct boring growth conferences. What do I mean by boring? If you have been regurgitating the same old goals, skills, and action plans for three years running with the same employee, with no perceived growth, enhancement, or change, your feedback is probably pretty boring by now. If you always talk to your financial coordinator about the collection percentage to the exclusion of other aspects of her job description as well as her role as a self-directed team member, she is not going to want to listen to you or improve herself. The same goes for your entire team. Team members cannot be focused only on the mechanics of their job descriptions, or just one or two skills. We all know that some of the softer skills: customer service, personifying the philosophy of the practice, new-patient management, and teamwork ability may not be specified within the employee's job description but they are the key skills required to take your practice to the next level. Your growth conferences need to be customized for every team member so you can help them acquire the specific skills, abilities, and attitudes they need to be successful in the future.

No-no #4: If you are doing all the talking, you are not having a growth conference. You are giving a Shakespearean soliloquy! Growth conferences must be a mutual conversation using negotiation to reach consensus as the primary outcome. In good coaching, the team member should always have the opportunity to talk first, talk longest, and be fully understood and listened to before the doctor hops in with her own perspective. That makes the conference about the team member, not the leader, and promotes accountability.

No-no #5: Team members cannot come into the conference without having goals for their own continuous improvement. Have you ever sat in a growth conference with team members who didn't have any ideas about what they wanted to accomplish and the conversation sounded something like: "Uh ... I don't know, Doctor, whatever you want me to improve on is fine with me ... zzzz ..." If team members have no motivation to improve, it makes it very difficult for you to coach them to new and higher levels of performance. If you have staff member who either doesn't feel safe enough to share with you what they would like to work on or they honestly feel that they have no place to go because they are at the top of their game, this can create a dangerous situation of inertia, where if things don't get better, they will only get worse.

No-no #6 and #7: The last two are variations on the same theme and I think they're the most dangerous no-no's of them all. The first is having a great and productive conversation during the growth conference, but not creating a personal improvement plan with clear benchmarks and timelines for success. The other is having a very doable action plan but not following through or having accountability for completion by the doctor or employee. Both no-no's undermine the credibility of the growth conference and performance improvement plan because there is no mandated change. Why would anyone want to keep doing the same thing, without any new results?

If any of these no-no's have been part of your formal feedback sessions in the past, it is time to change and let your staff know it is what has made your coaching less than successful up to now. There needs to be a commitment from both the leader and the team member that future growth conferences will address the positive and not have the same negative occurrences happening again. Just turn your no-no's into the positive potential of conferences that focuses on the "YES!"

Amy Morgan is CEO of Pride Institute, one of dentistry's leading practice-management firms helping dentists for more than 30 years achieve the practice of their dreams. Amy leads a team of dental, business, and financial experts who train dentists and their teams how to master the management side of their practices. Pride Institute offers several seminars to help avoid these growth conference "no-no's": The Dentist's Voice, Staff, Systems, and Numbers, or individual consulting services. To learn more about Pride's one-on-one consulting, continuing- education seminars, or other services and training products, please call (800) 925-2600 or visit www.prideinstitute.com.

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