Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery: Emphasizes the importance of effective team meetings for maintaining a growth mindset and provides strategies for conducting them.
Resources:
About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Hello friends, welcome to your weekly Motivational Moments with Eric Vickery, president of coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. This week, we’re talking about effective team meetings. Now, how is this motivational? Well, I actually think that your team meetings have to be something that inspires you, that keeps you going, that keeps you moving. We talk a lot about a growth mindset.
00:32
If you’re not growing, you’re declining. A team meeting, having effective team meetings, ought to be moving you along that growth mindset. So this week, I really want you thinking about how much time do you guys have reserved for your team trainings, your team meetings? What are you covering during those team meetings? So let’s talk about some parameters. Set aside effective huddles, we already talked about that. This is separate. This is time for the entire team, not just certain people, the entire team.
01:01
to block away from patient hours, not your lunch, to focus on how to grow yourself such that you grow the business. What does it take to do that? I learned a long time ago from one of my first mentors that in the NFL, the average player in the NFL practices an hour a week for every one minute of game time. That’s a lot of practice. That’s how they do it so well at such a high level.
01:27
Well in dentistry, it’s completely the opposite end of the spectrum. We’re always in the game and very rarely are we practicing. So what we realize is we need four to six hours a month of team meeting time. Again, not including huddle. Four to six hours a month of team meeting time. Smaller teams, four hours, larger teams, six hours. Teams that need a lot of growth, they’re truly trying to focus on growing, four hours might not be enough.
01:57
even if you’re small. So what does that look like? Every week an hour, every week an hour and a half. We’ve seen offices where they’ll do a half hour lunch and then an hour and a half meeting. Now, what we hear from offices is you want me to lose one hour of productive time a day in my schedule so that we can have a team meeting. Yes, I do. There’s a study that shows when you have effective team meetings, you are 33% more effective in your
02:26
daily activity, whatever it is you’re doing. So we know that effective team meetings work. It’s do you know how to have an effective team meeting? So you’ve now established that you need an hour a week, maybe an hour and a half every week, or maybe two hours every other week. Precious time that you do that, okay? You also will need four hours, a whole Friday morning, probably once a quarter, sometimes once every other month. Those are important for you to really go through all of your systems.
02:56
to focus on. So let’s talk about what we cover. What we cover in there, so you might have a clinical training for one of your hours that you just went to. You might have OSHA or HIPAA that you need to stay up with. And then two hours a month on patient interaction, customer service, case acceptance, verbal skill training, systems focus, writing your standard operating procedures, all of that plays a role in this.
03:25
If you feel you need to make up for that time, work an extra hour a day. Start a half hour earlier, finish a half hour later. Uh, add a Friday once a month for four hours for high productive time. There’s always a way to make up for quote lost time. We don’t believe that you’re losing. There’s a lot of sayings that come to my mind. You know, the number, the number one thing that we see is 97% of offices aren’t spending enough time training.
03:55
And we wonder why we’re struggling right now. We have offices coming to us saying, yeah, you know, we don’t have team meetings. You know, that’s set aside. We don’t do team training. We don’t work with a coach, but we can’t figure out why we’re not growing. Well, looking at your numbers and analyzing your numbers isn’t enough for growth. Whether you have a coach or not, team training becomes essential. We spend one hour of those four hours a month with you as a team training on something. Your secondary meeting after that,
04:24
Really we’ll be going back through what we talked about and covered throughout your coaching process. Now if you’re coaching yourself, do the same thing. Keep coaching through systems, verbal skills, all of the things, standard operating procedures, all of the things that make it possible for you to be successful. Now, one of those meetings could also be your state of the union meeting. This could be monthly, this could be quarterly. I think team members want and need to know what’s happening in the practice. This is where your tracker comes into play.
04:53
Sharing the information about your tracker, what you measure, you improve. Have your coach or yourself, your doctor, lead your State of the Union meeting to say, here’s how we’ve been performing last month and year to date in comparison to last year. All of the columns are there for you in your KPI tracker, your All-Star coaching tracker. Lastly, quarterly camping trips. Quarterly camping trips are essential to you building team rapport, to you growing together as a family.
05:21
to building your community and to establishing your culture. You already have your end of the year party set aside ready to go. That’s one of the four done. That’s a quote camping trip. So, you know, however you celebrate that. Some people do that in the new year. Some people do that over Christmas. It just depends. But you have something where team members and spouses are invited to a nice dinner, a celebration. And however you do that, we have lots of ideas. It can be powerful. But the other three could be,
05:49
you’ll get away for river rafting, it could be bowling, I don’t know, whatever it is, get away for something away from, numbers away from the practice, and focus on bonding together as a team. I don’t know, twice, three times a year, we have events for you to attend as well, where you can bring your team to a quarterly camping trip, where we’re teaching you how to grow verbal skills, systems, all of that, whether it’s our Practice Grow Summit, whether it’s our Mastery Series on Team Case Acceptance.
06:17
or whether it’s a leadership training event that we have, personal life mastery, there’s so many things that we can offer you that you could be a part of. So we look forward to seeing you out there. Have a great week, guys.
06:31
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
