Importance of One on Ones

00:00
Hello everyone, welcome to your weekly motivational moments with Eric Vickery, president of coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. With me is my fellow coach Betsy, she’s out of Texas and we’re going to be talking about the importance of monthly and individual team member one-on-ones. So Betsy, why is this something that you’re passionate about? You know Eric, I really feel like one-on-ones with your team members as the doctor or it could be the office manager.

00:28
I really think the doctor should be doing it. And I would hope that the doctor would want to, but it sets a tone for your individual team members for how they feel like they can communicate with you. I think a lot of times teams don’t know that they can talk to the doctor. And I think it’s really important that they know it’s okay. So true. And then expectations, knowing…

00:53
for both sides, what the team member expects from their side and what the doctor’s expectations are for the team member and for the rest of the team. So I don’t know, you know, if you remember all my quotes or anything like that, I don’t know where I came up with this but it just popped in my head one day, but clarity of expectation creates excellent execution. And when we have doctors saying, you know, they’re just not doing that that way, they’re not doing that that way and they’re focused on the negative, I’m thinking, okay.

01:21
how clear have you been in your communication with them on what your expectations are or how you want that done? And I always tell the story about a doctor who, you know, not really complaining to me, but she was trying to, you know, do I have hope for my team? She says, you know, I was sweeping the halls and I’m sweeping the halls and my team sees me and I’m sweeping the hallway. And I go, okay, great. And did you explain to them, you want them to jump in when they see that the hall needs to be swept?

01:49
She goes, no, they see me sweeping the halls. I go, and they’re probably thinking, wow, a doctor must really love sweeping the halls, but you have to have communication with it, right? And one-on-ones are a great place to do that. Good, what else? Well, I have a doctor who always wants to know why his team members aren’t doing things. He says, I hand them something to do. For instance, he had this Instagram post that he wanted put up.

02:14
and he wanted them gone through and figured out. And then he gave them to her and said, I want you to do this. But he didn’t set a timeframe. And she thought it was kind of like downtime stuff. And so she did it when she had downtime and he had wanted it done that day. And so I asked him, I said, you know, did you tell her what your expectation was? And she said, well, no, she should know. And I said, well,

02:44
We’re not robots. We don’t read your mind. So you have to tell us what you want from us. So if you have an expectation, set it out, tell them what you want so that everybody knows what that looks like. Yeah. There’s something called an exit interview that Robin Reese, our director of hiring and recruiting division talks about a lot. Hey, you gotta have exit interviews. But she says, if you don’t want an exit interview, try having stay interviews. So she calls the one-on-one the stay interview

03:14
team members who just get frustrated over something and they just give notice, now I need to be closer to home. They just don’t wanna tell you what’s really going on in there. But if you have this clarity between the two of you, you’re gonna be better off. I think if I was a team member of dental office, I would love to have my 15 minutes a month, one-on-one meeting with my doctor to really understand where am I, where am I going, what are my growth opportunities here, what’s the expectation of me?

03:42
I want feedback because I don’t want to keep making the same mistake and have nobody tell me. Right. I have four questions that I tell my doctors to ask. My questions are this. The first one is, how are you doing? I think it’s important for the doctor to be genuine when they look at their team member, their employee who they signed their paycheck for, and ask them, how are you truly doing? The next question is, how am I doing?

04:07
You know, what do you see for me? How am I doing with you? And how do you feel like I’m doing for the office? The third one is, how do you think the office is doing? Do you see anything in the office that we could improve on? Is there anything that needs work? Anything with team members? Are you doing okay with all of that? And then the last thing, I think it’s super important to finish with this as far as the doctor being genuine as well. What do you need from me?

04:36
What can I do for you? Is there anything that I can do? Is there anything you need? And being genuine. So good. Yeah, that how word is so powerful because you’re creating dialogue and you might need to replay the question. No, really, how are you doing? And really, what do you need from me? And how can I support you as a leader? And I always say, start with that introduction in that conversation. So if we were having that, I’d say, Betsy, I wanna figure out how we can be the best duo of coaches.

05:04
moving forward and I want to sit down and have a conversation and have you be as honest as possible with me about how I’m doing as your leader. And then we go right into those questions. Love them. This has been great. Thank you so much, Betsy. I really appreciate you doing this with us. Thank you.