I had the great honor to interview the leading dental expert on Hiring and Human Resources, Tim Twigg, President of Bent Ericksen & Associates. During our discussion together, I asked Tim the top excuses to training and why dental offices fail to invest in training.
Take a listen to the excerpt of this webinar interview question:
Here is a transcript of our discussion:
Alex:
First excuse here is “We are too busy to train.”
Tim:
I’d say allocate a Saturday. Allocate a Friday. Focus on training. Take an afternoon. I appreciate you are busy, but there is a financial impact – a negative impact to not doing the training. Dentistry is so focused on efficiency – everything is about how fast you can get something done, and there are times when you need to pause and take a step back and look at what we need to do to be more effective. And that may mean that we need to pause, or to take two hours out of the day because that investment of that two hours will bring huge rewards down the road on a long-term consistent basis.
Alex:
Well said. And there’s another one – the team members are not interested or resistant to training, or they say they know it all – something to that effect.
Tim:
Well the resistant to training and the know it all are completely different things. I mean resistant to training is like ‘what is it’, and is it family? Is it the hours? Is it the expectations? And we can certainly look at how to support people’s ability to do training and merge that with the rest of their lives and hours and times and things like that. Now the know it all part, I would spin back and test that, and say (not using these exact words) but “If you think you know it all, then do this for me or show me that.”
Alex:
Here’s another one: “It’s too expensive to train.”
Tim:
Well that goes back to the piece about efficiency vs effectiveness. You know, again, dentistry – what’s that saying “We’re going to step over dollars to save a penny.” Holy cow!
Alex:
I remember what you said – and I quote you often – conservatively speaking, it is going to cost you 100% of the salary of the employee that turns over – that leaves – and that onboarding and training and effective HR policies will keep team members there much much longer and happier. So that goes to the expense – you’re talking 30 to 50 thousand dollars a year with just one turnover.
Tim:
Exactly. Yes.
Alex:
Last one here “I’m not going to train because I don’t have the right people yet, and I’ll just wait until that happens, and then I will train.
Tim:
Well, part of the issue there is that if I don’t have the right people because of fit and attitude, well, then a person needs to step up to the plate and get a backbone and get rid of those people and get the right people in. Now the other is, sometimes there are assumptions being made about people’s inabilities, and yet, when given the benefit of the doubt or the opportunity to train and really understand, there are lots of times that we discover this person was a diamond in the rough, and we were making assumptions. When given the opportunity to spread their wings, they turn out to be phenomenal. So, all the person does by having that excuse, it paints them into a corner of continued mediocrity. And I would say, OK do one or the other – you either make the change and get serious about that or give training a try – and lo an behold, it may turn out to be phenomenal for some number of the people. And even if it’s only a certain number of people, we made progress – we increased our success and then we know exactly where to make change instead of assuming that we need wholesale housecleaning. There are tools and resources out there for training people, and you guys have them!
To listen to the entire interview, contact us about joining All-Star Dental Academy.
