Dr. John Meis
Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of The Double Your Production Podcast. I'm Dr. John Meis here with my partner, Wendy Briggs. Hey Wendy, how you doing?
Wendy Briggs
I'm great. How are you, John?
Dr. John Meis
Yeah, I'm doing good. This is really a great topic that we're to talk about today because it's such a common, common leadership problem. And what we're going to be talking about is the most common misconceptions about delegating to your team. And we're going to be talking more about projects than about clinical things. But some of the principles still apply to the clinical things. So what's one of the first misconceptions that we want to go through?
Wendy Briggs
Well, I think we often hear worries from people who should be delegating, right? The reasons why they don't is that they're worried about overloading their team or giving them too many things to do. They don't want the team to be stressed or overworked or overloaded. They're worried about the team complaining about the things that they're being asked to do. And I am guilty of this myself. Sometimes I have that feeling of, gosh, they're working a lot right now. I can just bust this out and not have to trouble them or interrupt them, And what we've learned is that people, the right people actually welcome new tasks or new projects.
Dr. John Meis
Yeah, for sure. You know, we often talk about Daniel Pink's book, Drive and the three things that motivate people. And one of those is autonomy. And when you give ownership and responsibility for a project to team members, it is fulfilling that need and that desire for autonomy. And, you know, one easy way to do that is, you know, you can always ask for volunteers and if someone volunteers, fantastic. But you don't have to. You can assign projects to people, And picking, you know, we always want to be finding things that people are good at and they enjoy because that makes work easy for everybody. And so there are times when teams are overwhelmed and there are times that I've that we've seen within our clients where the doctor is trying to get too much done in too short period of time and stresses everybody else, stresses everybody out and mostly themselves. So yeah.
Wendy Briggs
Reasonable expectations is important, right? Having reasonable expectations, I think, and clarity, right? So if the delegator has unreasonable expectations, the delegate is the one who should ask more questions and get more clarity on making things a little bit more reasonable or assigning different deadlines, right? So I think that just leads to a very high level conversation.
I think for most of us, human beings often resist confrontation or difficult conversations. So that might be why in the past we haven't been successful with delegating certain things is that we haven't had the confidence to have that conversation or ask those difficult questions and establish expectations that are maybe more reasonable for both sides.
Dr. John Meis
We have a tool called the effective delegator that we use with our clients that allows them to really make clear what the project looks like when it's done well and gives a timeline and resources that are available to do the project so that the person who takes on that project has everything that they need and everything that they need to get the project done and get the project done well.
Wendy Briggs
Yeah. Another common concern is that it takes too long to teach them to do it. They don't know how to do it right. They don't know how to do it fast enough. And so I'm just going to do it myself because it's easier for me rather than having to teach somebody else.
Dr. John Meis
Yep. And so yes, it's faster the first time, but then you whatever it is, you have to keep doing it over and over again. So we don't add up all of the time over time that we would say by delegating a responsibility or a project to somebody. So we I think every one of us has had that feeling like, just I don't have time to do the training and just going to do it myself. But then you have to do it forever. And so the truth is, taking the time to train is so critical. It's one of the reasons why we spend a lot of time with our clients on meeting cadence. And we've had podcasts about meeting cadences. And I think most practices that aren't as successful as they want to be, one of the reasons is they don't meet often enough. They don't plan well enough. They don't delegate well enough. And that's what meetings are for, is to be able to do that.
Wendy Briggs
Another common example, Dr. John, where this misconception is harmful or hurtful to practices is with hiring new people. We often hear the struggles, everybody rolls their eyes or gets frustrated when we have to hire somebody. It's because of the time intensive nature of onboarding someone new and teaching them all these things. We often hear that. It's easier if I just do it myself. I don't have time to sit and explain how to do it and walk them through everything. We've had some of our clients
hijack some of our systems to do this better. So we often talk about our 3-3-3 with onboarding. What does the new hire need to do after three days, three weeks, and three months? And then there's some of our clients have taken that structure and taken it deeper. How do we develop tiers for developing assistance, for example? We've had some of our clients kind of hijack, if you will, or I don't know the right word, hijack's probably not the right word, but they've been able to figure out how to facilitate that process with using QR codes with training. So instead of having one person teach the new hire repetitively how to sterilize or clean the autoclave, there's a QR code attached and they can watch the instructional video on how to do it. So that's another way that you can delegate one time, right? Creating a process that makes sense, that saves everybody time and energy over the long run is a form of delegation really.
Dr. John Meis
Absolutely. And the time invested today pays off over and over and over again. Another one that we hear sometimes is that it's not responsible for me to hand this off. You know, I have some special training or skill or knowledge or need for privacy or something. It would be irresponsible to delegate this. One of the most common ones that we have, and we work with this in our CEO group, is letting the team and the office manager be responsible for the profitability of the office. And to be able to do that, they have to know what the profitability of the office is. So they have to see financial statements. They have to see budgets. They have to have all that information so that they can manage the profitability. And many dentists are very uncomfortable with that idea.
They want to keep that. They think of that as being very private and they think, gosh, if my team knows how much the practice makes, they're going to want raises and blah, blah, blah, blah. I've heard a hundred of excuses for that. But the truth is the more you hand off, the more freedom that you have.
Wendy Briggs
Right. I think as well in our quarterly practice growth retreat in January, we had David Harris from Prosperident come and speak to our members about how to delegate financial processes or tasks safely. Right. I think that's also a fear. You know, having one person too deep into the business, maybe we have some embezzlement going on and we had some crazy statistics about how many practices actually have had money stolen.
Dr. John Meis
Yep, for sure.
Wendy Briggs
And it's more than probably most people care to admit out loud, but it's just about everybody.
Dr. John Meis
Yeah. It comes close. If you include time stolen, know, milking the clock and taking home personal supplies out of the office, I think it's probably pretty much everybody. And go ahead.
Wendy Briggs
Right. So I was just saying, so doing that the right way, he had a lot of really great suggestions for our members about how they could delegate some of the financial, but the systems of checks and balances to protect yourself. sometimes I think people get stuck on that too, right? I need to be the only one that manages ex doctors kind of feel the same way. I need to be the only one that writes out the checks or whatever that may be. And some of those things can be delegated with the right system of checks and balances, right?
Dr. John Meis
Yep, that's right. And one danger that we've seen when people start to delegate is they often delegate to just one person. And that can develop into what we call your best is your worst. That employee that's very willing to take on things, but then gets so full that they can't do them well or they can't do them timely, but they hold on to them.
And often dentists are this person. We call them task orders. And so when dentists are doing things that could be delegated, they're holding onto that task. And so we want to make sure that when we're delegating things, we're spreading it out among the team so everybody has the same opportunity to develop, the same opportunity to be motivated, and the same opportunity to contribute.
Wendy Briggs
Yeah. Another reason why that best employee becomes the worst is because then you're not tiger-proof in that position. We talk a lot about being tiger-proof, but I don't know that we've talked about it on the podcast for a minute. Being tiger-proof is something that we often work with the doctors to make themselves tiger-proof, but we have had certain circumstances through the years where there's another key position in the practice, the designated survivor, if you will, the key team leader that becomes you know, not tiger proof. And what that means is, they can't be easily replaced, right? So what happens is then we're in a position of vulnerability because that person could choose to hold the practice hostage for one reason or another. And we just don't ever want to create a situation where that's possible.
Dr. John Meis
Right. Yeah. Right. One of the things that I do when I'm talking to new people that are learning about TTI is I show them a pyramid and the pyramid shows that most practices that come to work with us are in some state of chaos when they come in. And so I'll say, how many of you are in some state of of chaos? And a lot of hands will go up. But a few won't, then I'll say, OK, if you lost, think of one person on your team. Is there one person on your team that if you lost that person, you'd be in chaos? And almost every hand goes up every time. It's so predictable. And so, you know, that's a great example of being hyper-dependent upon one person. And that is for sure a danger.
Wendy Briggs
Absolutely it is, And we've seen it many, many times and we never think we're gonna get to that place where our designated survivor, our key right-hand person becomes burned out or works against the practice in one way or another, but we've seen it more times than we can count. And so certainly it makes sense to protect yourself against that. And I wanna speak as well to the burnout issue because we all feel that, from time to time. And one of the ways that we can avoid that is by giving our teams opportunities to continue to improve. As you mentioned, drive is about autonomy, mastery and purpose. And I think the more we delegate, the more we allow people to grow and stretch their wings, the more we avoid burnout, but we also keep them growing and engaged. Our engagement level with our team is much higher because they feel like they're learning something new and they have a higher purpose in the practice.
Dr. John Meis
And I've observed people that are in that state of burnout or overwhelm are afraid to delegate things to other people because they're afraid of putting them in that same place. You know, person that you delegate, putting them into overwhelm. And so they do it out of a place of niceness, but at the same time, they're hoarding. And when they're hoarding, that means other people are going, going without the chance to develop. One principle that our coaches teach is the 80 % solution, And that is any time, I'll use myself as an example, any time I do a project, when I get the project done, I have done it as well as I can think to do it. But then after a little bit of time, I look back on it and I think of things that could have been better. So I always think that, you know, I get it about 80 % of the way there. There's always about 20 % that, I wish would have done this and this, or that we tweak. And so we make whatever project, and whatever decisions the current draft so that we can tweak them in the future. But if so, then I noticed that when I delegated things to other people, they would get it about 80 % of the way there. But the 20 % that they didn't get would have been different than the 20 % that I wouldn't have gotten. So I judged their 20%. And I'm very, very kind of myself on my 20%. But I judged their 20%.
That 80 % that something done 80 % to perfection that somebody else did is 100 % good for me. Right. So the 80 % solution is an important thing to remember that other people's mistakes or shortcomings will be different than yours. Not more than yours, not less than yours, just different.
Wendy Briggs
Yeah, but that's part of what makes having a team so amazing. You we talk about a lot about this when we talk about the doctor hygiene partnership on case acceptance. You know, people always are going to inherently see things differently. And that's why I, in my opinion, you know, having more than one person handling some of these tasks. think just because of that, just because of the diversity and the variety of perspectives and viewpoints, we're going to be more effective all the way across the board. because you've got.
Dr. John Meis
Absolutely. Yep.
Wendy Briggs
know, more opportunities to really continue to excel and do it better. You sometimes we find doctors say, hey, once I got out of the way, everything changed and it's better, you know? So I think sometimes we hold ourselves back to if we are that one person that's not delegating, we might be holding that back out of fear that somebody else could actually do it better than us. And, you know, that does happen occasionally, but often what we see on the other side is this relief that it's getting done, I'm not the one that has to do it. And you know what? I'm good with it. Like, I love it now, you know? I'm doing so many fewer things, but they're happening and it's actually great.
Dr. John Meis
Yep, it can be a little uncomfortable because you're used to being in the middle of everything. You're used to making all the decisions. It can be a little bit uncomfortable as you step back, but it is so worth it. So worth it for your team. So worth it for you. So worth it for your practice. So worth it for your patients when the entire team is working together at a higher level.
Wendy Briggs
Yeah, we've seen that many, times. And Dr. John, should take just a minute and let our listeners know we have a couple of really great events coming up where we're going to be talking about a variety of these things. We have a virtual retreat and then we actually have an in-person retreat in October. And the virtual retreat, we're to be talking about team harmony, team dynamics. We're going be talking about maximizing your own personal performance. There's a lot of really great themes there. And then coming up as well in October, we're talking about these systems, know, the systems that can help you support delegation at a higher level.
So why don't we throw in the show notes, the chat, a link to our event calendar. And for those that are listening to this podcast fairly soon after release, there's some really great information there for you about upcoming events. For those that are listening later, that event link will still show you our next upcoming events where we almost always talk about these topics, know, team delegation, engagement, systems that drive the practice forward. There's probably gonna be something amazing, that you can learn if you choose to join us at one of those events.
Dr. John Meis
Yep, absolutely. That's a great idea, Wendy. All right, that's it for this episode of the W Production Podcast. We'll see you next time.
Wendy Briggs
Thanks everybody.
