How to Get Your Team to Buy into Your Practice Goals
You’re a dentist. You’re a visionary. You have goals you want for your practice and you have a vision for what you want your practice to look like. While you might have a million ideas running through your head, you can’t expect your team to read your mind. And you can’t expect your team to have the same goals as you have.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a team that passionately buys into your practice goals. Your team members can share your practice vision—and they can buy into helping you achieve them. To do so you will need to get them to buy into the possibility that your practice goals will help them achieve other goals that matter to them. By doing so, your practice goals will become personal to them and they will be motivated to help you achieve them.
Here are three things you need to do to get your team to buy in and help you to achieve your practice goals.
Share Your “Why” With Your Team Members
Instead of only talking about what you want to accomplish, talk about why practice goals are important. Even before introducing practice goals, talk with your team about your vision beyond achieving the goals.
Do you want to build a practice that gives back to the community? Do you want to build a practice where all team members can achieve personal goals and spend quality time with their family? Talk with them about why you want to achieve the goal. Only after they understand and agree that your goal is for noble reasons should you explain what your goal is and how you and your team will achieve it.
This is true for big and small goals. For big goals, you might say, “I have something exciting to share with you. It’s a vision for our practice, to make sure we all get home on time, get to take stress-free vacations, and give back to the community by supporting important causes and providing free dental care to people in need.” Your team will be much more interested in that than, “I have a plan to triple profits.”
For smaller goals, such as wanting to go paperless, you might introduce it by saying, “I have an idea to help make all our lives easier and eliminate a lot of busy work in the office so we can all focus on the parts of the practice we love most.”
Starting that way and elaborating with all the benefits to them will help you communicate to your team why going paperless will help everyone. They’ll be more motivated to learn the software they need to learn to make the change for your practice to become paperless. More likely than not, they’ll be excited to go paperless because it will make everything so much easier.
Make Sure Your Team Knows How to Achieve the Goal
Getting your team members to understand the “why” is important. But if you stop there, the excitement and motivation won’t last long. Make sure you also work with your team members to find the simplest, most efficient, and best way to achieve your goal.
Take time to map out a suggested plan so you come to the discussion with an idea. Then, ask for their input so they can feel like a part of the process. You don’t have to accept all of their suggestions but listen to them—especially about things they do more frequently than you.
If your goal requires you to get 100 new patients within the next month, the “why” might be because you need the practice to make more revenue to support labor and overhead costs. But how do you do that? You could do it any number of ways. Marketing is an obvious first choice, but just saying “marketing” doesn’t tell anyone how to get 100 new patients. You need to ask “how” again. How will you market? Facebook ads would be a great start. We regularly attract dozens of new patients on a very small budget using Facebook. Keep asking “how” until you know exactly what each team member needs to do to help you achieve your goal.
Let Your Team Know What Success Looks Like
How will your team members know when they have succeeded? For example, a goal of 100 new patients in a month might sound clear. But what if your Facebook campaign attracts 200 leads, 100 appointments, but only 50 patients who show up? That’s certainly progress but it did not help you achieve your goal. And it didn’t help you earn the revenue you needed.
Thus, once you get your team to understand why and how you will achieve your goal, reiterate what success looks like. In this case, success would look like having 100 patients show up for appointments. Being clear about that helps you and your team can know whether you are on track. If you’re two weeks in and you have 60 appointments but only 20 patients show up, you might be on track for 120 appointments but you’re only on track for 40 patients who show up. That gives you time to adjust your plan. Maybe you need to change your Facebook ad targeting. Maybe you need to add other marketing strategies. Or, maybe you need to adjust your ad copy or split test multiple ads to find better-performing ones.
You can’t get to where you want to go and know when you might need to adjust without knowing what success looks like.
Get Your Team on the Same Page!
Once your team understands these three things, they’ll be ready to get on board with your practice goals and work hard to help you achieve them.
If you want help setting practice goals and getting your team on board with helping you achieve them, join the Delivering WOW Platinum Coaching Program where the best experts in the industry will work with you and your team to help improve every aspect of your practice.
