13 Feb 2017  •  HR & Employment Law  •  3min read By  • Donna Hall

Five simple ways to bring out the best in your dental team

As an owner or practice manager, bringing out the best in your team may well be something you strive to do on a daily basis year on year, however this can prove a little easier said than done and when staff motivation takes a back seat, it can lead to frustrations with individual employee performance or a completely disengaged team. The good news is that the most effective management is often quite simple, cost effective and can be implemented straight away.

Here, Regional Support Manager, Donna Hall shares five ways to get you off to a great start.

1. Get to know who your team are

If you want to bring out the best in people you must first understand who they are. It’s all about gaining a simple understanding of what motivates them, what might bother them, and how best to communicate with them on a level that they can relate to. There are many free and simple surveys out there on the web which you can get your team to fill out. The result will be an insightful snapshot of that person’s personality. There is no right or wrong, everyone has different traits, and you may well discover that all the team are different, some similar or the same. Remember that the aim of the exercise is to better understand the dynamic of your team make-up and, on an individual level, be better placed when it comes to working together more effectively.

2. Let it flow from the top

Lead in a way that makes it easy for others to follow you. Set the right example with your own business behaviour and ethics because by doing so, you will make it easier for employees to respect you. It can be surprising how often management play to a different set of rules compared to those that they expect their team to follow. Setting a fine example costs nothing and overtime will breed productivity.

3. Communicate your expectations

This includes both formal job objectives as well as informal day-to-day managerial expectations within your practice. Regularly and clearly communicating what you expect, the standards your dental practice has and the rationale behind why those things are expected, will breed competence and confidence in your team.

4. Take a sincere interest in career ambitions

By regularly showing an interest in each of your employee’s ambitions and listening to their needs you will be better placed to support them towards gaining the skills they need to succeed. So make sure you have regular catch-ups as well as a longer yearly appraisal as this dedicated nurturing will support you to develop happy, motivated and loyal individuals.

5. Constructive feedback

Worthy feedback must be regular, insightful and honest, and when I say honest I mean candid, communication that neither avoids the difficult messages to convey nor ignores the positive. Try to remember these two points: if feedback isn’t regular then how can you expect your team to understand if they are on track or need a bit of direction of how to adjust themselves? If your feedback is not constructive and clear, how can they give their best when it wasn’t easy to understand what that looked like?

So there you have it, five simple techniques that you can implement straight away to support you to bring out the best in your dental team for the year ahead.

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