Inspire your people: create an actionable leadership development plan for your dental practice
By Jamie MorleyMarch 14, 2024
Ever wondered how to go about developing the leadership of your dental practice but never quite sure how to start and what to do? Create an actionale leadership development plan. Read, listen or watch to find out!
Leadership is about motivating, influencing and inspiring the people around you to contribute to the success of your dental practice. Without leadership there will be a lack of direction, no clarity of direction, bickering, procrastination, people only doing what they are told to do amongst many other symptoms which lead to low levels of employee engagement, high staff turnover, high levels of sickness, low morale and poor results.
On the other hand with great leadership you have clarity of direction, collaboration, proactive action, constructive conflict and many great behaviours which ultimately leads to high levels of engagement, low staff turnover, low levels of sickness, high morale and great results.
With this in mind you first have to identify the leadership needs of your dental practice.
What are the needs of your dental practice?
It is firstly important to identify the needs of your dental practice. This will be different according to the size and structure of your practices, the current context and the individuals involved.
Observed behaviours
What are the behaviours that you currently notice within your dental practice?
Reflect over the last week how often you observed and noticed these behaviours. Are there any differences between teams within your practice or practices? This will obviously vary according to the size of your practice, but if you have a reception team versus a nursing team versus the associates what do you notice? What does this indicate in terms of the level of leadership going on in your practice?
Measures
If you look at the overall metrics, as I defined in this article, what does this tell you about the current levels of leadership within your practice and are these different within different teams?
Who can impact this?
You
Firstly it is important to look at yourself and your own leadership skills and capabilities. It is easy to look at your team members but you have to look at your own leadership skills first.
If you are a practice principal then you are the principal leader of the dental practice. People will look to you no matter what. Often I hear practice principals say that I have hired a practice manager to do this. Whoever you have hired to be a leader will play an important tole as a leader of the practice but it doesn’t take away from the fact that you are the main leader of the practice so you have to look at your own leadership skills.
If you are a Practice Manager then you will also need to look at your own leadership skills first, before looking at the leadership skills of senior nurses or reception leaders.
Key people around you
Who are the key leaders in your team? Who holds formal responsibility where they have people reporting into them. When you look at the different behaviours that you notice within the team and the key metrics are there specific areas that you need to target? Who is responsible for the leadership in those teams?
Identify specific areas of development for you and your key people
It can be useful to identify key areas of development for yourself and for the identified key people who can really influence and have an impact on the metrics and behaviours you have identified.
The Fitting Leadership Scorecard is a great way of identifying those specific areas for development.
There may be some specific behaviours that you have already identified. Either way you must be able to articulate the change in behaviour that you are looking for.
As an example the Scorecard could identify that this individual is constantly firefighting rather than being proactive and moving forward the key strategies for the business.
Set clear goals & objectives
Now that you have identified the specific areas for development it is really important to set clear goals and objectives.
Overall practice
When you look at the overall behaviours and measures for the leadership of your practice what do you want to get to and by when? It is important to make the goal time bound. It is easy to say I want to improve the overall levels of the whole practice, but by how much and by when? Be realistic. It might be that you want to increase the eNPS score by 10 marks in a years time. Reduce employee turnover by 20% in a years time, which means at this specific date a year from now.
Teams
What different behaviours are you wanting to see from any specific teams? What are your objectives for this specific team?
Individual
When looking at identifying specific areas of development it is really important to be able to articulate the specific behaviour. Take time to identify what doing that behaviour really looks like and to fully understand the impact of that behaviour. You must involve the individual in the conversation about what those specific behaviours might be. Have the other person complete the scorecard and engage in dialogue with the person so as to identify specific behaviours and what the new behaviours look like, along with any specific measures and outcomes that will be the result of those new behaviours.
Make a clear record of these objectives so that you have something to come back to and reflect upon.
What actions will move the needle?
Self-guided
There is an incredible amount of content out there on leadership which is either free or at a very low price point for people to consume in their own time.
Some of my favourite books which are also available in audio form are as follows:
My favourite blogs that I like to read are:
A couple of podcasts to listen to are:
Of course, not forgetting the Fitting Leadership Blog content which is available in video and audio, as well as my book Lead Your Dental Practice.
You can subscribe to the blog by clicking here.
It can also be incredibly helpful to do some writing on the topic. You can write your learnings and thoughts down from listening to the above material. What are your key takeaways? What specifically would you like to try out and action? You can also write from a purely reflective point of view to take time to write down your reflections on certain situations or about a certain topic. When you write you are forced to really consider your beliefs and perspectives on a topic.
Courses
Undertaking a course with other people in a cohort gives you the opportunity to learn from the group as well as from the course. It also keeps you more accountable for actually doing the work and exercises around the course. If the course is fully accredited by an educational body this further ensure that you have to do certain things in order to achieve the qualification. The things that you have to do are ultimately designed to help improve how much you learn and the impact of the course.
The Level 7 Certificate in Dental Practice Leadership that I provide does exactly that. The result is that the training has maximum impact and allows real change to occur.
Click here for more information.
Coaching
Individual coaching helps the person to take a step out from their role and explore the areas of development that they want to progress. This involves the coach asking questions to help uncover the areas for focus, along with different tools that may be used such as a personality profile and a 360. Having defined the area of focus it is then to explore how to overcome this and facilitate change. To hold the person accountable for any commitments they have made and support them in overcoming any barriers there may be to realising lasting change.
For more information on coaching please click here.
On the job development
Another way to develop leadership skills is to give individual on the job responsibility that can encourage the person to step into new leadership situations so they can develop those skills. This could range from giving somebody a small project to giving them an entirely new role. Specific projects can really give the individual a change to learn and develop those skills before moving into a role that has considerable additional leadership responsibilities.
Team Development
As well as focusing on the leader there is also considerable value on focusing on the team as a whole. You will have different teams within your dental practice as well as the overall team for your practice. Depending on the size of your team you may also have a leadership team. Spending time working on you as a leadership team is incredibly valuable. To consider what makes a high performing team and how you are performing as a team. To have open conversations and agree on what this looks like. To put a plan in place to develop those attributes as a team. To have a coach come in to facilitate these discussions and use such tools as the Five Behaviours.
Put in place time for reflection on progress
You have to schedule in repeat times for reflecting on the plan and reviewing progress. Of course this can only be done if you have a clear plan written down in the first place. Hence why it is so important to do this and to be clear on the objectives and agreed actions.
- How have you progressed against the agreed actions?
- How are you progressing towards the overall objectives?
- What has happened?
- What has been a success?
- What has not worked?
- How do you need to adapt the plan moving forward?
Again keep a record of any new actions or changes that are agreed.
Make sure the date for the next time to reflect on progress is in the diary.
In summary the steps you need to follow to develop a leadership development plan for your practice are:
- Understand the leadership needs of your dental practice
- Identify the individuals who can impact and meet those needs
- Outline the areas of development for you and your people
- Set clear goals and objectives
- Identify key actions that will move the needle
- Put in place time to reflect on progress
Need some help with creating a leadership development plan for your dental practice? Click below for a free 30 minute call.
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