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Dr. Hyman: Team Mistake
37 Plays2 months ago
In this latest episode of Dental Fuel, Dr. Mark Hyman shares an insightful take on team dynamics—did he spoil his team rotten? He reveals how his exceptional team has been his greatest investment, and their dedication to patient care made his practice thrive beyond his wildest dreams.
Dentists… Are you questioning if you’re paying your team too much? Dr. Hyman challenges this mindset by highlighting that a committed team is worth every penny. When your team excels in patient care, knows the systems, and follows protocols, it transforms the entire practice.
Dr. Hyman reflects on the immense joy this investment has brought him. But here’s the question for you: Is Dr. Mark Hyman a dying breed of dentist? or do other new comers in the field share his philosophy? How do you value your team’s contributions?
Key Takeaways:
- Trust and Empower Your Team: Dr. Hyman emphasizes that trusting your team and investing in their development is paramount. Failure to do so early in his career taught him valuable lessons on the importance of mutual respect and empowerment.
- Careful Hiring Practices: The importance of making informed hiring decisions cannot be overstated. Dr. Hyman's protocols for vetting potential hires, including working interviews and team input, highlight the need for thorough and thoughtful hiring processes.
- Invest in Team Well-being: Dr. Hyman's approach to team-building includes generous benefits and recognition of personal milestones. Regular incentives, including massages and birthdays celebrations, contribute significantly to team morale.
- Dealing with Bad Hires: Quick action on bad hires is crucial. Dr. Hyman shares the negative impact of prolonging the tenure of unfit team members and the positive outcomes of addressing these issues swiftly.
- Leadership and Loyalty: Long-term commitment from team members is a result of inclusive leadership and consistent appreciation. Dr. Hyman's team loyalty over decades stands as a testament to his effective leadership style.
About the Guest:
Dr. Mark Hyman is a distinguished dental professional with an illustrious career spanning over three decades. He is a quadruple Tar Heel with undergraduate, dental school, and residency credentials from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also teaches. With a career highlighted by his transformation of a bankrupt practice into a top 1% practice, Dr. Hyman is a recognized speaker and mentor in the dental industry. He has held 51 seminars last year alone and has presented at prestigious conferences like the CDA, Hinman, and ADA. Despite retiring from clinical practice due to back issues, Dr. Hyman continues to inspire and educate through his teaching and speaking engagements.
Connect with Mark Hyman: https://drmarkspeaks.com/
Connect with Ignitedds and Dr. David Rice: @ignitedds Free Intro Call
Connect with Tanya Sue Maestas: @tsmaestas.dds
Learn more about 90 Day JumpStart : https://ignitedds.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Dental Fuel Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Dental Fuel, the podcast that focuses on what no one else is talking about. Mistakes. The dental world is full of before and afters, and no one is talking about the middle. Dental Fuel brings you the unspoken in-between. Welcome back to another episode of Dental Fuel.
Sponsorship by 90 Day Jumpstart
00:00:17
Speaker
Dental Fuel is brought to you by 90 Day Jumpstart, a program to help you increase production and break free from financial stress.
00:00:25
Speaker
Getting a successful dental practice is challenging. Running a failing dental practice also comes with its
Transforming a Failing Practice
00:00:31
Speaker
challenges. Dr. Mark Hyman continues to reflect back on his dental journey and shares how he purchased a failing practice and transformed it into a flourishing enterprise. Dr. Hyman couldn't do it alone, and he shares the importance of team loyalty and retention. Let's listen in.
00:00:47
Speaker
Mark, I want to take you back to what you were sharing where you know you took a ah practice from bankruptcy to to worse than bankruptcy ah and rebuilding that. And I'm i'm assuming that you you brought a philosophy and a style of practice that was unique to your practice, but also building a team was probably very prevalent in that process. I would love to know if you made any mistakes in building that team during that time, or even after that time, any team mistakes that you've made.
00:01:17
Speaker
See, I'm one of the world's experts on team building because I failed so badly early on. So I bought the practice July 1st, 1986. the receptionist was a former doctor's wife's best friend. And she wrote me this beautiful note. I showed in the seminar, dear sir, I quit. It was dated July 10th. She changed it to August 8th. So she stayed about five weeks and she quit. The hygienist was the most oppositional, chain-smoking, rudest woman I ever met. And I fired her. So now I got one employee left. Don't you just love it when that happened?
Building the First Successful Team
00:01:52
Speaker
And that heard Linda Miles speak.
00:01:55
Speaker
And I went through the one teammate that stayed was my first dental assistant, Susan. She only stayed with me eight and a half years. The fill-in hygienist I hired said, I'll give you two weeks. She stayed 14 and a half years with me. And the first receptions I hired stayed with me five years before she had a baby and moved back to California. So that was my first dream team. We could have a team meeting in my car and I love that.
00:02:20
Speaker
Part of the biggest mistake I ever made was not trusting the team. So early on, I'm the doctor and I know better, right? i am a man Here's a shocker. I'm a massive UNC Tar Heel fan. Love my Carolina Tar Heels.
00:02:36
Speaker
Their legendary coach for 36 years was Dean Smith, who in his day was a winningest college basketball coach of all time. Okay. Coach Michael Jordan, blah, blah, blah. Won an Olympic gold medal, two national championships. Was a better person than he was a coach and he was a greatest college basketball coach. And I had a perspective receptionist come in, sat down. First thing she said is, I think Dean Smith is God.
00:03:03
Speaker
I said, well, I
Hiring Mistakes and Improvements
00:03:04
Speaker
do too. You're hired. She was the worst person I ever hired. It was absolutely horrible. So I instituted a policy after making some really bad hires that I would look over the, I would screen the resumes and we'd have somebody come in and do a working interview where they wouldn't work. They would just watch and listen and listen to how we talk to people. I had a temporary hygienist in once who said,
00:03:32
Speaker
came to get me for the hygiene check and said, well, I fussed at him really good. I said, you fussed at my patient. You're so fired. Get out of here. We don't yell at people here. right So now I would have prospective teammates come in, spend a day with us. We'd block two hours for lunch. And I'd give my teammates the charge card to take them out to lunch. And at the end of the day, I'd say, I'll get back to you. And I'll turn to the team and say, what do you think? And they'd give me thumbs up or down.
00:03:59
Speaker
Dr. Tonya Sudhi, times I got bit in the butt is when I just went, ah, you have a pulse, you're hired. Man, the schedule's busy and I need an assistant, so jump in and let's start dancing. Every time I did that, it was the wrong decision. So I ended up my receptionist. My Mary Catherine only stayed with me almost 25
Team Loyalty and Retention
00:04:20
Speaker
years. My lead dental assistant, Athena Escavetto Callaway stayed with me almost 20 years. Three of my hygienists, 15 years, another one, 14, 14 and a half. They gave me such love and loyalty. It was really unbelievable. But I think again, I had to fail first before I moved forward. I had to try it, screw it up and go clearly that ain't the road. So let me figure what I can do better. So that would be my message to the young doctors is invest heavily in training. Take the time to hire carefully. If you've hired a Turkey fire quickly,
00:04:57
Speaker
because the team is watching you, young doctors, you're always on the stage. The teammates are watching you watching you and I almost lost and briefly did lose my almost 20 year dental assistant because she was so incensed how I let a certain teammate treat me. This was a single mom. My mother was a single mom with three kids. I know what that game is like. And I let this woman walk all over me and take advantage of me to the point that my number one dental assistant said I quit um but I can't stand this. And she was gone about six weeks and came back. So I was very grateful for
Supporting Team with Culture and Benefits
00:05:33
Speaker
that. Wow. So you can always get another patient. You can't always get another teammate. When you get the team lovingly, my wife used to say, will you pay them too much? And my answer is compared to what they stay. They know the systems, they know the verbal skills, they know the patients, they know their history.
00:05:54
Speaker
What they like, what they don't like, what size isolate do they like? Do they want to see pictures or not? Are they hard or easy to numb? What's their story? So that was invaluable. So I had that season, Dr. Tanya Sue with the dream team, where we went almost 15 years with essentially no turnover. And we just crushed it. And I just felt like I went from room to room telling jokes and the teammates would go, boom, boom, boom.
00:06:21
Speaker
Let me ask you a question, Dr. TS. Please do. Yeah. How many sick days would you guess that those women called in just sick, didn't come in? How often do you think that happened? Probably only a handful. if Because you don't do that to your family. You do that when you have a job, maybe not when you have a family, a commitment, a passion. So I tried to spoil my team rotten.
00:06:49
Speaker
We had a masseuse that came in every Wednesday at lunchtime to do head and neck back massage. Whenever somebody had a birthday, I took the entire team out for their birthday lunch. I started to practice July 1st, so every July 1st, I bought a rose for each teammate for the number of years they'd been with me. Mary Catherine got expensive, like 25 roses.
00:07:10
Speaker
um We had a Hanukkah Christmas party every December to beat the band. I'd have the team over to my house. My wife would have a wine and cheese. cocktail party for them, then we'd pick them up in a limousine, drive to the local shopping center. I'd give out gift certificates. They had one hour to spend the money or I got the money back. In 32 years, you know how much money I got back? and None. Nothing. I couldn't figure out how they've spent so much so fast. Then they got outed. They do lay away. I got such a joy watch watching them run into from store to store grabbing stuff.
00:07:46
Speaker
and jumping into the limousine with a handful of packages and laughing and hugging each other and high-fiving, and then we'd go to a five-star dinner or Broadway show. And I'd say that in seminars, have people saying, tomorrow, how much does that cost you? And the answer is, it's priceless, man. What do you think they talk to the patients about the next three months? Three months before the Hanukkah Christmas party, we think they talked about, we had an office dream trip every year where we would work like two half days Everything we made those days went into the kitty. So I took the team to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Orlando, Florida, to Disney, to the Hinman in Atlanta, Georgia, took them to the ADA in Las Vegas and San Francisco. Every year we did a dream trip. I also fully funded their 401k, the retirement plan.
Ensuring Financial Security for Team
00:08:36
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I insisted Dr. Tanya Sue that they trust me. And I said, if you will trust me,
00:08:43
Speaker
I'm going to secure your future." And I had a handful of teammates say, all I know is what's in my bank account. All I know is what's in my checking account. I'm like, I get it, man. Except when I left private practice, I think I had seven or nine teammates that had six-figure retirement accounts. I was very proud of that. You could say, well, look at all that money you could have kept yourself versus Look at these women I took care of. Look at these relationships that I formed. Look at the love and loyalty I got. And that led us practice at a level that was so far beyond anything that I would have ever dreamed of. What a way to show value in your team and to build your team. I can only imagine that the morale of the team overall in their day-to-day efforts was probably very, very high because of how much value you instilled in them.
00:09:38
Speaker
It was unbelievable and it wasn't perfect. Let's get real here. Everybody has a bad day. The team would like to quote Dr. H when I would get my nose a little bent out of shape. I was in the middle of a really hard procedure and it wasn't going well. And my one of my receptions was kind of tapped me on the shoulder. What do you want for lunch? And I'm working and tap, tap, tap. What do you want for lunch?
00:10:04
Speaker
third time she tapped me, I just turned and said, solve the problem and turned back around and kept drilling. And so solve the problem became a joke for about the next five years. Whenever they wanted to tweak me, they'd go solve the problem. like
00:10:19
Speaker
That's great. It's always fun to have that family atmosphere with your team. that It just makes the day so much better. I tried, man. I didn't always get it right. it wasn't oh We all tried. Yeah.
00:10:32
Speaker
I have gained so many insights from Dr. Mark Hyman, and I hope you have too. Join us next week where Dr. Hyman shares some expert advice. If you're looking to grow your practice and need some help along the way, be sure to check out 90 Day Jumpstart. You can start for free by contacting Dr. David Rice. Check out the link to his Calendly in the show notes.