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Irene Iancu: Team Mistake
101 Plays2 years ago
Today we are joined by the remarkable Irene Iancu RRDH to talk about overcoming team mistakes and the pivotal moments of her career.
About the Guest:
Irene Iancu is a passionate and skilled restorative dental hygienist based in Toronto, Canada. With 16 years of experience in the dental field, Irene has developed a diverse set of skills, working in various specialized practices including periodontics, pediatric dentistry, orthodontics, and cosmetic dentistry. As the owner of her own practice, she goes beyond typical dental hygiene duties by also performing restorative work such as direct and indirect restorations. In addition to her clinical work, Irene is active in the dental community as an educator, social media influencer with 30,000 followers, and host of a popular dental podcast. Her journey and expertise have not only shaped her career but have also provided her with a platform to share her knowledge and experiences with a wider audience.
Episode Summary:
In an insightful episode featuring dental professional Irene Iancu, listeners are granted a front-row seat to the trials and triumphs of building and managing a successful dental practice. Irene provides a candid look into the complexities of onboarding employees and fostering a cohesive team. The conversation, which is rich in experiences and expert knowledge, makes it a must-listen for dental practitioners and anyone interested in team management and business growth strategies.
Irene discusses the pitfalls and learning moments encountered while hiring staff for her dental practice, highlighting the crucial balance between individual skill sets and team chemistry. She reveals having to adjust her hiring approach and subsequently stepping away from the process entirely, allowing her office manager to bring in personnel who have since surpassed expectations. Such revelations provide invaluable insights for both existing and budding practice owners seeking to optimize their team dynamics. Through practical examples and heartfelt reflections, this episode examines the subtleties of team-building and leadership in a dental context.
Key Takeaways:
- Recognize the potential downside of hiring individuals who are too similar to yourself and the importance of a diverse team.
- Understand that relinquishing hiring control can lead to better outcomes as employees can flourish under the trust and responsibilities given to them.
- Acknowledge that even the best employees may aspire to further their education or change career paths, affecting practice stability.
- Embrace the concept of managing expectations rather than people, and cultivate a nurturing environment where employees can become empowered leaders.
- Reflect on the journey of continuous learning and growth, considering additional education such as business management courses if suitable.
Connect with Irene Iancu: @toothlife.irene
Check out Tooth or Dare Podcast: @toothoredare.podcast
Connect with Ignitedds: @ignitedds
Connect with Tanya Sue Maestas: @tsmaestas.dds
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Focus
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. Dental Fuel is brought to you by Ignite DDS Masterminds. Masterminds is a program that helps provide you the tools you need to take the next steps in
Building and Managing Dental Teams
00:00:22
Speaker
your career. Building a team is important in our practices. Irene shares how team mistakes may often start from within.
00:00:29
Speaker
An interesting and important perspective. Let's check it out. As you started to build your practice, and I'm still kind of hiding from saying employed. But as you were bringing on team members. Onboarding. Yeah, onboarding is a good word. Yes, thank you. As you were onboarding team members, building a team is tough. You know, managing. That's not a good word either. Staff. That's a good word. Team.
00:00:54
Speaker
It's difficult, yeah different personalities and finding that right core team for you and to build your vision and you know where you see the practice kind of going can be difficult. What are some team mistakes that you've encountered? The red flags. Yes. I can tell you a couple and I can tell you
00:01:16
Speaker
that I needed to remove myself from the hiring process because I was the problem. So it's onboarding all of the wrong people because I wanted to find people that were like me. And oftentimes you can't have too many people that are the same working in the same environment. They're just
00:01:35
Speaker
their brains don't work the same way they don't click the same way so i was very focused that i had this laundry list of characteristics traits skills whatever you want to call them of people and i wanted them all to check off all of these boxes and those were the parameters in which i would hire someone.
00:01:54
Speaker
And then I realized very quickly that you need a mix of people in a practice. So in the first three years, I think finally we're at a stable place right now where most of my employees have been with me for over a year, some two years.
Hiring Challenges and Lessons Learned
00:02:10
Speaker
But in that first 12 months, I was a hot mess. I think I was just over expecting and then hiring people that would fit those boxes.
00:02:26
Speaker
I think the lesson that I learned is that you need to be, I hired someone to help me with interviewing skills. So let's, what was the lesson and then we'll go backwards. So what was the lesson? The lesson was that I was interviewing incorrectly. I was looking for the wrong things and I was trying to hire the best person for the job. I was trying to hire the Irene of 10 years ago as an employee.
00:02:45
Speaker
you realize that that person isn't going to be around forever because their hopes and dreams are going to take away from them. I lost three of my employees in the first 12 months to going back to school for dental hygiene. All three of them were either admin or dental assistants. Two were assistants and one was admin. I hired the best person and they were in that role for the best five months that I had ever had them for. Then I got the message that I'm going back to school, I'd like to become a hygienist.
00:03:15
Speaker
A good impression on them. It was so inspiring. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I decided to leave. So then I hired another person who was another really great person who also ended up leaving as an assistant to go back and become a dental hygienist. And now I have two receptionists, not one, but two receptionists who are also planning on leaving me to go back to dental hygiene, one who was supposed to leave in September, but had to defer for financial purposes, and
Team Dynamics and Growth
00:03:40
Speaker
another one who basically is going to leave me in a year.
00:03:47
Speaker
That's tough. That's a good way to bring people on, though. You want to become a dental hygienist. Yeah, but then you're investing a lot of time in training people. And you can't lead with a conversation interview and be like, so how long are you going to stay here for? I don't even think you're allowed to do that. But I learned that
00:04:05
Speaker
Sometimes the best people that you're gonna find are the ones that are probably gonna leave you one day. And now in hindsight, I know how my previous bosses felt when I quit for whatever reason. I worked for a dentist who when I started teaching, she wouldn't give me days off in order for me to travel and lecture. So I left her.
00:04:28
Speaker
And she was very upset and rightfully so. You know, she put a lot of faith in me and I produced highly for her. So it was hard for her to hire someone else. Same thing with my last office when I threatened to leave because I wanted specific pieces of equipment in order for me to elevate my procedures. She said no and I gave her my resignation and then I opened
Empowerment and Operational Changes
00:04:52
Speaker
my own practice. She also didn't take it well. So it comes down to like,
00:04:57
Speaker
finding the perfect person that you can train into that role and not expecting them to come out of the gate being the quote unquote, like people call it rock star employee, which I hate that term, but everyone will resonate with what it means.
00:05:12
Speaker
I think what you said is very insightful about, you know, when we hire, oftentimes we're looking for similar qualities to ourselves, right? Because I would assume that maybe you're similar to me. We're very efficient. We like things done a certain way. And we know that if we bring somebody on who is similar,
00:05:31
Speaker
likely you would get things done. But I think that that takes also a leap of faith to kind of take a step away and allow somebody else to kind of take the charge of that as they're kind of looking at the big picture from a different lens. And they can bring different people who they could feel could balance out the entire team and add to the team. So I think that I think that that's, I think that's a huge pearl, personally.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah, and really getting to know the people. It's hard to be a manager, so you're not managing people, you're managing expectations. And at Voices of Dentistry, I don't know if you were there, but that was the lecture that I gave on the main stage. It's also linked in my YouTube.
00:06:13
Speaker
Thankfully, they were able to record it. And the title of it is, can not great employees, I use the S word, so I won't swear here, but can not great employees become good leaders? And the answer to that is yes. It just means that you need to lean in a little bit more with them. So I think the kind of lesson to learn is that you can find someone, that diamond in the rough, that ultimately is the one that takes your practice to next levels.
00:06:42
Speaker
And it may not be the person that you expected. Um, like right now I have a, an assistant, she is surpassed and exceeded the expectations that I had for her coming into the office. When she first came into the office, she's been with us a year. We're supposed to celebrate her one year anniversary this past Monday. Um, you know, she was reserved and quiet. And I realized after learning about her, that she worked in a practice where she did everything. She was the assistant. She was the receptionist. She worked for a single doctor.
00:07:12
Speaker
practice that also did his own hygiene. She ran starey. She did all of the ordering. She was overworked, undervalued, and at times demoralized. And she came into my practice expecting
00:07:27
Speaker
that that was just normal. Like that was just how it is. So she was very quiet and she said yes to everything because that was what she was doing before. So when I started to take tasks away from her in order for her to build efficiencies on the test that she was doing, she felt like I was punishing her.
00:07:46
Speaker
But I wasn't. It's just that that's not how we operate. We've got one full-time dentist, one full-time assistant chair side, two hygiene, one floating assistant, and then two receptionists. And to some people, that may sound like overstaffed. But overstaffed also means that people get to do their jobs better instead of half. And if one person calls in sick, you've got someone to help out. Right. You have the backup.
00:08:09
Speaker
So she's flourished now and she is coming up with ideas and she's solving she's providing solutions to problems that i didn't know that we even had because she had the luxury of space and time and the ability to be creative. And i didn't hire her.
00:08:27
Speaker
someone else hired her. My office manager hired her. I didn't meet her until her first day. And that's the case with a couple of the employees that I have now that I'm just like, wow, this is such a good, like a great find. And the best part is that I didn't have to find them myself. Did that make you nervous the first time you chose to, you know, step away and not start to hire an interview?
Reflections on Practice Management
00:08:51
Speaker
Yeah, yes and no. So I became a restorative hygienist one year into opening my practice. So I went back to school in this quote unquote quasi post COVID time. So two years ago yesterday was my very first day of clinic working on teeth. I think I did like nine amalgams and I failed my rubber dam assessment. And I had no choice. So I was in school three days a week, Monday Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
00:09:19
Speaker
And I had to relinquish all power for the practice to the office manager that I hired. And that was the expectation is that I can't do any operational stuff on these days because I'm stuck in school. And I don't want to take away from my school experience in order for me to be kind of one arm on one side and one arm on the other side. So I relinquished all of that power willingly. And I said, as of September 7, which was the first day of school,
00:09:47
Speaker
I won't be making any of these decisions unless you actually need me to. And it's interesting when you relinquish that power.
00:09:53
Speaker
how much more power people get within the practice to make those decisions on your behalf. And they do it in a way, they can do it in one to two ways. Either they'll do it to just get the job done, or they'll do it with this passion that they had the final say in a monumental decision that might change your business trajectory. And that is what I got. I ended up getting people that were just now an owner mindset and making decisions
00:10:21
Speaker
have grown our practice without me even having to be there. Interestingly enough, I still only work two days a week practicing clinically because the office runs so well without me there. I get to do other things. I'm not working today. I am. I have been all day. I've been doing other things, but clinically, I get to
00:10:46
Speaker
let them do what they do best. And then I get to go in there and do what I do best and everything just runs. It's a great balance. If you had to do everything again from day one, what would you do differently? I hate this question. Usually the question is, and I think this is just a mentality thing that
00:11:07
Speaker
people have this concept of hierarchy in our industry that the receptionist is the bottom of the barrel, or the assistant is, or the hygienist, and then there's the dentist, and then there's the specialist, and then there's the whatever. There's this perceived notion of this hierarchy, and the question I often get is, if you could do it all over again, would you go to dental school?
00:11:30
Speaker
And my answer is no, because I love what I do. And I think that it's pretty unique to be one of few that gets to do all of the things that I do and not be a dentist.
Career Highlights and Future Projects
00:11:43
Speaker
You get a little eye rolly at some point.
00:11:46
Speaker
If I could do everything over again, I'd probably wait to open the practice, but that's knowing that COVID was happening. There's some really interesting business management courses through Yale and through Harvard. I may have decided to do those first. There's like a 16-week mini MBA for women through Harvard that I encourage you to
00:12:11
Speaker
to check out if this is something that you want to do. For sure. Because I'd love to know more about business operations. And I don't know. I think that everything happens as it's meant to.
00:12:27
Speaker
That's very true. The simulation is, we are all in a simulation of some kind and I was put here for a reason, so I'll get ejected at some point. Yes. Well, they say hindsight's 20-20, so I was just curious if you would go back and change anything, but sometimes- More knowledge, I think more knowledge. Yeah, for sure. Coming into it with more knowledge would be great.
00:12:51
Speaker
Sometimes the ways things play out is the best way that things needed to have played out, right? Sometimes we grow and we gain knowledge in that way, as opposed to maybe everything going perfectly from the get-go. Does everything ever go positive? Yeah, I was going to say that. I don't think that ever happens.
00:13:09
Speaker
No. If you would have told me in 2007 that this would be my career now and my life, and if I were to look at a whiteboard of all of the things that I've done since graduation to today, I would have thought that you're crazy. There's absolutely no way. You mean someone's going to send me to Singapore to speak on Kerry's prevention and management?
00:13:32
Speaker
That's awesome. That's nuts. That's just not anything that you could ever even dream of. It wasn't part of my radar. Now I'm working on this crazy project with Spear Education where I get to redesign their entire hygiene curriculum. That's so cool. Congrats to you. Congrats to the entire platform.
Episode Conclusion
00:13:53
Speaker
You can't even dream those things. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Dental Fuel. Join us next week as we close out our conversation with Irene where she shares some excellent expert advice. You can follow her on Instagram at toothelife.irene. You can also follow us on Instagram at Dental Fuel and at IgniteDDS. You can learn more about Ignite Dental Masterminds at ignitedds.com slash masterminds.