HOW TO NURTURE A GROWTH CULTURE

Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” He understood that even with the best laid growth plans, a weak culture will undermine those efforts and limit what the business can achieve.

So much of building the right culture is hiring the right people. It’s important to have a team that shares your appetite for growth and can collaborate effectively to realize your practice goals. Every new hire has tremendous power, including the potential to strengthen or weaken your culture.

But once you have your team in place, it’s up to you to determine how professionally prepared they are to support your growth plans. Whether you want to add a new location or expand into specialty areas of dentistry, each member of the team will have to row in the same direction to make the effort a success.

Perhaps you’re one of the lucky ones: You have a team of high-performers who understand your business strategy and support you and the business fully. But chances are that your culture has at least some gaps, and if it doesn’t now, it may develop them as you start to put your growth plans into motion.

How can you strengthen your team to help them feel confident in partnering with you to build your practice now and in the future?

BUILD PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

The term “psychological safety” has been around since the mid-1960s, but it’s seen a resurgence in recent years since it was applied to the business world at the turn of the millennium by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson. The term refers to the nonphysical security needs people within a group or organization require to thrive.

To achieve psychological safety, employees need to feel that they can express themselves authentically, without fear of guilt, shame or punishment – or ultimately being fired. That’s not to say that psychologically safe employees can’t be let go, just that they feel confident that any decision to terminate their employment will be a decision not made based solely on having shared some constructive criticism or a new idea.

An absence of psychological safety can limit how comfortable employees feel about sharing their ideas, questions and concerns because they anticipate that speaking up will lead to criticism or worse. It also can affect their level of candor about having made a mistake.

In fact, Edmondson found that among teams she studied, some had a culture of openly admitting to making mistakes while others hid them. The more transparent teams actually had better business outcomes.

The good news is that when employees feel that they’re in a psychologically safe environment, they communicate more openly, take risks and try new things – ultimately creating more value for the business. Research from employee coaching company BetterUp found that company cultures with a high sense of belonging had a 56% increase in productivity and a 50% reduction in the risk of employee turnover.

Who’s responsible for creating a psychologically safe environment? As the practice leader, you need to model the behaviors you want to see, but it’s also your team’s responsibility to mirror this mindset for their colleagues. Everyone must be on board; it takes just one or two judgmental or dismissive individuals to reduce or eliminate psychological safety for the entire team.

CULTIVATE A CONTINUOUS LEARNING MINDSET

Once you’ve strengthened the psychological safety within your team, you can start moving them in new directions. Keep the momentum going with a focus on setting and achieving goals that require out-of-the-box thinking. What are some of the biggest challenges within your practice? Patient acquisition? Patient retention? Records management?

Talk about these challenges with your team, and explain your goals. You may want to create small workgroups dedicated to each issue, and ask members to do some research and come back to the team with recommendations. You’ll need to carve out some time for them to pursue this work, but the payoff will come when you have fresh ideas and potential solutions to your current challenges, creating new opportunities for growth.

Additionally, you can designate specific team members who have shown proficiency in a specific area as the go-to person for that topic, making them the resource for others to connect with when they have a question or want to learn more. This will give these team members more confidence in their knowledge, encourage them to stay up to date on the subject and potentially free you up to focus more on your business strategy.

Another way to encourage new learning is to talk with your team about external educational opportunities. Perhaps your office manager would like to take some courses on new technologies, or your hygienist has an interest in public health. You’ll want to be strategic and consistent about which opportunities you can support, as you’ll want the practice to see a benefit from making this investment. In addition to increasing the practice’s pool of knowledge, you’ll see added benefit from staff members actively learning, as these opportunities will often require a mindset shift, at least temporarily.

Don’t pass on smaller opportunities for learning. Is there a software upgrade or a required training coming up? Emphasize to your team how important these opportunities are, and why staying current on industry software and standards benefits patients and the practice.

TAKE RISKS

When your team has new knowledge, they’ll likely want to try it out. How comfortable are you with letting your team take risks? If you’ve owned your practice for a while, think back to when you opened your doors. That was likely a time full of risks, although it was probably you taking most of them. To grow your business, put yourself back in startup mode, but now it’s your employees’ turn to take the risks.

With employee livelihoods on the line, you may not be inclined to turn over the reins on the big swings right away, and that’s okay. Starting small gives team members the opportunity to get some wins under their belts and acquire some confidence to go bigger. What you want to foster is a mindset that being innovative and collaborative will build the practice. Some projects to get your team started include expanding your social media presence, working with a vendor to select new hardware or software, leading a promotional campaign (such as on whitening), or organizing a community event.

As your employees engage in these activities, it’s nearly a given that they won’t necessarily do it the way you would have done it, and they may make mistakes. Make sure they know that you want them to come to you as they need guidance, and that you aren’t going to punish or fire them for well-intentioned missteps along the way.

And as each project comes to a close, hold debriefings to review what went well and what could use improvement. These meetings can turn into finger-pointing sessions, so think back to the psychological safety you want to foster and prevent that from happening. If one person is taking a lot of heat in that session, jump in and change the conversation to focus on how to turn those negatives into positives.

INTEGRATE CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK

Project debriefs serve as a great mechanism for group feedback and to see the collective dynamic that pushes a project forward. But your team must hear from you on a regular basis about the work they’re doing every day, and what role you see for them in your growth plan.

In fact, offering regular feedback may be a blind spot in developing your growth plan; recruiting firm Zippia found that 65% of employees want more feedback and that 69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being recognized through feedback. Zippia’s research also indicated that companies that invest in regular employee feedback have 14.9% lower turnover rates than organizations where employees don’t receive feedback. That’s a lot of untapped potential if you’re saving performance conversations for a half hour at the end of the year.

Frequently, performance reviews can feel awkward or uncomfortable, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Many times, reviews become awkward when you don’t provide ongoing feedback on a regular basis or you’re not giving the conversation the appropriate structure to help guide it.

Consider meeting quarterly rather than once a year to avoid surprises for you and the employee, and so the employee has an opportunity to course correct before things go too far down the wrong road.

To guide these conversations, use a formal goals document that supplements – not replaces – this conversation. This should be a living document that runs through the year. In January, your employees can document their goals for the year, and they can track wins or progress toward those goals.

In that document, you also may want to include a section that covers the expected daily/weekly/monthly tasks of that employee, so when you meet, you can talk not only about those big annual goals, but also what’s happening day to day.

For the routine tasks, assigning each one a traffic light color can help you be more objective. Perhaps “Following safety protocols” is a green light because the employee is doing it well, but “Managing difficult patients” could use some work, so it gets a yellow light.

If an employee isn’t performing well in a specific area, avoid making it personal. Instead place the focus on how not performing the task correctly has a negative impact on the practice, team cohesion or patient care. Ask the employee what steps might help them improve. Really listen to their response and make a plan for next steps.

Every employee will see your practice from a different perspective, and may have new or better operational ideas.

These ongoing check-ins keep the performance dialogue open and also, in the worst-case scenario, protects you if the employee consistently underperforms and needs to separate from the practice. Keep a copy of quarterly updates to the goals form and document key discussion outcomes.

ENGAGE EMPLOYEES, EXPAND EFFORTS

Remember, having highly engaged employees who intend to stay at your practice will optimize your growth plans. Employees who don’t see a path forward for their careers may be more vulnerable to recruiters and employers who promise that level of transparency. What’s more, with a team that feels secure and ready to learn and take on risks, and is performance focused, you’ll have the support you need to take your practice in new directions and expand your efforts to deliver exceptional patient care.

REFERENCES

_{Gallo A. What is psychological safety? Harvard Business Review. February 15, 2023. hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety}

_{Hastwell C. What is psychological safety in the workplace? How leaders can build psychologically safe workplaces. Great Place to Work. April 4, 2023. greatplacetowork.com/resources/blog/psychological-safety-workplace#}

_{Jiménez J. Why psychological safety at work matters and how to create it. BetterUp. October 17, 2022. betterup.com/blog/why-psychological-safety-at-work-matters}

_{Mazur C. 20 essential employee feedback statistics [2023]: Employees want more than just performance reviews. Zippia. February 1, 2023. zippia.com/advice/employee-feedback-statistics}