Look for Meaningful Ways to Reward Your Dental Team

According to Gary Zelesky, a speaker who often discusses the power of passion, dentists need to be more open to change in their personal and professional lives. On the professional front, this means allowing their team members to express their passions. In this clip, Zelesky describes the steps one orthodontist took to show appreciation for his hard-working team.

“When I talk about dentists being open to change, there’s two basic changes that I think a dentist needs to think about: his professional life, obviously, and his personal life. I think that when it comes to the dental practice, I think a dentist needs to be open to allow his team to express the passions within their own lives, no matter where it is or how it happens.

I’ll give you one quick example. I was speaking with a team. I do passion makeovers with teams. Afterward, this dentist decided he was going to find everybody’s favorite album. He was an orthodontist with over 30 team members. He went and he looked for everybody’s favorite album. He went online and found out that he could get everybody’s favorite album in a nice frame with their name on it. So he found out everybody’s favorite album, and remember, there’s only one way he could figure out everybody’s favorite album. He had to go to every team member and — guess what – ask them. Even that was revolutionary. So, he got everybody’s favorite album, and over the weekend, he brought an army of people in, and an entire wall was changed in his practice, called the Wall of Fame. They had to take down the pictures – all the before and afters – (makes funny faces) all those wonderful pictures and they put up this wall of fame. When the team came in the next day, they saw this, and some of them actually began to weep because nobody had ever recognized them at that level.

RELATED: More Advice from Gary Zelesky

· Dentists: Try to Find Humor in Everything

· Why Dentists Need to Embrace Change in Their Practices

· How Passion in your Dental Practice Determines Success

What we do many times when it comes to recognizing people in the office, we say, ‘Here’s your little plaque of the month. Here’s your plaque for being employee of the month,’ and it’s like everybody else’s plaque. I was in one office, the way they rewarded the employees, they gave them a parking spot closer to the office. Oh, that’s what everybody wants.

The changes need to be enormous. They need to get more personal. And let me say this in balance. It’s not a matter of being like, ‘I’m a friend. We are family. The dental practice, we are all a family.’ Here’s the issue, you’re not a family because you’re a boss. And some dentists get so friendly that sometimes the team doesn’t know when the friendship is over.”

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