You create your practice culture whether intentionally or not. Do you manage through fear and control, or do you guide through empowerment, trust, and team-wide problem solving? In working with dental offices around the country, we see a variety of practice cultures – some are effective, others are debilitating. For example:

Five Alarm Fire Practice
In this dental practice, the team is in a perpetual panic because it seems the leader is continually creating and/or finding problems – setting fires so s/he can extinguish them. The doctor is extremely controlling and has a powerful need to “solve” these problems her/himself; thus, s/he cannot delegate effectively. Most practice systems are struggling if not crippled. The leader says s/he desires organization and effectiveness, but s/he creates perpetual crisis.

The “Fiefdom” Practice
Here comes the Feudal Lord. This leader is also highly controlling and dominant; however it’s taken up a notch. S/he enjoys competition and pitting employees against each other in a game to win the leader’s favor. Fiefdom leaders despise the idea of delegation, but will often have someone on staff who is their “trusted advisor.”

Creating Community
Community leaders see their role as building quality dental practices rooted firmly in community, both internally and externally. They create an environment and a culture for success by establishing clear, challenging, yet realistic goals and specific expectations for members of their team. They set employees up to succeed by investing in training to maximize employee potential. They don’t just tell employees what to do; they clarify why their responsibilities are important to the overall success of the practice. They encourage open exchange of ideas, and listening is a key part of their management strategy.

Want to change your practice culture? Call me at 877-777-6151 or email sallymck@mckenziemgmt.com

Sally,

We have a huge number of patients that have had one of the PPO’s we are part of and now find themselves without insurance. (retired or unemployed or even new standard insurance) The problem we are having is that more and more patients are angry with us due to our fees. Patients with PPO’s have a much lower fee plan than that of our normal pay for service patients. Now without insurance they want us to still honor the fee of the PPO or they are leaving because we are so overpriced. We have not had this issue prior to the PPO and we just don’t know what to say to these patients. I looked at your archive and didn’t find anything directly referring to this. Thank you for any help/guidance you can give us.

Renee

Hi Renee,

There is no right or wrong answer here. Putting myself as the owner of the business, the business decisions I make have to be what is in the best interest of the business, always. In order to make an informed decision, I would want to know how many of my active patients were actually on this PPO plan and how many people it affected, i.e., retired and unemployed. I would then want to know how my fees ranked within the zip code for my practice. You can purchase this on my web-site here: http://www.mckenziemgmt.com/book-practice.htm#b11. From this, I should be able to tell if the patients are able to in fact, go to another dentist and that my fees might be too high. If I were to lose a lot of business then I might have to consider a “post PPO” courtesy adjustment. I would also need to work on lowering my overhead as much as possible in order to be profitable.

Hope this helps,

Sally