Sometimes you have to make challenging decisions in your dental practice concerning patient care, staff retention, equipment purchases, and more. In order to make the best decision for you and your practice, consider two pieces of advice offered by Chip and Dan Health from their great book entitled Decisive.
First, do not get stuck within a narrow scope of potential options. Too many times we consider just one alternative, and then we spend our time figuring out how to make the alternative work and how to get the team behind the idea. Then when questions come up about the alternative we are championing, we get defensive and we often fail to see other options.
Effective leaders are those who widen their options to consider multiple alternatives. Therefore, challenge yourself and your team to come up with multiple options for curbing cancellations or improving the patient experience or whatever you are currently trying to tackle.
The next tip from the book Decisive is to utilize the Vanishing Options Test, meaning ask yourself if you could not chose any of the options you are currently considering, what would you do?
For example, maybe you are struggling with a member of the front office team who works a lot with insurance. You try several things but her attention to detail is still lacking and mistakes are happening too regularly. You may be considering termination, but before you do, you try the Vanishing Options Test and look for another answer. You consider the strengths of the employee, which include friendliness and the ability to make patients feel at ease, and you decide to move her from the insurance role to the main greeter and scheduler. In the end, this proves to be a great decision.
By increasing the number of options you are considering and by forcing yourself to consider a different set of alternatives than you currently have, you force yourself out of common patterns. You force yourself to make better decisions, and those decisions will make you and your team even stronger.