Preview Thursday: The Dentist Who Gets It

We are pleased to present this excerpt from The Dentist Who Gets It by Dr. Steven Hymovitch.

How Do You Champion Your People?

As much as you may have a put together a diverse team, you need to be diverse in how you, the boss/leader-of-the-team/employer/lead dentist, handle your people. Indeed, chaos could easily ensue when bringing together so many kinds of people.

I’m no genius or great leader of men and women, but I knew (or more precisely I learned) that I had to show my employees they had a leader at the helm. I am not, nor would I ever be, a you’re-under-my-thumb kind of a guy; but this was my ship, and I had to be a steady, knowing captain, charting the course or we’d sink for sure. I am not the kind of guy who is going to let details get by me anyway, so I kept my eyes and ears open, tried to let my people do what they were hired to do, but they always knew what was expected of them.

It’s not enough to simply say “job well done” or hand out bonuses. Sure, these immediate positive reinforcements are important. But on a grander scale, think about diversifying how you champion your team, how you can enrich the color palette of your responses to those who work for you, how you appear, time and again, a positive, proactive force in these people’s professional working lives.

Simply put, consider how what you do will keep them working for you for a long time. You’ve done well to hire a good team, made up of a wide variety of folks from a variety of different backgrounds who have varied ways of problem solving, who all have different skills to fit into the whole of your organization. You need, then, to constantly work on the diversity of your thinking. How do you do this?

• Be agile.
  You have cultivated a staff who might come at you with many different ideas, approaches, needs (religious holidays alone could be many if your staff is made up of people who worship drastically different than one another). I also am open to people needing to leave early on some days for reasonable reasons.
• Be ready for the challenges.
  You certainly are going to find plenty of them if you hire a diverse staff. The wider a variety of people you get around you, the more you can as much benefit from potential wild flights of creativity as you can combustion. Be ready for this, and cultivate solid emotional intelligence.
• Don’t let your desire for diversity cloud your judgment.
  Hire the best person for the job. Look far and wide, consider people far from your comfort zone. Certainly don’t let other employees come to dictate, even by their presence, who you come to hire.

Yes, your diverse, fantastic staff, filled to the brim with all those unique thinkers and doers working daily with one another for constant proactive change is a wonderful sight to behold. But you all have to work in the real world.

So often we get so into creating our office culture that we march forward with blinders on building our brand. We get so busy looking to hire just the right people, getting things moving with precision clockwork, that we easily forget that, while hiring and dealing with a diverse staff is important, how they go forth and play with others is the true test of how successful your grand experiment proves to be. An "us vs. them" mentality serves no one.