I have explored the concept of leadership in many different directions over the past 10 years or so because I feel a responsibility due to my privilege and opportunity to look after the team.
I actually look after several teams, and I talk about the boy's football team (now young men) and the team at the practice in the same way because the principles are the same.
One of the greatest instructors (apart from John Gibson's extraordinary day of teaching leadership at the Clinic) was Simon Sinek's book Leaders Eat Last.
In this book, I was introduced to the concept of servant leadership, which is when you are a servant to the team in your position of leadership.
This concept has been talked about a lot, and many people fly the flag for servant leadership, but when it comes to the crunch, sometimes it is difficult to execute what that means.
In essence, it means that leaders last.
In The Navy SEALs, which Simon Sinek references in his book, he talks about how the officers wait until all the rest of the men have eaten before they eat, and they eat in a shared space; they don't have an executive bathroom or any special places, they eat together as a group, and the leaders eat last after everyone else is fed. That is, in effect, said the leadership.
It means that when you have the opportunity to run a business which is commercial, you take your cut at the end after everyone else is rewarded. If nothing is left for you, you have failed in your leadership because you have not built a structure or model that also allows you to eat.
If you eat last in the canteen with the soldiers and there is no food, then your system for feeding the team has been let down.
However, the actual test of servant leadership falls in the philosophy that 'the leader looks after the tribe, so the tribe then looks after the leader'.
I read about this in Sinek's book time and time again, but I only encountered it face to face after the Covid pandemic, after everything we had been through as an organisation and then when I fell unwell.
Both Hayley and I had worked so hard and taken on so much of the work to try and keep everyone in a job.
I know that that was worse for Hayley than it was for me, but day and night, she worked in order to keep people in their jobs so that we did not have to make anyone redundant or let anyone go.
We kept people in positions who'd only been working for us for a matter of weeks when the Covid pandemic hit them, and we shut, but what happened to the other side of that when both of us, in times of difficulty and problems, was that the group looked after us.
And so, two extraordinary things happened in the last week, which I want to tell you about. It may sound like a terrible humble brag, and I'm sorry if it does. It's not meant to be arrogant.
The first was that I was in a meeting with Tom, our marketing director, in his office when one of my managers came and asked if she could close the door for a few minutes and lock us in effectively; slightly confused but not sinister.
I then came out of the room and went into my own office, where there was a small present wrapped in recycled paper with a handmade Campbell Clinic badge stuck on it and a card.
The card was from the nursing team at The Campbell Clinic (Everyone). They had signed the inside and were saying thank you to me.
That was quite extraordinary; in fact, it only made me cry a little bit. I've never known anything like that.
I got a card and a present from my nursing team because they like being at The Clinic, and they seem to be happy with the way that we are doing things.
The second do was in a really difficult job that I have.
At the moment, we're trying to completely redesign a framework for dental sales in our organisation because we are just not entirely happy with how other people teach it, promote it or provide systems for it.
This will take us the next 12 months, but when we're finished, we will be able to show other people the system we have and how we think it works.
We will count it to the nth degree; we will add a pathway for patients, which is extraordinary, innovative and technologically brilliant, and we will give people the different parts of the jigsaw in our sales process as part of our business education in order for them to adopt it also.
The first part of this, though, was to write the philosophy of sales at The Campbell Clinic; we had to start with our why, and I was finding real difficulty in putting this into phrases that seemed to mean something to me and to everyone else but then out of the blue on Slack Laura, our sales manager (and the most extraordinary treatment coordinator, individual I have ever met) sent me this below.
Imagine that.
I have been wrestling with this for literally months, and this dropped, and I thought, oh my God, that's it, it's nailed.
And so, all those times that Laura and I spent together after the practice was reopened 12-hour shifts seeing new patients almost broke the pair of us at the end of the day; Laura got it and invented it.
The leader looks after the tribe, so the tribe looks after the leader.
The Campbell Clinic Sales Philosophy
Our philosophy is rooted in commitment to ethical principles where we value integrity, fairness and respect in all interactions. We believe that true excellence arises from nurturing a caring and compassionate environment to allow us to understand and solve our patient's needs whilst building genuine relationships based upon trust. We believe that patients should be treated with empathy and kindness. Our sales are not about pushing patients into treatment but providing them with options which promotes the confidence for them to make a fully informed decision. By fostering this culture, the sale is the natural outcome of meeting the patient's needs.
Blog Post Number - 4027
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