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On Friday of last week, we had a Team Day at the practice. This was an extraordinary day, a collection of people that work together trying to make a difference and trying to make it better.

It was quite symbolic because it will be the final team training day that we will have at the old site, because the next time, we will be moving.

These training days have become a corner stone for communication in our practice for many years and we meet quarterly as a team, usually with work in the morning and fun in the afternoon, but on this occasion work all day (although much of it was fun).

The dynamic of team days in the dental practice are interesting because in many situations such as ours is almost impossible to get the whole team together and absolutely unfeasible to get the majority of the clinician’s present.

Dentists that work in practices like ours are, by their nature, traveling salesman, who are somewhere else the day that we have a team day.

That said, we redesigned and re-created huge parts of our business and set work for the next 3 months which will definitely make us better than we were today.

One of the things that I did as a small exercise though, was to demonstrate how jobs have changed in the practice and how people have progressed.

I asked the team (that were around 25 of us) to shout out my unique ability list so that I could write it at the front.

This is an ancient exercise in management and for individual and personal development.

The exercise goes like this; take a sheet of A4 in portrait and draw a vertical line down the middle, on the left-hand side at the top write M.U.A on the right-hand side write E.E.

M.U.A stands for my unique ability and E.E stands for everything else.

The trick in my role (in any role really) is to retain and develop everything under my unique ability list and to give the rest of it away to someone else.

And so I asked the question to the group “what (if any) unique abilities do I retain in the business?” there was quite a lot of silence and quite a lot of scrabbling around before a few answers started to come, in no particular order they looked like this.

1. New patient consultations
2. Vision
3. Example
4. Passion and drive
5. Ideas

It went along like this for a little while, but once the answers all dried up and ran out, it was fascinating to see that surgery or dentistry were not on the list.

To be valuable and continued to be valuable, one must get past the role of the technician and into the role of the entrepreneur (Michael Gerber style).

In plotting the charts of where we go next, it is worth remembering that even my team don’t think that my surgical abilities are particularly important, let alone anybody else.

Blog Post Number - 2185