Today at the practice, well, the day I wrote this blog, actually the day I spoke about this blog, and then someone else edited it and published it for me, we had a medical emergency.
It happened very close to the end of the day and required the attendance of a paramedic car and an ambulance to look after a patient who was struggling with an epileptic seizure,
But that detail is for later, at the bottom of the page.
I would first like to start with some feedback that we received today from someone who attended our Dental Entrepreneurial Bootcamp course last week.
"I really believe that this course will positively and permanently change my practice and my professional outlook. For an experienced and battle-weary clinician, it takes an inspiring team to be able to do this. The Campbell Academy are such a team. They are world-class in their knowledge and skills but also in their attitude and their willingness to share. If you are lucky …you may find a teacher or mentor with some of these qualities, but to find a team of teachers and mentors with all of these characteristics in the same team is completely unique. As Obi Wan Kenobi almost said - this is the dental academy you have been looking for. I'm delighted I have found it …and look forward to returning again and again."
To receive feedback like this is something quite extraordinary.
It is one thing to go to other places and tell people that you have the most extraordinary team working side by side with you in the practice, but it is quite another to receive unsolicited feedback like this, that you never actually asked for and only went on doing your jobs in the best way that you could to find that when you turn up on a Monday, this is in your inbox (well, in your Slack).
I think the feedback in italics above speaks for itself, but the point here is that that is the point of the course that we provided.
It's not a course for me to stand up and pretend to be famous and shout loud it's a course to share and to collaborate and to give away and to help other people navigate a better way to do what they are doing so to positively influence in a bigger way, the people that they look after, be it their teams or be it their patients but hopefully both.
The vision of the Campbell Clinic Group (the why of our business) is this "We exist to positively influence the lives of as many people as possible through the work that we do and example we set".
And so, the feedback would suggest that what we did last week achieved that for at least one person who attended the course and therefore we won.
But the point of this is that in order to get to a better place, that thing that people call 'work-life balance' almost certainly never exists (your work exists to give you the life you want, and the opposite of life is death, not work).
What you need to do is learn to give away.
Chris Barrow spoke on the course last week as he often does at the Clinic and Academy and it was his gift of the book by his own business coach Rachel Turner, which taught me the lessons of the three personas of the leader of a growing business.
The first is the brave warrior who runs into any problem and fixes it. This is the start-up business, the true entrepreneur.
The second is a considered architect who builds systems to support the growing tribe of people who work within the organisation.
And the third is the wise monarch who has the privilege and position to truly lead an organisation from the top by just touching or tweaking or turning knobs and pulling levers.
The point of the course is to help people move from brave warrior through to considered architect through to wise monarch.
For many of us, though, it's impossible for us to turn into a considered architect, or we start out as a considered architect and can never be a brave warrior or turn into a wise monarch.
It takes extraordinary people to change their personalities, like a chameleon, to travel through the ranks.
So, in the absence of the ability to shapeshift our characters, we must find people who have the character traits that we do not and then empower them, uplift them, and take them to a better place.
What happened yesterday when the medical emergency was playing out downstairs in the clinic was that I was sitting upstairs dictating my emails (for someone else to type for me). In fact, I had very little awareness that the medical emergency was playing out downstairs because the team took it upon themselves to sort it and fix it and then to complete the significant clinical event form so that we could report it and discuss it at our clinical meetings and make sure that we had done it the best way possible and make sure that we had looked after the patient to the highest possible ability that we had.
That is something called culture and culture only comes from a situation where you allow your people to go themselves.
It's such a difficult and terrible thing to have to do.
It's such a double-edged sword.
It's a little bit like watching your kids leave home for university (I've already done that twice).
The pride you feel in your children growing up and going on to other exciting things is wonderful, but the loss is extraordinary at the same time.
Watching your business grow is exactly the same. It's totally possible to find out how to do that, but it's also really important to understand what you're letting yourself in for.
Blog Post Number - 3751
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