Last week we brought you the first edition of Colin’s interview with England’s Netball legend Sara Symington. We discussed with Sara the topic of Leadership and how her skills and techniques can be related to all industries, including dentistry…
“So, Sara, the Netball World Championships are in 2019 in Liverpool in July, but the stuff you talked about today on the Business Course which relates to Netball also crosses over to the stuff that we do in Dentistry. It ultimately comes down to leadership, setting an example to the people that you are looking after. One of the things you talked about was something that we've talked about on this course, which is this ‘Sara’s World’ ideology, so when you went into netball, it was important that you made clear what ‘Sara’s World’ was going to look like?
Yes, I think it goes back to two things for me. It’s about standards and behaviours that are going to be accepted and not be accepted. It’s also about having a very clear plan about how you’re going to execute things and why and what. There has to be the whys and the whats that underpin that. You can't just say we're going to do this, you've got to take people on the journey or you've got to try and convince people to come on the journey. Ultimately, it's a people business, it's getting the best out of people.
Then once you've nailed that, those levels of expectations, being quite tight about what you want, you’re then able to say “you signed up for this didn't you? You said this was okay so what's changed now?”
It’s making everyone accountable, it's not just about one person.
The rewards in any minority sport are so limited. Financially, but also the glory is short-lived because news is so disposable. One of the things I think, in our industry in dentistry, is historically we've rewarded mediocrity financially really quite well and that's changed now. I think there are so many parallels, having watched the British cycling rise, the marginal gains stuff, how they focus on detail and how then exceptional performances were rewarded, I think lots of industries are going the same way aren’t they? The old-fashioned thing about turning up and clocking-in and out, it's not going to work anymore, regardless of what industry you are in.
I agree, I put a slide up today about the insanity of doing the same thing day in day out, it's not going to get you any closer to your end goal, being the gold medal for us. It’s different for different industries and different businesses but it’s about not accepting mediocracy going forwards. It comes back to setting high standards, how you're going to achieve and creating a process that is going to get you closer and closer to whatever that overall target is.
Thank you so much, it’s been massively inspirational, I hope we can get you back again with the Business Course group in 2019.
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