397: Perfect Meeting Recipe

Podcast Transcripts:

Kiera Dent:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Dental A Team podcast. I'm your host Kiera Dent. And I had this crazy idea that maybe I could combine a doctor and a team member's perspective because let's face it, dentistry can be a challenging profession with those two perspectives. I've been a dental assistant, treatment coordinator, scheduler, filler, office manager, regional manager, practice owner. And I have a team of traveling consultants where we have traveled to over 165 different offices coaching teams. Yep. We don't just understand you, we are you. Our mission is to positively impact the world of dental. And I believe that this podcast is the greatest way I can help elevate teams, grow VIP experiences, reduce stress, and create A teams. Welcome to The Dental A Team podcast.

            Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and all right, this is something that comes so natural for me that I don't even think of it as a topic that would be a popular podcast topic. And then I realized sometimes all of us, you have talents, I have talents that just come to us naturally, but for some other people it's a little trickier. So this one actually came from a team member we had working with us for a little while who said, "Kiera, I am terrified for you not to be as much involved in the business." That's a goal guys. I think it's always wise as business owners to be building a business that can run independently of ourselves. Don't worry it's a massive ego blow because you're not needed and they could do it without you. That's fine. Just gives me more space to go create in another area.

            But this team member said, "Kiera, I'm really, really nervous to have to run team meetings when you're not here." And I thought, "What? Why? Team meetings are easy." And then I remember myself 10 years ago, five years ago. Meetings are not easy and they're still not easy for me. I've just learned different tips and tricks that I wanted to share with you of how to run effective meetings. So, first steps first, I'd like to build an intention. Why am I even running this meeting? So get really clear.

            Number two, before I even walk into a meeting, this is going to sound so ridiculous. It's true. I literally do this. It's called get in peak state. So Tony Robbins, totally straight up Tony Robbins. You guys I am a total guru and a fan of him because so many of the things he does... Yeah, I'm probably brainwashed, don't you panic. But he talks about getting in peak state. So no joke, okay, I was podcasting before I did this podcast. I wasn't in peak state. I had phone calls and I was just kind of blah.

            Well, I have a song, it's Harlem by New Politics. You all can just jam out with me. I made everybody at summit at Dental A Team do it. I love that song. That is my pump-up jam. It's been that song for the last year or two years. As soon as I turn that on my heartbeat gets going. I jump up and down. I get so pumped, so excited and I get into what's called peak state. So now my podcast now, I just recorded a podcast before this one, I'm on this one. I am so much more energized, excited. I feel my life feeling better and you guys it's 3:00 in the afternoon. That's not normally my let's go time.

            And so what it is, before you go into a meeting, get yourself in the right energy. So for me, I pump myself up. I get all excited because I know I'm going to bring way better energy if I'm in that peak state. You guys can do this in your morning huddles. You'll have a much crazier, exciting day. Docs do this right before you walk in the office. Team members put on your favorite song, have it be a consistent song for you, right before you walk into the office. Get yourself in peak state.

            When I attend Tony Robbins events they always say, "Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever leave a room not in peak state." So leaving your house, leaving your car. Guys, I don't do it. I promise you. But really there's a different energy when you're in peak state. I literally have our team do dance parties because at Tony Robbins, when I first was there, my first day I watched all these people jump up and down. I thought they were freaking ludicrous. By the end of day five I'm jumping up and down and loving my life and coming home and jumping up and down. Because when I would do that it changes it. I've got it in my body. It's in my adrenaline. It's in my voice. So before you even go into a meeting, it sounds ridiculous. I promise you'll run way better meetings if you get yourself into peak state. So usually I tell myself I'm freaking amazing. I usually will listen to my favorite song that makes me just happy and smile and just pumped up and energized before I walk into a meeting.

            So I set my intention, get into peak state, and then I also have agenda. So you guys I've talked about it a lot, Traction. I'm obsessed with it, by Gino Wickman. I go off of a lot of their meeting agendas. So we start out with a win. So when I do my morning huddle it's wins. Today, guys, I literally went after my team and I'm like, "Everybody needs to come to this table with a win. I don't care what it is. Personal, professional win, I don't care. Bring a win because it puts you in a natural state of being in peak state. It's a massive, massive, massive piece for you guys." If you start a meeting with everybody talking about wins. And I don't just like one person, you've always got that Keira Dent in the class that's going to talk about things positive because that's just part of who I am. No, everybody needs to bring that.

            And if your team is not participating, get them jumping up and down and say, "Guys, we're turning on our peak state song. Everybody up." It's not an option. It's a mandatory. And if you choose not to, fine do burpees or sing karaoke. I don't really care. But make sure that your team is also there. So start with some wins, do a personal, professional expectation if it's a longer meeting. If it's morning huddle, fantastic. I usually do wins, get to the nitty-gritty, make sure I'm really focused on the intention.

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            For a morning huddle my intention is how do we win the day for us as a team and for our patients. So my morning huddle meetings look a lot different than my weekly team meetings. So depending upon the type of meeting that you're running, it's going to depend on the intention. Morning huddle you better believe I get everybody jumped up, jazz for the day, because I want to huddle of a great day. And we're literally going to talk about how do we win the day? What do we need to do? How do we get our team members up to goal? What can we do for VIP patient care for our patients? All those things are my morning huddle meetings.

            Now, when I'm running a team meeting, that's either a weekly or a monthly or a quarterly meeting. Those tend to be my models. So I do a weekly level 10 meeting. We do it for an hour and a half. My whole team's on there. If you have a larger team, just use your leadership team. Then we do a monthly and then we do a quarterly. Quarterly's are eight hours. No joke. We do ours via Zoom. They're amazing. I love them. I get everybody participating. So again, intention of what you want to get out of the meeting. Then you also are going to get yourself in peak state so that way you're making sure that you are coming in your best state. Get your team in peak state right away.

            If it's on, let's go for a weekly meeting. Weekly meeting we do our wins, personal, professional wins and their expectation for the meeting. That always gets everybody clicked over into meeting mode. It's fantastic. And I keep it going. I call on people in random orders so that way everyone's on their toes highly participating. I also tell them before they come to a meeting everyone's expected to play full out, participate a hundred percent. I tell them, "Hey, if you've got an issue and you choose not to bring it up in the meeting, I don't want to hear about it later. This is your opportunity to bring up issues, concerns, growth, all of that. And if not, don't bring it up. If it needs to be one-on-one do so one-on-one but do not be talking to other people."

            Then we go through, we review our goals of the company. It literally goes in this order on purpose. This is straight from Traction. So personal, professional wins. Then I go through the goals of the company for this year and this quarter. That way we're reminding ourselves what are all these issues about? What are we even striving for and aiming for? Then we roll into issues and creating solutions. And then we move into action items.

            I'm really big, don't leave a meeting ever without having people have action items with due dates. Have somebody assigned to setting those actions, wherever you choose to put them, and then following up the next meeting to make sure those action items were done. That's literally how I run team coaching calls. That's how I run the coaching calls with our clients. I go through updates, wins, tell me where you're rocking and rolling. Let's review our action items from last call. What's the focus of our call today. Let's solve it. And then what are the action items that you're going to take and go implement? That is how people feel like there's progress. There is literally a tracking and a stacking of these meetings that are going to help people feel like there was progress. Meetings are yucky when there's no progress made and you go around and around in circles. It's like, "Why? Why was I even here? We solved nothing." That's a waste of time.

            And then the last piece is I have my meetings rated every time. If it's below an eight, or at an eight, I ask people, "Why was it at an eight and what could be done to be better?" The last time we got an eight it's because the person didn't come prepared with any issues. I also have people that will always give a nine or a 10. Guess what? They're the happy people. Then you have some cynical people that will always give you a four or five or six. Fantastic.

            You can also rotate who runs the meeting and you can have them listen to this podcast of how to run effective meetings. I've also found the energy I bring tends to be the energy my team picks up. It's not always the case, but genuinely speaking they will pick up with that. Also, call on people randomly. Ask people, "Hey Shelby, what do you think about that? What are your thoughts?" Especially, you're more quiet, reserved people. Ask them for their feedback. Sometimes they're not going to speak up, but they have really great ideas if just given the opportunity or asked to contribute. So don't be afraid. Ask people.

            I also tell people they're all required to come with one issue or concern that could make the company better to the meetings. And if they choose not to, you got it, dance party, karaoke, burpees, whatever it chooses to be. Just have that as your company standard. This is what we do. We come here to solve issues and we're all holding ourselves super, super accountable to it. That way it doesn't feel like it was a waste of time.

            So I know that seems kind of ridiculous. For me, running meetings, I used to just talk about numbers. I didn't talk about growth. I didn't talk about the goals of the company. I didn't know how to run a meeting. And so when I say meetings come naturally for me, it's not necessarily the case. What comes naturally for me is public speaking. Being able to talk to people, being able to be positive, being able to be communicative. Those things come naturally for me.

            So for you guys though, if you're not a great public speaker, that's okay. You don't have to be an awesome public speaker. You don't have to be Kiera Dent to run a great meeting. People who are not Kiera Dent run amazing meetings. And I know that each of you can do it if you would so desire.

            So again, set your intention, get yourself in peak state and then follow an agenda. I'm always having a scribe, somebody taking notes. Meeting minutes, if you will. And make sure you solve the problems and solve them forever. Don't bandage them. Dig deep. You guys can read The Five Dysfunctions of Teams. It's one of my favorite, favorite books by Patrick Lencioni. It talks about how if you don't have trust, meaning vulnerability, then you're going to have a lack of conflict. Which means if I don't agree with it I'll actually speak up in the meeting versus then talking to whomever after the may of that was a stupid meeting versus saying it in the meeting. And if we don't have healthy conflict, we're going to have a lack of commitment. Excuse me. A lack of accountability, which leads to... I lied. A lack of commitment, which leads to a lack of accountability, which leads to a lack of results. People aren't committed to the decisions we've made, they're not going to stay accountable to it and they're actually not going to get results. So at the end of the day make sure that those things are in play for your meetings.

            Look at your meetings. Are they at a set time? Don't do it in the middle of lunch because if we run over with patients that says, "Hey, this meeting doesn't matter." If it's at the beginning of the day, it's a fresh start. Everybody's ready to go. Guess what? You're probably going to get better ideas. So I recommend in dental practices that you guys have your meetings blocked for the rest of the year. I suggest that you do them in the morning. Yes, I know you're giving up prime patient time. That's okay. If meetings are hyper productive, it will be well worth it. If they're not productive, forget it. Don't bother. Truthfully, it's not worth giving up patient time for it.

            And then make sure that everybody has their action items with deadlines. Somebody's responsible, and I don't always have it as the office manager, delegate to the rest of your team. They're brilliant too. They can take it on. That they give everybody their action items and everybody is expected to come to the next meeting with them. On the following meeting, after we go through our company goals, I then review all the action items and you either get a done or not done of your action items. If you didn't get it done, you have to tell why. Because what I found is there's no reason to come into meetings and set goals that are just laissez-faire. Why do that? That's ridiculous. There's no reason to do that. Have people take ownership. Get people into the mindset of we come in, we hunker down, we work hard. No, not every single team member is going to want to do that and that's okay. Don't expect that. But if you've got 80, 90% of your team who hunkers down, solves problems with you, rock on. I think you've been effective with your meetings.

            And then rate the meetings. Get the honest feedback. It's downright terrifying. It scares me every single time. However, that's how I know. And I tell people, Five Dysfunctions of Teams, you've got to be honest. Because if these meetings are terrible, tell us that way we can improve. If we don't know, we can't improve. So read Five Dysfunctions of Teams if you haven't as a team. Read Traction. Figure out how to run these meetings effectively. But make sure the energy you bring to it and the decision that you make, for me, it's always we're going to play full out and we're going to gain clarity. Or we're going to create a solution to our new clients that has been a struggle. Whatever it is, I don't care. Set your expectations with your team so that way you guys can solve it. People like meetings that are productive and that people are accountable. That's usually how you get higher ratings on numbers. Call every team member out, make sure everyone's participating and make sure they're solving their own problems. You don't have to be the hero. Your team's genius and allow them to be.

            So hopefully that was helpful for you guys. It was just a topic that came up when I was like, "Oh, running effective meetings might not be just something that's natural." And so push yourself. Brittany, one of our consultants, said an awesome quote the other day. I don't know where it's from. She said, "Do the uncomfortable until it becomes comfortable." And I think with a lot of us meetings can be that. So I'm going to challenge each of you do uncomfortable until they become comfortable. And if you want help, we're really good at running meetings and teaching you how to run meetings. So reach out if meetings are a struggle, we're happy to help. [email protected]. And guys as always thanks for listening. Catch you next time on The Dental A Team podcast.

            And that wraps it up for another episode of the Dental A Team podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.