Dr. John Meis: Hey everybody! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Strategic Thinker. I’m Dr. John Meis and I’m here with Melissa Thomas. How are you doing, Melissa?

Melissa Thomas: I’m good, hi Dr. John!

Dr. John Meis: Well, we picked a really good topic today, I think this is going to be a fun conversation. So, Melissa and I decided to talk about the lessons that we’ve learned from our favorite leader. And, both of us have had the pleasure of having many great leaders and mentors, and so it’s kind of a tough one to boil down those lessons, but that’s what we’re going to do. And, when we talk about the people that are in our lives that were great leaders and mentors to us, that helps us figure out some of the pieces that we have that we got from them, but it also can help us figure out some of the pieces of our leadership game plan that we don’t have that we need to spend a little time strengthening. Alright, so with that Melissa, tell us a little bit about the main things that you learned from the greatest leader that you worked with.

Melissa Thomas: So, I loved this topic because it really tries to make me boil it down into one thing, but I think it’s still an overarching theme of several things. And, the biggest thing I think I learned from really my most influential leader was that I didn’t really know how to be a good leader until I was lead by a good leader. And so, really breaking down the pieces of, “Why did I feel like she was such a fantastic leader?” Well, because she made me feel supported. How did she do that? She made sure that I always knew that she had my back. Or, she was a good listener. How did she make me feel like my opinion mattered? She asked for my opinion. So, it was really thinking through all of those pieces. What did I feel? What did I learn from that leader? And, how did she make me feel like that? To really kind of take those actionable nuggets and say, “That’s what I need to do for those people I’m leading.”

Dr. John Meis: Yeah, awesome. That is such a great point, creating that safe environment so that you can kind of get outside of your comfort zone and do more maybe than you thought you’d have.

Melissa Thomas: So you’re not afraid to fail, right?

Dr. John Meis: Right, exactly!

Melissa Thomas: You’re going to make mistakes, but you’ll be supported. And, knowing that you have a safe place to make those mistakes is really, really powerful too.. 

Dr. John Meis: Yeah, I remember reading somewhere that one of the mantras in Silicon Valley is to “fail big and fail fast”. I’m not sure I entirely believe that, but the point is don’t be afraid to take risks. And when you take risks, there’s going to be failures, that’s just part of the deal in growth and part of the deal with innovation is not everything is going to work out exactly like you planned it. And, from my point of view, as long as you learn from that and we don’t make the same error twice, then it’s been a good experience.

Melissa Thomas: To your point of making mistakes, I had a leader once tell me, “It’s not about the mistake that you made, it’s how you cleaned it up too.” The biggest lesson is how’d you clean it up? Did you apologize? Did you make it right? Did you not do it again? So, it’s everything that happens after the mistake that makes it impactful. 

Dr. John Meis: Yeah, you know in relationships, whether they be with patients or coworkers or family members, sometimes the relationship is really deepened by having an experience where there was something that didn’t go well, but you recovered from it well. You had that conversation, you talked about it, you talked about what went right and what didn’t go right. If there’s an apology needed, you’re happy to do that. And, you said the most important thing which is that I’m not going to do that thing again. I’m going to show my learning, my development by consistently avoiding whatever it was that happened.

Melissa Thomas: Right, by learning from that mistake.

Dr. John Meis: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Alright, I’ll throw one out here, maybe we’ll go back and forth for a few minutes. One that I learned was, kind of related to one that you just said, but it’s finding the balance with your teams between challenge and support. So, if we give all support with no challenge, then people don’t feel very fulfilled, they don’t grow as rapidly, they don’t necessarily take risks, they don’t take on things that they don’t think they are ready for. So, if they’re always just supported without being challenged, that can create a problem. So, the other side of that is if there’s always challenge, if everything that you give people is above their capabilities, and if you aren’t coming up with support when there’s failure, if you’re just challenging them and challenging them and challenging… So, a situation where we have high challenge and low support, that doesn’t work very well because what we build into our systems is turnover. That’s a stressful situation where people just feel like they can’t get ahead and they move on. So, balancing out that challenge and support, not too much support with no challenge which creates often prima donnas, The other side having too much challenge with no support, you burn people out and you have lots of turnover, and you never develop that core team that is really what makes businesses grow. That same core team working together, learning together, getting better together, supporting each other, trusting each other, that’s what makes companies fantastic.

Melissa Thomas: And, it’s interesting because I think that with a new team member, you might be higher on the support and lower on the challenge, and then you’re slowly shifting. So, it’s not that your leadership style is here with challenge/support, it’s shifting to meet the individual where they are, making sure you’re always balancing that.

Dr. John Meis: That’s exactly right. And, it’s the same in group practices when we’re looking at individual locations. Some of them need more support than challenge, some need more challenge than support, and trying to get that balance right with each one. The last thing you want is your high-performing practices to not feel challenged, because no matter how high-performing they are, they can do better. And, if they get support with no challenge, all of a sudden they think they’re special, they start to think that the rules don’t apply to them, they start misbehaving, they start taking time off, they start finishing their day early, and they end up in some behaviors that can be disruptive to the service that we’re providing to patients. So, that’s exactly right, it is being thoughtful about how you balance those 2 things. 

Melissa Thomas: That’s true. I also think that one of the things that comes to mind is I understood the true value of communication. And whether it be… just little snippets here and there. I had a leader who after every big executive meeting, she would debrief the entire team, “This is what happened.” And, sometimes it felt like, “Okay, we don’t need to hear everything that happened.” But, when that goes away, you realize how valuable that communication was. So, it was just helpful to understand, “We talked about this… this might be coming up… I’ll let you know when you need to be brought into this… This could be happening.” And, you just felt safe, like you knew what was going on and that you were valued in the communication loop.

Dr. John Meis: It also helped you make the little decisions that you’re making, if you know what the big decisions are and the direction things are going. When you know where you’re going, the little decisions are so much easier, aren’t they?

Melissa Thomas: That’s how you trickle down your vision, right? You can’t assume that every layer of your organization, each practice outside of your main practice or outside of your support system, if you will, really understands what you want if they aren’t being communicated to.

Dr. John Meis: That was going to be my next one that I was going to throw out is that you can’t over-communicate the fundamentals. So when I think about group practices and the fundamentals, the things that have to be communicated over and over and over again and it seems repetitive to the executive team, but they have to be repeated over and over again, and that is mission, vision, values. You cannot talk about those things too much. And, you think about them, you live them, it’s part of your day-to-day duties, but other people can get distracted by what they’re working on because they have their everyday duties which are different. And so, just refreshing those every time you have a conversation, being able to over-communicate the fundamentals I think is a critical leadership skill.

Melissa Thomas: They say that you haven’t done your job communicating it if your team isn’t tired of hearing about it, right? If you don’t get the, “I know, I know,” then they don’t really know.

Dr. John Meis: Right. They’ll let you know if they have too much, but that’s assuming you have a static team. And, look what’s happening in dental employment right now, we’re short staffed, we’ve got new team members, because we’re trying to fill seats with a dental workforce 17% lower than it was before COVID, we’re trying to do more with people that maybe aren’t as capable or as experienced as before. So, it’s even more now that you’re communicating those things over and over again so that people understand.

Melissa Thomas: I always think the same is true when I think about clinicians, I think we used to talk to really our providers about this too, is that it’s the same thing for a patient. It may be your 5,000th time you’re discussing a crown and what it means to the patient and their tooth. But it may be their first-ever crown. So, just remembering that just because it’s so ingrained in your mind doesn’t mean someone else knows what you’re thinking, understands the procedure, the list goes on…

Dr. John Meis: [cuts out]… or, are you dry of lessons? Have we exhausted what you had thought about ahead of our conversation?

Melissa Thomas: I think so, those are the bigs ones. Now, I could go on and on and on because, like we said, stories get close to your heart, right?

Dr. John Meis: So, I think that’s a good one though, using stories to get your point across. Stories engage people, it opens their creativity, they want to listen, they want to be drawn into something that’s outside of themselves, and by using stories to make points, that’s a great communication tool.

Melissa Thomas: There’s a natural passion in explaining it too, right? It’s easier for others to communicate an experience that has happened to them than to just explain something out of a text book.

Dr. John Meis: Yeah. I just have one last one that I think is really important and that is we all perform better when our confidence level is high. So, as leaders we have to think about how to make corrections in our team without destroying or lowering their confidence? So, making sure that with every experience that people leave that experience with their confidence in tact. Now, sometimes people get over-confident and their needs to be a little bit of a correction there. But, I just see so many leaders that come in and bark orders, they tell people they’re stupid, they just rip everybody up, everybody’s confidence level is lower, and then they expect the team to perform better. That’s not really how humans work, they perform better when their confidence level is high.

Melissa Thomas: It’s “tough love”, right? No! It doesn’t work! (Laughs)

Dr. John Meis: That’s exactly right. When we’re giving those challenges, we have to do it in a way that maintains or grows our team’s confidence. Otherwise, their performance is going to go down. Alright Melissa, well thanks for hopping on this episode of The Strategic Thinker, we’re glad you all were on with us and we hope to see you soon. Thanks so much.

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