JOANNA CAREW

I walked into an internal training session today ready to deliver an hour of motivation on the power of selling during the dental nurse-reception handover.

My opening gambit, stolen from the wonderful Prav Solanki, was selling is “earning the right to make a recommendation”. I have listened to a lot of Prav’s wisdom and wholeheartedly endorse this concept of selling. My team did too …

But the training was rapidly hijacked by all of the problems the team are facing in our existing practice workflows:

• That’s great Joanna, but we are needed in surgery and have zero time to do the handover …
• Yes, we’d love to recap the appointment but what about confidentiality if there’s another patient in earshot?
• How can I book a treatment plan if the clinician has forgotten to add the appointment timings?
• It’s not easy to sell sundries when the hygienist didn’t follow the protocol and recommend anything to the patient …

The objections just kept on coming. My neat little trainer was suddenly a bloodbath of all of the problems faced by the nursing and reception staff.

So what to do?

I kept pushing for more, and more! This was pure gold. The floodgates opened and the team were able to air their views and describe the problems they face every day.

To give more context, we’re about to embark on a deep-dive review with an external business coach. He is going to review EVERYTHING that we do. I’ve made the team aware this is happening and I’ve told them I want to know about all of the niggles that effect them everyday so that, collaboratively, we can find solutions to these problems.

Today my derailed training session was a breakthrough moment of trust, the team felt safe enough to candidly express all of their problems. Then they started making links how a malfunction in one department fed through difficulties for another staff member and so on. 

Suddenly, we had collaborative thinking, we thought through short term fixes for immediate problems, and outlined the larger issues that need to be resolved.

I stood and held my hands up that the training session was a trainwreck as far as my objectives were concerned, but fantastic for uncovering problems that were preventing us from delivering the customer service that we are all so passionate about.

It felt like my being vulnerable was accepted and appreciated by everybody, and we all sensed a desire to genuinely work together to redesign workflows and pathways for delivering treatment plans and excellent customer service.

Once again, I am humbled to work with such a great team of individuals. Their passion and commitment to Carew Dental are what makes our practice stand out to patients; they receive bags of energy and care during every visit to the practice. Even with our problematic protocols!

I’ve said it a billion times, I love my job!! What a team, just amazing!