Scott Leune: This podcast is sponsored by dentalmarketing.com and they have agreed to give the listeners of this podcast a free competitive marketing analysis. This analysis is going to show you very clearly how your practice is doing compared to your competitors. It's going to give you the health of your SEO, it's going to give you a website grade, and you'll also see what your competitors are up to. This helps you know what ad strategy you should have today, how clean and effective is your marketing right now find out by getting this free and detailed analysis, text the word marketing to 4 8 6, 5 9 and you'll receive this competitive analysis from our sponsor dentalmarketing.com. So do you ever have conflict in your practice? You ever annoyed or upset or you've got employees who just tell you they won't do something or you feel like you're being held hostage If you address conflict or if you try to have accountability, you're going to lose people and it's so hard to find people and we don't even want to address conflict.

We kind of want to put our head in the sand and pretend like bad things maybe aren't happening or maybe we just swallow it and we're upset internally and we'd get home and we'd just have a bad day and a bad night because of conflict. That's what we're going to talk about and we're talking about it with the expert. Gabe Karp, he's a conflict expert. He's a former trial lawyer and he's also a lawyer that would sue lawyers for malpractice talk about conflict. He's an author, he has been on TED Talk, he has been an entrepreneur and part of a company and one of the companies has now got 16,000 employees. He's part of Detroit Venture Partners. He's a board member of nonprofit medical group and he loves talking about the tools and strategies on how to deal with conflict. Head on. That is exactly what we're talking about in this episode, one of my favorite episodes I've recorded so far. So listen up, stay tuned, take notes, and you are going to be happy that you made it to the end of this episode.

Alright, so again, Gabe, welcome. Thank you for joining us after that introduction. I've been so excited to actually meet with you because one of your areas of expertise is a hot topic in dentistry. It's been hot for maybe decades and that is conflict management, conflict resolution, and your take on conflict is enlightening. It's refreshing while so many other people talk about, well how do I avoid conflict and how do I make sure we don't have conflict or problems? Your take is much different from that. So before saying any of that again, I want to thank you for joining us. Could you please for just a few little sentences here, for those of us that that are listening that have never heard of you before, could you give us the spiel on who you are, where you come from, and what you do?

Gabe Karp: Sure. First of all, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. And my journey into conflict, and I call it healthy conflict, began as I was a trial lawyer for the first decade of my career. I was in court multiple days a week in conflict and doing pretty contentious stuff, commercial litigation, which is business, divorce, legal malpractice, suing other lawyers for screwing up. So if you think about a normal lawsuit as being contentious with conflict, this was on steroids and cross-examining someone who cross examinees people for a living and who just freaking hates you is a really good learning experience. And that was the first time I started taking a step back thinking about conflict and how anger was flowing through a room and how emotions were really changing the dynamic of conflict. And then I left the private practice of law, joined a small tech startup.

We grew it to about 500 people pretty fast. You make a lot of mistakes in that growth and tremendous conflict. And I found that when we leaned into conflict and we embraced it, whether it was with a client that was upset, it was an underperforming team member, it was an investor, it didn't matter what it was. When we leaned in and embraced it, we moved faster and people felt better and we made more money and we had higher margin. Performance issues were addressed without drama, people actually got better. And I would say I can already think of many people who achieved a much higher optimal version of themselves because we were sort of forcing that on everybody. And what I found is that I was very comfortable with conflict. I was a lawyer, I was a trial lawyer. I enjoyed it. We could probably psychoanalyze why, but I found that.

So I was immediately running right to these conflicts and the people around me were very uncomfortable with it. I didn't even realize that at first. In fact, my lack of awareness made people even more uncomfortable. Then once I realized that the only thing I could think of is I need everyone around me to be more comfortable with conflict because we need to move faster for business and we don't have time to accommodate dancing around or tiptoeing around things because of issues. And I spent a lot of time working with people saying things to people to get them comfortable with the conflict and it worked and it was repeatable. And people would come to me and say, Hey, you said this thing a couple months ago and it's really stuck with me and I use it all the time and now I don't mind having these difficult conversations. So that's kind of how I got into this space. And then going from the tech startup world to a successful exit to venture capital, dealing with board level issues and financings, I found that it didn't matter if you were in the courtroom or the boardroom or even the parent teacher conference or the Thanksgiving dinner table. It's the same conflicts playing out over and over again and there's no difference. The setting may change, the names may change attire, your uniform may change, but the conflict itself is we all deal with the same crap.

Scott Leune: So okay, we got it. We got to dive into this. So when I think about, alright, I'm going to go straight to dental office, I'm a dentist, I am kind of burned out by the stresses and the conflicts of managing people. On one hand I've got a problem with turnover. I'm scared to lose people because it's so hard to replace 'em. On the other hand, I'm not happy with their performance and it just seems like I have to do so much by myself when I have other people do it, they're not meeting my expectations so often or they can't do it as well as I need them to do it. Or sometimes I just wonder if they're just have ill intent and I can feel hostage. I could feel like a hostage in the situation where the performance isn't good, but I can't afford to lose someone.

But I almost feel like I can't afford to even keep 'em either, and I'm just walking around on eggshells because I don't want to upset anyone any further than what we already have going. And oh, there's always seems to be drama, whether it's something important or something as dumb as it's too hot or it's too cold. Every day is just a new amount of drama that hits me as well. Alright, so I think I just described a typical day in a dental office from the dentist owner's perspective. So can we dive into that a little bit? You're the conflict expert. I've heard you say things like, well, you already said we should lean in to conflict. I've heard you say things like conflict is not a bad thing. You've also said don't focus on flawless execution and that there can be a gap between what we expect and what actually happens and we need to be accepting of things. So can we dive into that a bit?

Gabe Karp: Yeah, absolutely. Let's just start out with the understanding that healthy well-run organizations, dental practices, anywhere have conflict. It is inevitable that those conflicts come up. The unhealthy organizations pretend that that's not the reality. And then the organization or the culture, and it can be a culture of an office of four people. The culture is a conflict avoidant culture. Don't say anything that's going to upset somebody. Don't be impolite. I take a very different tact. My approach is be kind to people. And here's an example. Let's talk about conflict. Let's say right now on this podcast, it's video. If I had food in my teeth and I'm not looking at myself and you see that, or even worse, you're talking to me backstage, I'm about to walk out and present to 500 people and you see that I have food in my teeth. If you don't tell me that and let me go out there, that's mean.

That's like an unkind thing to do to somebody. So let's take it out of food and teeth. Oh, it is a good dental example. You just tell me to floss. But let's say that you have an underperforming, you have a hygienist who's doing something you don't want them to do or they're not doing something you do want them to do and you don't tell them, and instead you just sit there and are just mad about it and then you're afraid to tell 'em. And then what you're doing though is you actually have valuable information that would really help this person. And out of the, and I don't mean you Scott, you're a nice guy, but just collectively you out of a sense of being kind and polite, you deprive this person of the opportunity to be aware of what they're doing and you deprive the opportunity to correct it and grow.

That's not nice. So if we approach it not from being polite to being nice, it changes the dynamic. You want to tell someone, Hey, look, there's a problem here and I want to give you awareness to it so you have the opportunity to fix it and here are some ways I think you can fix it. So let's back up for a second, A hard conversation to begin. People are like, okay, that's great, but I don't want to walk up to someone and say they have a bad attitude. They'll just tell me they have a good attitude and then turn it around on me, and then they go from bad to worse. So instead you can open up any conversation with, Hey, I think you're being perceived in a way that you don't want to be perceived or I have something I'd like to share with you that I think would be really helpful for you. Those are two just random ways to start a conversation. Most people are going to perk up and want to hear what you have to say next. Very few people are going to say, screw you, I don't want to hear it. And very few people are going to think that. So once you have their attention in that way, number one, they're prepared to hear something that they know isn't going to be the greatest news, but they also are prepared to hear an opportunity for them to improve and do something better and be better.

Scott Leune: Interesting. So instead of saying you have a bad attitude where it immediately triggers them into being defensive and counter attacking the attack they felt they just got, right? You're saying, I think you're being perceived by people sometimes in a way that you don't want to be perceived. You don't intend to be perceived that way. And now that's almost like it's not attacking them. It's almost like a friend saying, Hey, I need to give you this. Heads up, you've got some food stuck in your teeth. Did I say that correctly?

Gabe Karp: Yeah, exactly. And part of that is, and I kind of skirted over it, but yeah, you shouldn't say anything that imposes a belief or a feeling onto someone else. Meaning I would never tell someone what they think or what they feel because they're immediately going to know in their head I'm wrong because they're not going to want to acknowledge that. So let's take a bad attitude, for example. Listen, I think you're being perceived in a way you don't want to be perceived. For example, the other day when so-and-so was talking and you cut her off that gave the impression that you weren't interested in anything she has to say. But I know that's not true. I think you're a great person who is interested in what other people have to say, but the perception is that you didn't, there's no more supportive way to approach that. And you're telling them, don't fricking cut people off.

Scott Leune: And if we don't tell 'em, and that goes on and on and on, that person eventually gets a label. People then just are triggered by that the next time they do it again. And it just spins out of control. And what you're doing is you're putting out the little spark before it turns into a fire that then becomes raging.

Gabe Karp: So instead of you don't care about other people's time, hey, when you show up late to the meeting, that gives the impression to others that you think your time is more valuable than theirs.

Scott Leune: So when you do this thing, it causes other people to think this about you. But I know that's not true. You're not like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That's amazing. I wonder though, if we step back a bit, would you agree with me that sometimes we have unrealistic expectations of people that maybe our internal conflict is almost an unreasonable to begin with,

Gabe Karp: That is a source of a surprisingly high percentage of conflict. I use the analogy of don't get mad at penguins. I've talked about this before, but let me explain what that is, is that you can avoid a lot of suffering in life if you stay out of the gap between our expectations and reality because in that gap, that's where a great deal of suffering is. And that's your expectations of maybe someone on your team that isn't performing the way you want or it's a personal relationship. I mean, again, to me, it doesn't matter if you are in a dental practice or you are in a boardroom or you're dealing some kid's little league game it. It's the same dynamics that play out. So the hard part is, so I say don't get mad at penguins because they can't fly. And people are like, what the hell does that mean?

Well, what that really is, it's a lesson in acceptance. We should accept people's limitations even though, and we should not expect them to do things they're not capable of even though we may really, really want them to, the hardest part is to recognize that they actually have a limitation because most people assume that the others they're dealing with don't have limitations. So I say take a penguin for example. What do you mean a penguin can't fly? It's a bird, it's got wings, it's got feathers and birds with wings and feathers can fly well, but penguins can't. Flight is literally beyond their ability and we can choose to get mad at that or we can accept it. And I've had people, I've talked to people and they'll tell me about something that someone else does. It always pisses them off, makes them upset. And I said, yeah, but this person, have you considered the possibility that they're not capable of behaving in the way you want?

And then they'll rattle off all the reasons why they are capable. What do you mean they're not capable? They're smart, actually very witty. I've heard them tell funny jokes isn't that? And someone who's smart and witty in these areas, they would have to have the awareness in the area that I need them to have awareness in or they'd have to have this ability. And my response is, no, they don't have to. And you're saying that because you really want them to, but getting mad at them for this thing that's like getting mad at a penguin because it can't fly.

Scott Leune: Yeah. Wow. I'm thinking of two examples right now in my life. So I go on a weekly date night with my wife and a bunch of our friends, and I'm thinking of some of my friends that never show up anywhere close to being on time. They're always an hour or more later. And it used to kind of annoy me and upset me and I just accepted it and I realized I'm never going to book reservations for them. I'm just going to always assume they're going to show up at stop. Even though they said they'd be at stop one and they may not know any different, but oh my God, it sure did improve my life and I wasn't upset every week when they didn't show. I almost laugh about it now. That's who they are and it doesn't bother me. I also think about an employee I've had who was so good at their job, but not great at talking to people. And I had 'em in a position that required both be good and talk to people. And I was actually told by multiple other people in my organization, we need to let this person go. But I was like, God, they're so good. Maybe we need to put 'em in a position where we don't expect them to be good at talking to people. We put 'em in a position where they're focused merely on their strengths and the gap that we have isn't going to impact us negatively.

So would you agree with me then that if we can have a penguin, we need to accept it and put them in a position where we're not damaged by what they're lacking? Although sometimes we need a bird to fly and we realize we have a penguin and it's nothing against them, but we don't have a role for penguin. We need someone flying.

Gabe Karp: So by the way, those are two phenomenal examples, especially with the friend who's late because the suffering ended when you just accepted the reality

Scott Leune: And it was my suffering. It wasn't even theirs, it was mine.

Gabe Karp: Yeah, they don't suffer.

Scott Leune: Yeah.

Gabe Karp: And I mean it sounds so simple. It's common sense. So many people never even get to that acceptance because they're pissed off. It's like this is rude. You realize your friend, they're not making a choice. They be late and make you upset. That's just who they are. That's how they've prioritized. And some people may be watching this, but wait a second, the guy can decide one day to be on time and the response that is, yes, the guy can decide, but for the past a hundred times he hasn't. So it would be irrational for us to expect that out of the blue, this guy's just going to change Now, by the way, that guy actually might change one day, but until then I wouldn't expect it. The team member who is so great in this one area but is not good talking to people, once you accept that that is who this guy is, now you can make an informed decision of what you want to do about it.

And you had the luxury, and by the way, many of us have this luxury and we don't realize it. You had the luxury of say, all right, I'm just going to change his role. I'm going to change things around. So I'm going to play to this guy's strengths and play away from his weaknesses. And I'm not going to put him in a position where he has to fly when he can't fly. But if you get to the point where you say, well, yeah, okay, but for this particular position, I need this bird to fly. Well, okay, well if you've got a penguin there, that will never happen. So you need to replace that penguin with a bird that can actually fly and you make informed decisions and you make them dispassionately.

Scott Leune: Yeah. So what's interesting here, where my brain's going is step one is we need to make sure our expectations are reasonable. And step two though says, well, what if they can fly? But every now and then they make a mistake. It's not great flight every time. So now that's talking about this whole concept that you've said, don't focus on flawless execution. So I've got a bird that can fly, but they're not flying perfectly every time. Do I engage in conflict? Do I get upset? Could you talk about that?

Gabe Karp: Sure. The flawless execution piece is I think it's best to actually approach us from 180 degree angle different. So let's think about ourselves. I mean most organizations, particularly bigger ones, the culture is they honor flawless execution above all else. And any mistake or misstep, it's frowned upon and it's seen as a badge of shame. And the problem with that is that all organizations are run by human beings. And human beings are imperfect. We are not flawless. We are, the nature of the human condition is that there are flaws. Now there's nuance, quality execution is very important and and must be honored. But because we're humans, mistakes are inevitable. And a real test of character is how we respond once we recognize that we've made a mistake. And in organizations where flawless execution is honored above all else, when somebody makes a mistake, they're going to be really motivated to keep it covered up for as long as possible.

And there's so many bad dominoes that fall after that point. We didn't have to get into it, but so staying on the viewpoint of us, let's talk about character for a minute. When we make a mistake and we recognize it, that's an opportunity for us to demonstrate our character and the culture of our organization can either lend itself to people having strong character or it can push against that and cause people to want to cover up mistakes and not be accountable. So that's from our perspective. Now, let's go back to the leader. And you've got someone on your team who's made a mistake. You want to have a culture, and the culture is top down from leader. You want that person to be in an environment where they not only feel comfortable owning up to their mistake and being accountable they want to because that's the thing that's honored in the organization.

So I would view your role as a leader as when somebody does make a mistake, you want to give them, want to make sure that they take full advantage of the opportunity to be accountable, demonstrate their character and replace it. And I've said to people, I've worked in very high stress environments and people are so afraid to make a mistake. And I pull aside, I say, look, let me s spare you the suspense. You're going to make a mistake. And one of the problems by the way, is when people are really afraid to make mistakes, they don't make decisions. And then you as the leader become the bottleneck in the organization. Nothing can happen without your say so because they can always say, all right, hey, if this goes wrong, that was on Scott, that was not on me. You don't want that. You want people, even in small organizations, you want people to be autonomous.

You want them to have agency over their day. So if you say to somebody, you're going to make a mistake and it's impossible for you to avoid a mistake. So if you try, you're just exerting effort that you shouldn't try not to make a mistake, but know that when one happens, tell me about it immediately and let's minimize the damage from that mistake and let's use it as an opportunity to learn where we can Maybe, maybe I need to learn, maybe we need to change some process here that makes it easier for you to not make that mistake in the future. But I promise you, you're not going to get fired from making a mistake. You will put your job in jeopardy if you refuse to make decisions and you're only going to be a mindless drone that will only do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it. You shouldn't want to be in that organization, and I don't want to have people like that here.

Scott Leune: Well, you just described a dental office. I think you've got a leader that is forced to have to decide everything. Now, this leader was trained in school, had to have perfect grades, had to do perfect dentistry to the perfect number of millimeters in the perfect clinical environment. And they expect perfection in so many ways, and their people aren't making decisions and their people are scared to make mistakes and they cover things up. And so the leader ends up having to do so much work and is always disappointed because number one, they had to do the work. Number two, the work the people did do wasn't perfect. And number three, the people aren't doing the rest of the work. You just described it. So if it's okay, I'd like to, let's tell a little story here. I'm a dentist and I want to implement this new technology in my examination process, AI analysis on my x-rays and this kind of digital scanning of images. And I've got two dental assistants and one of 'em is older, really not good with computers, just can barely make it through our clinical charting, let alone the AI and the x-rays and the scanning.

Gabe Karp: And

Scott Leune: I've been having this person try to do AI and scanning and it's driving me insane because she's not doing it and I'm feeling like maybe I need to have a different person and then I've got another person that can do it, but they're in the hygiene department and they're not in the correct department for this. And so in this story, if I follow what you've said, I'd be like, okay, maybe I need to switch 'em, right? Maybe I need to put the person that's naturally good at this into doing that job and the one that can't, the penguin have the penguin over in the penguin department where they don't have to fly. And then the person now that's doing it that can fly makes mistakes every now and then. And instead of being upset, I maybe need to be curious and I need to be supportive of their mistakes, becoming moments where they can bring it and talk about it and have accountability with themselves. I can honor that, but also they can teach me because maybe, I don't know something. Maybe the mistakes are a result of something that we as a company should address or fix that we're making it harder for them to be as flawless as we would hope. Did I say all of that correctly?

Gabe Karp: You did. And there's a lot to unpack in a couple different angles of that. So it's worth digging in. Yes, you said that right? And a lot of it depends on the details of the dental practice and who you've got and what's going on. I mean, I'm a strong proponent of it's always great to have a written job description of a hygienist and you want to hire for that and that's great. But once you get somebody in and this unique person's set of skills and weaknesses, I'm a proponent of let's modify the rule around the person. There's the old adage of forget about just get the right people on the bus. Once they're on the bus, then you figure out what seats they go into. So when it comes to a culture of accountability and candor, that's so important. So there are mistakes people are going to make that they're not really going to be a learning opportunity.

They're just a mistake and sometimes they're a bad mistake. And you as the person running that practice, you need to know about that as soon as possible. So you got to create some safety for people to come forward and say, raise their hand and say, I screwed up. And they're not going to do that if they don't feel safe. So you got to tell 'em. Now here's the hard part. There aren't many of them, but there are things people can do. There are mistakes people can make that mandate. Immediate termination on the spot. I don't know. They scream at a patient, they do something totally unacceptable. Yeah, you work here, you got to go now. But that's a small number of things. You want to make sure that people feel comfortable and when there is a bad mistake that it's not really a great learning opportunity.

I would actually use this as an opportunity to reaffirm a person, especially if they're talented and you can say to them, Hey, look, this thing happened, this is bad. And when you don't yell at 'em, I use what I call a shopping list voice. I probably don't have time to get into that, but you can imagine the tone of voice you use when you convey a shopping list to somebody. I'm going to the store, you want me to get anything? Yeah, eggs, milk, sugar, it's dispassionate. Tell them the thing they did was bad. And if there's no lesson to be gained from it, I would say to them, let's not sugarcoat this. This is bad, but you are not bad. You're actually like a great person who's got a great future ahead of you if you want it. And my hope for you is that this mistake is like the turnaround point in your career. And that six months or a year from now, we'll look back on this and say, yep, really screwed that up back then. But ever since then, she's been executing with a great attitude, delivering stuff on time, making patients all these things, and there was a mistake. And that mistake is just part of your success story. That's what this can be. And if you say that you're just creating a really supportive environment where people are going to do their best to give you their best. At the end of the day, that's what you

Scott Leune: Want. Yeah. Wow. What about though I am an owner, I want to implement something new, I want to implement changing how we schedule patients, and I've got two veterans on my team and they're like, no, that's not going to work for these reasons. We're not going to do it. We don't want to do it. Or even worse, they're silent, they don't say anything, but they are not going to do it. It's not being done after we've agreed or I've commanded that this is the new thing. That's a conflict. It's not a mistake. It really is head to head in some ways, my way or your way. Let's dual this off here. What would we do here with this?

Gabe Karp: So let's say you got someone who says, look, I've been scheduling this way for you for the past 15 years. It's fine. We don't have to change and this new stuff that's going to be hard for me and I just don't want to do it. I would dig into the issue with that person. I mean, it depends on personality, but I would say, alright, let's pretend for a moment that this is actually really important to me and that I want to change the way we're scheduling because, and then you list the reasons why you actually want to make the change. Presumably you don't want to make a change just for the sake of changing. There's some improvement. So I would point those out. What if this new way of scheduling actually things more efficient or I don't know what it ties into the text messaging thing where the patient gets a text message the day before the appointment, say just a reminder and it reduces our no-shows, and you just list whatever those benefits are. They're going to need to respond to that. And if you notice, I started that by saying, let's pretend. The reason I say that is that you want to pull people out of having to be defensive or confrontational. You're creating a hypothetical

And you're sort of removing this stigma of being a person who's engaging in conflict. You're just having a hypothetical conversation now, and that frees us up. Now, I would also say that you may want to institute something. I call them regularly scheduled debrief meetings, or if you already have too many meetings, just carve out 10 minutes for your team to get together 10 minutes a week where it's like, okay, our job right now is to call out problems, get things off our chest. You are not doing your job if you remain silent. And what you're doing is you are making the initiation of conflict a job requirement. And when people know that, okay, at three o'clock today we're going to have that meeting where they're going to think about things to come up, they're going to want to say things at that time. Because part of the discomfort a lot of us have is we've been socially engineered to avoid conflict.

We soften bad news. We took a little feedback when we were kids. We would say, if you don't anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. So there's real stuff going on in our brains that prevent us to make us shy away from conflict. When you flip the script, somebody no longer is worried about being stigmatized. There're always the one raising problems. Instead, it is a 180 and the people who remain silent, they feel the social pressure, they're stigmatized because they're now the dead weight that everyone else is trying to have to drag along as we look for solutions to problems and we continually seek improvement, and it's not a big deal. It literally could take 10 minutes a week. And if you've got issues you want to solve, it's so worth it to spend that 10 minutes a week. Bad news will surface faster in your organization.

You'll encourage people and not only you'll motivate them and empower them to spend a few minutes thinking, how can I improve this? I want to come up with something good in that meeting. I want to be the one that brings out the nugget. Like, Hey, do you realize that the way these billing codes are stored all these years, it's really inefficient. I mean, think of the minor improvements you can make and you stack up eight or 10 of those across a few months, you've got real improvement in an and So, sorry, I kind of rambled there, but

Scott Leune: No, no, this was probably my favorite part of this entire time together because there's some massive amounts of wisdom in what you just said. Number one, if it's pre-scheduled, people know it's coming and maybe we won't get flooded with things in between the meetings because they know we have time carved out for it. So now that kind of takes some of that stuff off our plate in the middle of the week. Second, if they're bringing it to the group and we have a culture that says, Hey, we're going to talk about it and this is going to be a positive result, it's almost like they're not going to let it bubble up and become something ridiculous and irrational, especially not in front of their peers. They're going to try to come at this in a more mature way, and then because it's in front of their peers and in front of the leader of the organization, they're going to want to bring value and look valuable and look mature and appropriate and kind.

They don't want to earn a bad label in that moment. And I think when I look at how dental offices do it, a lot of dentist stop having meetings. They might call it a bitch session every now and then it turns into a bitch session, let's avoid it, is what they do. And it's avoiding that there's a little bit of cancer in us, like, oh no, we should go ahead and talk about it and do something about it now before that thing starts spreading to multiple people in multiple ways, the multiple rational thoughts that can suddenly just overtake the culture before anyone even brings it to the leader.

Gabe Karp: Yeah, I've got an observation on that and then I want to level up one more from there. When you have these meetings every single week, I would say the very first time you try this in your dental practice, it's probably not going to go perfectly. It'll be bumpy and people will feel uncomfortable, and it may sound like a bit session, but when you run that right back the very next week and do it again, now people have kind of gotten a lot. Like the first time you open the release, valve stuff's going to fly out.

The next time you do it, there's not as much pent up. And then the third time you do it, now you're in a really good groove and it becomes more dispassionate. And I'll say one more thing in addition to these, what I call debrief meetings, have a pre-brief meeting. So you mentioned, Hey, want to do, I want to institute a new way of booking appointments or something, get the people together and say, there's an idea here, and that's to do this new way of booking and here's what the system looks like. Let's assume we do this and we fail and there are problems, and a month from now we're complaining about it. Why would that be? What are the things in the organization that would give rise to those failures? Now you're taking an execution problem with conflict in it, and you're turning into almost an academic exercise and people get to freely think they're going to look for reasons why it would fail. And by the way, they may come up with them, which would be fantastic because then you can say, okay, now that we know the failure points, how can we plug those up? How we know where the leaks are, how can we plug them? How can we avoid those problems? And someone may say, well, yeah, one of the reasons why it won't work is that I don't want to fricking do it. I don't want to change.

There's value in making somebody say, that sounds petty, but sometimes people have to say that. And if they say, they say, okay, that's definitely something to consider. I don't want to force something down your throat and cram you into doing something, but would you at least be willing to consider the benefits of doing this A, B, and C? Do you think those benefits are good things? They're not going to say to you, no, those benefits are bad, or No, those benefits aren't worth it. At the end of the day, you are the boss. What you say goes, but you're giving people agency, they get to be architects of the solution as opposed to being someone that you're just dictating to. And when you ask the hypothetical question, let's say we do this in the future and it doesn't work now you've totally freed them from the stigma of being the source of conflict. They'll actively engage in that exercise. And it's actually an empowering thing. People go home that night after they're done with work and they feel like, well, today was actually a productive day. I cleaned a couple of people's teeth and I got to hand out some new toothbrushes. But also we worked on some real stuff today that's going to make a difference in my life and my coworkers lives.

Scott Leune: Yeah, I cannot tell you how happy I am that we had this talk today together because dentistry really needs what you're saying. So I don't know if you've ever thought about connecting with the dental industry or the dental profession, and I bet the medical professionals are in many ways similar, but we really need experts giving us tools on how to become better at dealing with the conflicts that happen every day. We're at a point now in dentistry where we feel burnt out. So often there's people talking about mental health and people are willing to quit dentistry. People are willing to sell their practices to get out of having to manage people and deal with conflict. And it is really impacting how we function. And so we really need what you're saying. So I don't know if anyone's told you that, but I'm telling you right now, if you found a way in dentistry, you would have a very receptive audience to what you're talking about.

Gabe Karp: Yeah, I have done it in the medical side. I've spoken to hospital systems in their annual meetings and I'll just kind of lump dentistry and medicine together. When you put doctor in front of people's names, there's, in order to achieve that degree, there are things you need to go through that maybe have some undesirable impacts on your ego. And I have found that there's a resistance to changing from my way or the highway. There's comfort in that, especially when people came up in a system where they had to kind of be hazed for a while and they put in their time and well, yeah, that's just how it works here. But you've got people's wellbeing at stake. You can deliver better dental care with a positive culture in an office. And I've seen that certainly in the medical hospitals and in doctor's offices, and there's a lot of resistance because you have people mandating all these metrics now on the healthcare professionals and they feel like there need to hit these metrics is interfering with patient care. And by the way, that's a good conflict to have because the person dictating the metric may not be aware of how it's negatively impacting patient care. And the person kind of suffering by having to follow the metric may not be aware of the benefits the metric produces because no one's talking about it because they're in a conflict avoidance culture. Because yeah, we're not supposed to go there. We're not supposed to have that conversation. And I say have it Because you eliminate all kinds of internal suffering.

Scott Leune: Yeah. You are speaking to the heart of so many organizations in dentistry right now. Well, we're out of time, but I want people to understand where they can learn more about you. Could you let us know where to go online or where to go on social media to connect with you or read more about you?

Gabe Karp: Sure. I'm on LinkedIn, but you can also just gabe karp.com. My last name is KARP. A lot of people think it's C, but just gabe carp.com is in about 15 seconds on that site, you'll get a very good sense of what I'm all about and what the messaging is. And

Scott Leune: The book you wrote, what was the name of the book?

Gabe Karp: Don't Get Mad at Penguins.

Scott Leune: Oh, I love it. Don't get mad at penguins. I am probably never going to forget that for the rest of my life. I love it.

Gabe Karp: Let me just plug this one thing I did do a TED Talk, how to thrive with Difficult People.

Scott Leune: Oh,

Gabe Karp: It's only eight minutes, so you can just look that up. And I spent a few minutes talking about penguins in that TED Talk, so it's a good summary of the whole penguin.

Scott Leune: Awesome. Well, again, I thank you so much for opening up your schedule and giving us this wisdom here in dentistry on the dental CE podcast. Before we call it quits here, is there any last thing you'd like to say to the listeners right now?

Gabe Karp: Yeah, so first of all, thank you. It's been my pleasure to come. As you can tell, I'm passionate about this and I'm going to go back to what I said kind of at the beginning about that gap between expectation and reality. If we can close that gap and we can inject that lesson into not only our work but our personal relationships and our communities, we can eliminate so much suffering. So that's what I would hope people walk away with,

Scott Leune: And I'm going to have my wife listen to that over and over and over again. Well, again, thank you so much for this. We're going to try to link everything up so people can find you easily online, and I hope we get to do this again. I would love to kind of come to you with an example or two of what we see in practice, and you and I just kind of chew on that and talk about it, and I would love to do that. I hope we can do that in the future.

Gabe Karp: Yeah, my favorite is getting into real life examples. So again, thank you for having me. It's been great and I would love to talk

Scott Leune: More. Alright everyone, so Gabe Karp, KARP, gabe karp.com. Gabe, thank you so much and I hope to see you soon. So now let's do the dental download with our episode here at Gabe Carp. Holy cow, was this an amazing episode for me at least? I was really kind of connecting with what he was saying and thinking back to the times of conflict that I've had in the past as well as some of the stuff I'm actually having right now. So here's a lot of things that he said and what it kind of meant to me in dentistry, and by the way, I really appreciate that we spoke directly about dentistry, that he was willing to kind of in a way coach through these examples. But here's some of the things he said. He said, lean in and embrace conflict. It helps us grow faster. And if you remember, he said he had to grow to 500 employees very quickly.

He said healthy organizations have conflict. Unhealthy organizations, they also have conflict, but they pretend there is no conflict. So in those unhealthy organizations, people end up hiding conflict. It becomes almost like a political game. And what that means to me in dentistry is we can have situations in dental office where there's almost this animosity that's happening under the surface that we may not know about because people are hiding it. Something happened and because we hid it, because we didn't talk about it because we didn't have a culture that said it was safe to bring it up, we didn't have a meeting. We want people to bring it up. It never got brought up, and then it just starts growing underneath the surface and this cancer can spread to multiple people and ultimately it can blow up on us or it could just silently, continuously hurt us. And so I love what he said, that healthy organizations have it meaning a healthy dental practice is going to seek out the conflict in a productive way, in a safe way. Talk about it and resolve it.

He talked about penguins can't fly. So outside of having conflict, we first have to recognize that our expectations need to be reasonable, and if we're having an unreasonable expectation of someone, then that is going to generate conflict That should have never existed. Like if we expect all birds to fly and we look at a penguin and say, we expect you to fly, fly, but they can't. We can't. That's not going to work. If we have an employee who is unable to do something we wish they would do, we have to recognize that and own that and make a decision on what to do about it instead of having the expectation they can actually do it. I use the example where if I have an employee that's horrible with computers, I can't necessarily expect 'em to take on new technology very well and very quickly I either need to put 'em in a position where they're not going to have to do that because they just can't.

Or if it's a requirement that they have to do that, it's a requirement they have to fly. I'm going to have to replace 'em. He then said, outside of having the expectation that someone should be able to do something they can't do, he talked about, well, we shouldn't also expect flawless execution. Maybe someone can fly, but we shouldn't expect it to be flawless. When we expect flawless execution and we honor flawless execution, then people are scared to make mistakes. They hide their mistakes, and he said they stop making decisions when we're fearful of making mistakes because we expect flawless execution, we stop making decisions. We're like, just tell me what to do and I'll do it. I don't want to make a mistake. And that results in this domino effect results in the owner, the leader, the office manager, the dentist having to do everything, having to tell everyone what to do, and that is a lot of weight to carry.

That's a lot of work. That is the dentist saying, I wish I had an office manager or the dentist saying, I wish I could cut back a day clinically so I could focus more on the business. That's also the dentist saying, I wish my team could run the practice. I wish the practice could run itself. So when we have this culture of saying we don't expect flawless execution, we actually expect mistakes, we own up to mistakes, we honor it when people own up to mistakes that makes it safe to then also make decisions. And he talked about we as leaders need to be the first ones to own up to the mistake. We have to again lead by example. When we make a mistake, we bring it up immediately. We need mistakes brought up immediately, and he talked about to bring up mistakes. He talked about the fact we need what he called a debriefing meeting and he talked about maybe only needing 10 minutes a week.

At the end of the week, we have a meeting and everyone knows the point of this meeting is to bring up what's not working to bring up issues, mistakes and conflict, and we're going to go around the room and everyone's got to bring something and that I had said in the podcast episode that there was so much wisdom in that meeting that is like an aha moment for me. If we can make conflict something we have a meeting about and that we expect to talk about instead of something we hide and avoid, then now that meeting is going to be a proactive way to address conflict. While it's small, it's in an environment where people will want to look intelligent, want to look mature. It's in an environment where the conflict is probably not going to bubble up into some kind of irrational dramatic thing that bubbles over and causes all kinds of pain.

And also because the meeting is scheduled, we get to kind of push the conflict to the meeting and people will wait for their conflict until the meeting. In a way, I think it's a genius tiny little tweak to how we run a practice is inserting this debriefing meeting. He also talked about the pre-briefing meeting where he used the example, if we want to implement something new, let's say a new way to schedule, a new way to answer the phone, we want to implement assisted hygiene instead of just trying to drive it in and forcibly cause people to say yes, they're going to implement it. He says, let's make a hypothetical about it first, hypothetically speaking, if we were to implement assisted hygiene, he said, tell me all the reasons why it might fail, hypothetically speaking, what might cause it to fail. That little tweak in communication makes it now safe for people to kind of brainstorm openly about all the reasons why it might fail, and that allows the conversation to not be so riddled with conflict. It's not going to be an attacking type of conversation or a defensive type of conversation. It also allows us as the leader to now proactively understand where these kind of friction points might be and what we're trying to implement and we can address 'em. I thought that was genius. Now we then brought it to, okay, well what if there really is conflict? We got to address it like someone made a mistake or someone is doing something just bad, they have an attitude issue or they're cutting people off. So those are two separate things. Mistake versus maybe this kind of attitude issue. On the attitude issue, he talked about kind of instead of saying to someone, you've got a bad attitude, he said, he talked about the fact that I think you're being perceived in a way that you don't want to be perceived. So I think you're being perceived in a way you don't want to be perceived when you do this.

He use the example when you cut someone off as you're talking about things and you're excited about things, I think you're being perceived as not caring about what they think or what they have to say, but I know you're not that way. I know you care about what they think or what they have to say, but I think because of how you're cutting 'em off every now and then you're being perceived like you don't care. That is a really cool way of addressing conflict. He also used the example of if someone makes a mistake, he said, well, you got to tell them. You have to say it was a mistake. And even if it was a really bad one, we have to say it, Sarah, you made a really bad mistake. The mistake is bad, but you're not bad. You're wonderful, you're amazing. You do these things right and those things, right?

But this mistake, this was a bad mistake. We're going to learn from this and we are going to look back and hopefully be able to laugh about this. We definitely need to fix this right now though. I love how he said that this is bad, but you're not bad and just calls out the mistake. And he talked about the shopping voice, the tone of voice that you would use if you were calling off a shopping list like, Hey, we need apples, we need bread. We need milk. That kind of voice like, Sarah, this was a mistake, this was a mistake. This is a bad mistake, but you're not bad. That's the shopping voice. I love that as well. When I step back and think about this whole session, I think about dentistry. We constantly complain about how hard it is to manage people and we complain about the drama.

We call people divas sometimes under our breath, and we have this animosity that can build up, and it's not just from the dentist to the employees, it's the other way around, for sure. The employees to the dentists, the employees to each other. I love the framework he outlined. I connect these dots in this way. Step one, we need to make sure that we're not expecting a penguin to fly. We need to make sure that we have appropriate expectations, that someone has the ability they truly can do this. That's who they are. Then number two, when people do things, we better not expect it to be flawless. We should expect things to go wrong every now and then because that is a reasonable expectation and a mistake isn't necessarily a problem or a conflict that we have to react to emotionally. And then number three, we need to honor mistakes.

We need to build a positive culture around mistakes, and we could do that with a debriefing meeting. We can do that with how we talk to people about the mistake, the tone of voice and the types of words we use, and we have to also lead by example. When we make a mistake, we have to call it out. And if we have a problem with a person that's not based on a mistake, but it is a conflict about something else, we need to approach 'em in a way where they do not feel attacked. And that is using that strategy. Hey, you don't know. I don't think you understand that people might perceive this or that, and all of that means we're being nice. We're being nice to our people. We're not letting 'em walk out on stage with some food in their teeth. We're not letting 'em become someone that gets a label as rude or cutting people off.

We we're not treating 'em so harshly that they're scared to make a mistake or scared to make a decision. We are being nice and we are now a leader that has a team that feels safe to make decisions. It feels safe to call out problems and that also doesn't feel attacked when they might have been part of an issue. I hope that if this is speaking to you, this episode that you re-listen to it and take notes and try to use a strategy this week, try to use something he talked about this week and I would love to hear back from you either on the comments or send me a message on Instagram. I would love to hear back from you your story of did it work or what was it like? I might even want you on the podcast telling the story, so try something. He said, tell me what you did and what happened, and let's all benefit from these stories. Alright, I hope this was valuable for you. We've got these episodes dropping every week. Make This part of your weekly habit driving to work or working out. Here are our episode once a week. Please subscribe and please leave a review if you can help us. If you feel like this is valuable for you, we would really appreciate it. And until next time here, this is Scott Leune on the Dental CEO podcast.