Scott Leune: So something that's bothered me my entire career is that the largest supply companies give huge discounts to the large DSOs, while private dentists have to just pay more and more and more for things every single year. What's also bothered me is that there are some buying groups out there in dentistry that claim to save private dentists a bunch of money, but those buying groups are still utilizing the big companies that have been overcharging dentists the entire time. And those buying groups aren't necessarily giving dentists the low pricing that the DSOs still get comes a solution, a new sponsor of ours, I'm super excited to announce that the Private Dental Alliance is trying to solve this problem. Finally, someone's doing it where private dentists only join their alliance and they get super low pricing on equipment supplies and lab fees, competing with the DSOs, putting them on a level playing field with the DSOs.

If you want to understand how much money you would save, text the word savings to 4 8, 6 5, 9 savings to 4 8, 6, 5, 9. Do that right now, and you will be able to see very quickly a price comparison of what you're currently spending with whoever you're spending it with to what life would look like if you were in the alliance. Be a private dentist that takes advantage of this. Save a ton of money. Don't keep going month after month, losing money because you just haven't gone through the process of joining the Alliance. That's Private Dental Alliance. Super excited. Finally, we can save some real money. As private dentists, we have a huge problem in dentistry. It's hard to find people, it's hard to keep people. People don't seem to be happy. They don't seem to be engaged, not just the people that work for us, but shoot. The owner of the practice doesn't seem to be happy, engaged, burnout's happening.

These are the topics we're going to talk about with today's guest, Laura. She is a very well-known author of a book Limitless and another book Wonder Health. She has been a Ted Talk speaker. She's been named one of the number three top motivational speakers in the world. She's been on countless different shows and publications. Good Morning America, Oprah Daily, Inc. Forbes, Harvard Business Review. This is definitely an episode to listen to as we dive into what we can do in a dental practice to get rid of this problem of having to find and keep people happy. All right, Laura, so as you heard, thank you so much for joining us on the Dental CEO podcast today. And for those of our listeners that have not heard you speak before, haven't read one of your books, could you spend a little bit of time giving an overview of who you are and what you do?

Laura Gassner Otting: Yeah, so I spend all of my time thinking about how people can bring everything they are to everything they do, whether it is in human performance, whether it's as a manager, whether it's as an entrepreneur, whether it's somebody who's trying to scale a business, whether it's somebody who's trying to decide whether to take that next step. And I come to that knowledge having spent 20 years in executive search where I interviewed thousands of executives in massive moments of career shift and organizational disruption, all learning that the most interesting people in the world are not the ones who had a linear path, but the ones who took right turns and left turns and U-turn and learns all those lessons along the way.

Scott Leune: And I think when I read through everything you've done some things stand out to me, you wrote a few books that became bestsellers. I think the one that I recognize that I haven't read yet, but it's now on my list of I listen to books every morning, so I put it on my list, but that's the one Limitless. And then you also wrote, wonder Hell, was that after Limitless or was that before?

Laura Gassner Otting: Yeah, wonder Hell was After. And it was actually because of Limitless. So I wrote Limitless, frankly, because I was asked to give a TEDx that TEDx got some attention. I got offered $1,500 to fly across the country to give a talk in Boise, Idaho. And I was like, wait a minute. I just get to talk for 45 minutes and you pay me money. Tell me more about that job. And I noticed that the people who were making real money had books. So I figured I should write myself a book about what it was that I knew. So you get to this moment in your life when you're building a practice and you realize that in order to get to the next level, you have to have some marker of credibility, some something that you don't have yet. And so I wrote Limitless with the idea that if I could really collate everything that I had learned, memorialize, everything I learned in those 20 years of executive search, I would be able to start speaking from that.

And then that book came out and it actually debuted at number two on the Washington Post bestseller list right behind Michelle Obama. And in the moment that it debuted, I had this experience where I thought, well, I'm exhausted from everything it takes to launch this book. And I left my humility back in the Waiting Lounge in Vancouver before I got on this red eye back to Boston number two, what does it take to be number one? And when I had that moment, I was met with this burden of my potential, this what else can I become in my life? And once I had that, I couldn't get rid of it. So I called a hundred different glass ceiling shatters, Olympic medalists, startup unicorns, thinkers, creatives, entrepreneurs, artists. And I wanted to know how they got out of this moment dealing with this burden of, I know I can be more, but I don't quite, I'm filled with doubt and uncertainty and anxiety and exhaustion and imposter syndrome. And so Wonder Hell was actually born out of what happened with Limitless.

Scott Leune: Yeah. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but Limitless was named as kind of one of the year's best books. Was it by, was it The Today Show or what?

Laura Gassner Otting: It was by Good Morning America.

Scott Leune: Good Morning America. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And since you've been featured on Oprah DA and Harvard Business Review and Forbes and all these kinds of publications, so it's turned into an amazing thing that you've done. So could you explain a little bit about then Wonder Hell, so what's kind of the gist of that book or that topic?

Laura Gassner Otting: So Wonder Hell is about that moment where you've experienced some success and for a dental practice, you've got one great location, you want to go to 10, you've got 10, you want to go to a hundred, right? You are in this moment where you want to put a second chair in, even it could be any level of success. And once you've achieved it, you're like, that's amazing. It's exciting, it's humbling. It's wonderful that I got to this place I didn't even know I could get to. And inside of that success, you now walk through the doors and see even more doors that you never thought were possible. And when you see those doors, you see this version of yourself that you never thought was possible. And once you see it, it's actually really hard to unsee it. And so you feel this potential sitting on your shoulders, this burden of potential that walks in and unpacks its backpack and is like, Hey, what are you going to do with me now?

What are you going to do with this potential you didn't know you had last week, last month, or last year? And as you sit with that person that you know can become, you start getting filled with doubt and uncertainty and exhaustion and envy and burnout and imposter syndrome and all of these, I'm not so sure. So it's wonderful, but it's also kind of hell. And here's the thing I learned in 20 years of executive search, internal candidates who apply for a bigger job but don't get the job, even if they have a great interview process, they apply for the bigger job, they don't get the job. The very process of interviewing for that bigger job means that they literally have to wear the clothes of that role and speak in the voice of that role and think in the mindset of that role. And once they see themselves in this new bigger role, they can't unsee themselves in this new bigger role.

So once you feel this burden of potential, you can't unsee it. This is why internal candidates always leave eventually if they don't get the job because they can't unsee it. So you're stuck with this version of yourself. And so what I learned from the people that I spoke to was that they had to do three things. They had a number one come to terms with their ambition to be like, you know what? It's okay for me to want more, for me to be bigger, for me to do things that haven't been done in the world in which I live. It's okay to embrace my ambition and feel all those voices, not as limitations, but as invitations inviting me forward. The second thing was that they had to take all of those emotions that got in between who they were yesterday and who they know they can become and come to terms with them, renegotiate the relationship with them, the doubt and the exhaustion and the envy and the burnout.

And all of those feelings are not necessary evils that have to get swallowed and pushed down and pushed aside, they're not the price of success. They're actually incredibly helpful markers that tell us that we're on the right track so we can stop and we can pause and we can listen to decide how we want to renegotiate all of these feelings at each age and at each life stage we're in at every moment of our practice growth. And then finally, they had to get comfortable being uncomfortable because it turns out that wonder hell loves itself a repeat visitor, it's not going to get easier once you finally get the 10 locations, it's not going to get easier once you finally get the one extra chair, once you finally get the dental hygienist, and it's not going to get easier. It gets more complex, but you also get better. So we have to get comfortable knowing that this is just, there's not one big finish line, but a million different little ones along the way.

Scott Leune: Okay, let's put this into practice. I've got on one extreme, I'm a dentist that graduated with $450,000 of debt. I went and got a job working for a corporate group and I thought, okay, that's maybe the responsible thing to do for now. And now I'm actually on my third different corporate group because I've just been bouncing. It hasn't been as much money as I wanted. It hasn't been the kind of dentistry I like the people I work with. I didn't get to pick make change. It doesn't represent what I know I could do and could be. So now I'm in this moment where I'm like, should I open my own practice? Although I'm worried about it, I'm scared, but I'm also feeling stressed. I'm getting burned out from the situation I'm in. How am I supposed to think about this or how does that apply to what you just said?

Laura Gassner Otting: So I may be in the minority of people who do public speaking, keynote speaking, and that I don't necessarily know if burnout is a thing. I understand we feel burned out, but I think it's actually because we just don't feel lit up, right? We're not excited, we're not engaged, we're not loving the work that we do. And what I found, I mentioned Limitless when that book came out. We started a workforce engagement survey. We have 10,000 responses from 113 different countries from every possible demographic in every possible industry. And what we found is that most people, like most people, 98% want to be inspired by their work. They want something about their work to get them out of bed and get them going in the morning. But we found that only about a third of workers say that their boss is actually inspirational. We also found that less than half of all workers understand how their goals, their daily goals, connect to the big picture of where they work.

Less than half of all workers even understand the big picture of where they work. And less than half of all workers understand what their own goals are every single day. So it's not that we're burnt out from doing too much, it's that we are doing too much of what doesn't actually matter to us. And so what I would say to somebody if they're thinking about maybe starting their own practice is that they need to do two things. The first is they need to think about their number. And it's actually two numbers. What's your need to make number and what's your want to make number? So the need to make number is what do you need to make to keep a roof over your head to put food on the table to pay your student loans? What is the need to make number? And then the want to make number is how many vacations do you want to go on each year and where are you staying?

Right? You staying at the Roadside Inn or are you staying at the Four Seasons? Are you driving a car to work? Is it a Hyundai? No offense to Hyundai drivers, or are you driving a Rolls Royce? Everything in between are the sacrifices that you're going to make in terms of how hard you're going to work, how long you're going to work. Every entrepreneur gets to maximize one of three things. You can maximize impact, you can maximize freedom and flexibility, or you can maximize profit. We can often maximize on two at a time, but you can't maximize on all three. So if getting from your need to make number to your want to make number means that you're not getting as much freedom and flexibility right now, that's okay, because if you do great impactful dentistry work and you're profiting well, eventually the freedom will come.

You've got those three things, freedom, impact, and profit. That's the first thing the want to make and the need to make number. Then the second thing is to really think through what will you do if you fail? What's plan B? So people don't start new businesses, they won't start new practices, they're afraid they're going to fail. And if you're afraid you're going to fail, then you don't actually spend a lot of time going towards success, just spending so much time worrying about risk. And so what I say is take a piece of paper, write down plan B. Plan B is probably going to go work for a big corporate dentistry operation that doesn't light you up, but enough to get yourself back on your feet so that you can now think about starting again. Take plan B, write it out in great excruciating detail, and then stick it in the bottom left drawer and don't think about it again because you've now plan B.

So now you can spend time thinking about plan A. When I wrote Wonder Hell, I did a bunch of research into manifestation because frankly, I thought it was bs, right? Like manifestation, I'm going to manifest a sale to Japan. I want to go visit Tokyo. I thought it was nonsense. And then I learned that there's actually science behind it. Our brains take in 11 million bits of data every single second, but we could only process 50, right? 11 million, we can process 50. So if you write unlike pretty swirly font on your vision board that you want to go to Japan, and the next day a bus passes you by with a sale to Tokyo, you didn't manifest the bus, you didn't manifest the sale. You just told your brain to pick out of the 11 million bits of data every single second that one piece of data. And it's the same thing with starting a practice. So if you're thinking about starting your own dentistry practice and you've taken care of plan B, then you can focus all of your time on spotting opportunities that will help you be successful in plan A.

Scott Leune: So what's interesting is if we worry, then we're almost manifesting the negative side of what could happen as we're

Laura Gassner Otting: Seeking absolutely seeking that

Scott Leune: Out. And you said, what's plan B? So here's the frustrating and ironic thing about dentistry. So many times, plan B, the fallback plan, what happens? What should we do if we fail in building a practice is actually what we're already doing. So let's say I go start a practice, if whatever reason, it doesn't become what I want it to become, and I sell that practice, I get out what's my fallback plan, what I've been doing for the last five years, working for someone else anyway. In other words, the worst case scenario is what people are actually, they're living worst case scenario because they just haven't taken the initiative that uncomfortable confidence it takes to kind of move forward to the next step. And so that's very interesting. Now you said there's no burnout. Maybe we're just busy doing the things that don't fire us up. So it's almost like someone had told me one time, when you work hard for someone else's vision, that could be stress. But when you work hard for your vision, that can be passion and passion and stress feel completely different.

Laura Gassner Otting: Yeah. Think about it. Have you ever been so busy doing something you love that you just lose track of time, you forget to eat. You're just so in flow, you're in the zone. You never finish that and go, wow, I feel so burned out. I was working so hard. You feel alive, right? So yes, I do think burnout is a thing, but I think that that's not the problem. It's not that we're too busy, it's that we're doing too busy. We're too busy doing things that don't matter to us, to our families, to our communities. And I think we also get very busy doing things that we've been doing all along. So at every agent, at every stage, what we care about changes. So think about it, if you decided you wanted to become a dentist when you were in college, you major, you go to dentistry school, you made this decision about who you wanted to be and what you wanted your life to look like literally before you had a fully formed frontal lobe, like the part of your brain that actually dictates good sound decision making.

So even if you are madly in love with dentistry, and I am madly in love with my dentist, he's incredible and he loves what he does, which is part of what makes him incredible, what he wants out of his practice has changed. When I first went to go to him as a dentist, he would saunter into the office and his hair was slicked back and he was wearing a black t-shirt and black jeans, and we used to refer to him as like rockstar dentist, right? Like Dr. Dentist Rockstar. And then he got married and he had a kid, and I've been with him now for 20 years, and now he wears pastel color golf shirts and he is all gray, and he's a different guy. So the way he manages his practice is different today than it was 20 years ago because what he wants out of life is different today.

And I think for a lot of people in any line of work, but especially if you are the head of a practice and people depend on you, you feel like you have to keep doing all the things you've always done because that's keeping all the people who have always been there happy. And I think stopping every five to seven years or so and saying, is this still my calling? Do I still love this work? Do I want to do more practicing of dentistry or more running of the business? Just that question of how, what lights me up calling connection? Does the work I'm doing on a daily basis actually connect to that calling that I've just re-identified as either the thing I still want or identified as the different thing I want? Then contribution. How does this work contribute to my life in terms of the way I manifest my values on a daily basis, the kind of money that I'm making, the career trajectory that I'm building, how does this work contribute to my life?

And then finally, control how much personal agency do I have over how much this work contributes to my life and how much it connects to my calling? And again, at every agent, at every stage, the amounts of which we need the calling and the connection and the contribution and the control will change. But because we made the decision when we were prefrontal lobe, we had this idea of who we are. And we never stopped to give ourselves grace along the way that we might've changed, that the world around us might've changed, that the people in our lives might've changed. And so it really bears, it's really important that we sit down and we have that conversation with ourselves, with our partners in business, in life, every five to seven years and just ask ourselves if I'm doing too much of what doesn't matter to me, what does actually matter to me?

Scott Leune: Yeah. So what I'm hearing is again, those three buckets you mentioned, we got the money or the profit bucket, we've got the control or freedom bucket, and then we've got that impact bucket. Does it fire me up? Is this my calling? And when I categorize the careers of dentists, I can see how I could almost label them in a way and understand what those buckets might look like for them. If I'm a dentist that just has a job, I've got other amounts of control than a dentist that owns a practice, or if I own one location versus three, I might have less or more time freedom than the other person. Or if I'm going to 10. So I could see how this all changes. And what I find is that if we are still the one location dentist trying to run five, we've got a problem.

So we haven't kind of reset how we do things, but we're still doing things the old way, yet we've piled on more complexity to that. That can be a problem. Something you said that was very interesting to me was kind of this thought of impact and how when you interviewed people, almost everyone wanted to have impact or be connected with an organization in a bigger way, but only about a third of 'em you said, had bosses that would motivate 'em in that way. Now, I mean, I'm thinking now as not just a dentist, should I own my own practice or should I have multiple practices? But I'm now also thinking as, oh no, the leader in a dental practice.

How do I keep my people? How do I keep them engaged? How do I keep them happy? Are you saying that walking them through the process of what motivates them in a practice or trying to get them to buy into a bigger vision or a bigger why is super impactful? Is that what you're

Laura Gassner Otting: Saying? It's everything. It's not just important. It's everything. Because every one of us will define success differently. In 20 years of executive search, this was my job, call the most successful people in the world and recruit them away on behalf of my clients. Call people who have never heard of me, who have never heard of my search firm, who might not even have heard of the organization I'm recruiting on behalf of and call them up and ask them to turn their lives upside down and move their families across the country or across the world to take a job they didn't even know existed. It sounds like a hard job, right? Called the most successful people and get them to upend their lives except for the fact that despite all this success, they weren't very happy. And I became fascinated about the fact that I would call them because they were super successful if they weren't all happy.

So they'd all call me back and I thought, if these people who are the most successful people aren't happy, what chance do the rest of us have? And it turns out that we all define success differently. We've all been given this idea that bigger, better, faster, more is the only definition of success. You've done 10 this year, you have to do a hundred, next year you did a hundred. Next year you got to do a thousand. The year after that, we've been handed this idea by teachers, by family members, by the Kardashians, it doesn't matter. We've been handed this idea of success is the fastest and most expedient path to the biggest number possible. And for a lot of people, that's not it. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of people who listen to this podcast who say, yeah, yeah, I want to make enough money, but I want to be home and have dinner with my family every night, or I never want to see my family.

I want to make all the money I possibly can. Everybody has a different definition and everybody's right. And that also goes for your team members. So at the end of the year, if you've got somebody, say you have somebody who in your practice is in charge of revenue, they're in charge of sales, right? They're doing sales and marketing and you've had a banner year. So they come in and you give 'em a bonus, they're going to walk into your office in six weeks and three months and six months with that. What have you done for me lately? Face on. So what do you do? You hand them more money and you hand them more money and you keep hitting that easy button and they keep walking into your office with that same face. But it may be that what they really love about your practice and why they're here and what they sell about is how you have this great community partnership with the local elementary school and help kids learn how to brush their teeth.

I don't know, making that up. So maybe putting them in charge of your community partnerships will actually allow them to feel super invested in the work. Some people want to be literally invested. They want to profit share, they want to feel like they own a piece of it. Some people want to take Friday afternoons off when they get to visit their grandmother in hospice. I don't know. Everyone has a different thing. And if you don't know what lights your people up, you're going to lose your people. There's a million miles between being loved and being seen. So if your people think you love them because they do good work, because they hit the revenue markers, because they get to work on time, they leave a clean workspace and you pay them for it, they're like, great, that's transactional. But if they think that you see them, what they care about, what lights them up, what brings them to work every day, why they chose this work, then you've got 'em right? Then they're connected to you, then they're in it with you. And so whether you're running a practice or whether you are the leader of the practice or whether you've just got a little division in a practice, you need to understand what makes your people tick or your people are going to to on out.

Scott Leune: And to put this into practical terms and dentistry, sometimes it's very difficult to figure out a big why in a dental practice. Why does a receptionist want to work in a practice? What's this big life-changing thing that lights them up? And it is just dentistry, it's just answering phones. There's nothing sexy in there. There's nothing that can create this deep passion in people. So sometimes it's hard, although clinically you can find that people that are on the clinical side can be passionate about the clinical work, passionate about helping people, passionate about building beautiful things, smile makeovers. All of that can be passionate. But one thing that we did when I owned a bunch of practices is we had a monthly community project that our team picked the thing. And so every month, someone on the team got their passion project funded, they got their passion project with time commitment, and in their community, they became the person bringing value to that thing that they care about. And so they got put on that pedestal and they got seen on that pedestal being about that thing. And so that was just one little practical example of what you just said.

Laura Gassner Otting: Well, and to get practical, we can also say for your receptionist, it's actually easy to figure out what makes him or her tick. You look at the pictures that they put on their desk or they putting pictures of their kids. Is their kid playing a soccer game? Is a picture of their grandmother? Is it their dog? Ask questions about that. Whatever they are bringing into the office to show if you're connected on social media, if they have a social media account, after you've employed them, just see what they care about. And if what they seem to care about happens on a Thursday afternoon, when they come in on Friday morning, ask them how their kid did that day. Just start that relationship and start watching what lights them up. Start watching what they care about and then give them some control. Ask them what they think the practice could do better.

Where could we do better? What kind of role would you like to play in that? Because studies show that people will take jobs that give them more control, more autonomy versus jobs that give them more power. So if you're giving them some input, some ability to actually affect what goes around on and around them, they will feel better. In that research that I told you, we found again, 10,000 responses, 113 different countries, every possible demographic, every possible industry. We found that people said that they will leave a bad boss. Okay? That's not rocket science. So we focused our research specifically on people who said, I work for a good boss. A boss who gets good results, who has good numbers, who's done the work, who's done the training, has all the awards on the wall, people who work for a good boss, but who say, I have no relationship with that boss are just as likely to leave as people who say I work for a bad boss.

Isn't that incredible? So even if you're a great boss and your person doesn't feel seen by you, they're going to leave. So how do they feel seen? They feel seen if they have some control over how they work, when they work, where they work, just their sort of space around them, they feel seen. If they feel like they have some input into the metrics by which they're measured, they feel like they are seen if they know that you know what they care about outside of work. So just ways that you can see them will allow you to give them more of what lights them up in a way that frankly doesn't cost you any more money.

Scott Leune: So dentistry is suffering from one of the largest epidemic size issues we've ever seen in industry where we are losing people like crazy and we can't find new people to replace them. At the same time the practices are growing. So there's this pressure cooker, and what's happening is salaries are skyrocketing and the quality of care sometimes is suffering, and it's just a mess that is stressing a lot of people out right now, what I hear from you is maybe we could have a thoughtful approach that says we need to pay people well. We also need to give them control and freedom on different aspects of their job, and they need to feel some sort of connection to their inner calling that is related to their job. And if they have the connection, if they have the control, and if there's enough money there, those are the ingredients, that's the recipe for someone that's happy, that's going to stay, it's going to appreciate it maybe.

Laura Gassner Otting: Absolutely. Did I say that correctly? Absolutely. Yes, you did. And here's the thing. When I would call all those super successful people, I would listen for about eight motivating factors that would excite anybody at any time to consider a new job. And if I heard one of them, I was like, great. I can get 'em on a second call. If I heard two or three of them, I'm like, okay, cool. Maybe I could get them to let me interview them if I heard four or five or six. I was like, no problem. This person, I'm like, move on to the next one. This one, this fish is in the barrel. So there are things like mission, am I inspired by the mission of the organization? Am I inspired by the leader who works here? How broad is the impact I can make? How deep is the learning that I'm going to have?

Where is the job located? What's the skillset that I'm going to learn? What are the benefits? But money, obviously money is one of them, but what we found is that money is actually not very often the most important factor. In fact, in that research, I think it was something like 36% say money is the most important factor that determines their happiness at work. So there's a lot of other people for whom it's not the most important factor. And even if it is the most, there are also other factors that are important. So your people are inspired by, obviously you have to pay them a fair wage. It has to be a competitive wage. But there's so many other factors that go into why somebody feels excited about a job, why they want to come work in a job, why they want to stay in that job. And again, those things are going to change. If you've had somebody who's worked for you and they've been amazing for five years and now they're kind of starting to mail it in a little bit, it's time to have that conversation.

Scott Leune: So if I am a CEO of an organization, a dental organization, I could say, okay, I'm going to pick, I'm have a budget. I'm going to pick three passion areas for every single employee that I'm going to support throughout the year in some way, and I'm going to allow them to have the ownership, the autonomy, the credit behind that. I'm also going to make sure that we've got not just fair wage, we've got a bonus plan in place so that as the company could afford to pay more people, we actually do. We actually give them a way to not just get their guaranteed pay, but they're going to be able to earn even more if that becomes an opportunity or if that becomes important to them. And then in their job, I'm going to need some boundaries of what I require of people, but in all the gray area of how they do certain things, I am going to let them decide the best way to do it. I'm saying this out loud. I'm thinking right now if I do those three things, I've just done what I don't think a single dental practice I've ever seen does. I don't think a single dental practice does all three. Maybe some of them do one maybe, but not all three.

Laura Gassner Otting: And that doesn't cost a lot of money to do that, right? There's a thing in the military called commander's intent. Are you familiar with Commander's Intent?

Scott Leune: Please describe it.

Laura Gassner Otting: Okay, so Commander's intent goes like this. If the intent of the commander is that you take the beach, we're in war and we're coming up on our boats and you're going to take the beach, but as soon as we get close to that beach, all of a sudden we are realizing that there's the enemy's coming in from the sky. You have to do something different. So you may not go the same way you were going, and maybe your commander gets shot in the very beginning of the battle. You still know what the intent is. The intent is to take the beach. And so it doesn't actually matter how you get to success, how you get to goal as long as you get to goal. So allowing this thing that we talked about earlier where people want to have some sort of control in their work saying to them, look, I'm not going to tell you how to do your job.

Obviously there's quality that we have to meet, but generally speaking, I'm not going to tell you how to do your job. I just want to explain to you what the goals are. And then together we can co-create what that path will be. So you can give them guardrails on it, but as long as you give them commander's intent and they understand not just what commander's intent is, but how commander's intent fits into the larger picture. Again, 50% of people didn't understand how their daily goals fit into the bigger picture of the organization because also left in half of all workers understood what the larger goal the organization even is. What happens a lot of times is in these larger organizations, the CEO, the leader will come in and talk about all the amazing things that are happening. We are 10 practices. We're going to scale to a hundred next year.

Isn't it exciting? And all of your people kind of glaze over and you're all excited about it. You don't understand why they're glazing over and then the leader leaves and feels burnt out and feels deflated. Like how come everyone wasn't excited as I was? Because they're all sitting there thinking, well, what does this mean for my individual practice? What does this mean for my individual workload? What does this mean for the patient workload that I have for the hours for my money? What does it mean to me? And so a lot of leaders, again, across all industries, but especially in a practice like dentistry where it's so individually driven, you may tell them about all the exciting things that are happening, but they want to know what it means for them. And so giving them that chance to co-create, co-own how they do their work every day, allows 'em to be much more invested in the work, and it allows you to see what lights them up about the work itself.

Scott Leune: Well, and if they control it, they sometimes know a lot more than we do. Don't they know the more efficient way of doing something, or if we let them control it, we give them our trust. But if we don't let them control, it doesn't mean we don't trust them or we don't value them. We don't see that they're skilled enough to do this their way. So all these negative things can happen when we don't give 'em control. Any of those are grounds to leave or not getting paid more if that's what's important, grounds to leave or not feeling like someone's growing or that what they do even matters grounds to leave. And so I just described dentistry. That's what it's like to work in a dental practice. At the end of the day, you ask people that leave dental practices, what do you need? Why do you need, what do you need here? They almost always say, more money. More money, because I don't think they've ever tasted the sweetness of a job where people are focused on what they care about and they're passionate about, and they give them autonomy and control. I think that when you insert all of that, the default answer of more money changes,

Laura Gassner Otting: I think most people don't know it's an option.

Scott Leune: Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been wonderful. We're running out of time here. Before I hand it over to you for some last words, I want to thank you for having this conversation with me. It's such a privilege to talk to someone that is as experienced and as accomplished as you. And we didn't even go into your story, but gosh, we could talk forever on a lot of the cool aspects of your story. Is there any last set of words you want to give our listeners before I wrap up this episode?

Laura Gassner Otting: Yeah, I think the thing I would say is that nobody's expecting perfection from you as a leader. And so you don't have to come in having all the answers. The closer you get to the head of the table, the more you're expected to talk. So we stop asking questions and then we stop hearing our people, then we stop seeing our people. So I think going in and sort of laying the groundwork for these conversations without having all the answers already, there is. Okay.

Scott Leune: Yeah. Awesome. Well, Lori, if people wanted to get ahold of you, I already said that you've got the book Limitless and the book Wonder Hell, how else could they learn more about you or reach out to you?

Laura Gassner Otting: Yeah, so my website is laura gasner otting.com. All my friends call me LGO, so I'm at hey, H-E-Y-L-G-O on all the socials.

Scott Leune: Awesome. Well, Laura, thank you again for joining us. This has been amazing. I can't wait to talk to other people about kind of what I've learned and what we should be putting in place as leaders in a dental practice and everyone listening to this, I hope this was valuable for you guys. Everyone, thank you so much for logging in and listening once again to the Dental CEO podcast. Goodbye. Alright, so let's dive in. The dental download, what does this mean for dentistry? Man, it was great talking to someone like Laura. I don't know if you research her. You'll see she's very well known. She was actually named the number three top motivational speaker in the world and has been featured on Ted, on Oprah, Forbes, Harvard Business Review. So this is truly an expert talking to us. And while this was a podcast episode, it's not a day long seminar.

There's some pieces of value here we need to think about. So she started out talking about the fact that we need to have this kind of reset every five years or so where we ask ourselves, am I still doing the thing that I should be doing? Am I still engaged? Does this still feel like the right thing to do? Is this my calling? And she said that oftentimes every five or seven years, we kind of need to shift a reset, a new calling. Are you there right now? Are you, as you listen to me right now, are you doing your calling or do you feel like a reset is needed is coming up? And when she talked about the reset, and I use the example, an associate dentist, maybe they're thinking about owning their own practice, she said, well, that's plan A, own your own practice, but go ahead and define plan B.

What does plan B look like if plan A doesn't work out? What's the fallback plan? And I talked about, well, what's so ironic is that so oftentimes our fallback plan, our worst case scenario is us right back to doing what we're doing today. We're literally living our worst case scenario today. And so for a dentist that's thinking about buying or starting a practice, let's say they buy one, they start one, and after a few years, it wasn't for them. It's not what they wanted. It's not making the money they wanted. The way the market is, they could easily sell that practice and become an associate yet again, they're literally doing the worst case scenario today, every day until they make a change. So what that means to me is we don't have a lot to lose. We don't have a lot to lose by starting the next chapter of our success in our career by trying the next thing out.

And the trying is going to be uncomfortable. It's going to be different. We're going to have questions and things aren't going to be totally clear on what to do, and that's okay. That's part of the journey. She also said, manifesting in the logical way is real. That we have all these data points that come into us every second and we can only process so many. And when we manifest things, when we think about what we could be, we think about the future selves that we want to be, we start seeing the ways to be that today. And the opposite is true. When we worry about the future of everything that could go wrong, we start noticing and taking and letting in those data points, and we actually hurt ourselves and become more negative. There are so many people that have proven this out, and she's yet another person I've talked to that's said the same thing.

She also spoke about the fact that there's not really, in her opinion, this true concept of burnout, that really what it is is there's three main buckets that we need full enough. One bucket's money, one bucket is freedom or control, and then one bucket is kind of that passion bucket. Are we doing what matters? And I think that if you're a dentist listening to this, how are those three buckets for you today? Are you doing what makes you passionate? Do you have enough freedom, control time, freedom and freedom on the kind of dentistry you do, the type of people you work with, what the facility's like, and what about the money? Is that money bucket full enough? And I think that burnout happens when we're low on these buckets. We might be low on just one bucket, but that could burn us out. We may have zero passion in what we do, even though it makes us money and gives us some time freedom.

If we have zero passion, we can feel burnout as a result of feeling lost or insignificant, like we're just wasting the years away spinning our wheels and we're not moving forward. Or of course, if there's not enough money or if there's not enough freedom, we just feel like we're working so hard and we're not getting anywhere there either. So I think it's these three buckets that can get out of whack sometimes that make us feel burnout. It's also those three buckets that can make our team feel disengaged with working in our practices. If they don't feel like they make enough money, then at some point that's going to break. Or if they feel like they don't have enough control because we don't maybe trust them or we don't see the value in them, we don't understand they're being forced to do it our way without respect of their way, their ideas that can burn them out and they can leave. Or of course if they don't feel like their job with us enables them to have a more fulfilling life, a more passionate life, whether that's dentistry related or not, if their job doesn't make them feel that way, their job therefore can feel like a dead end.

We spoke briefly about what are some practical things we could actually do. We can make them feel passionate by supporting these passion projects. Once a month, we support someone's project, we try or maybe we try to hit two or three projects per person per year. That means we need a budget, we need a meeting, we need a decision, and we let them go. It could be as simple as, here's a thousand dollars for the local football team. Or it could be, yes, we are going to support the 5K run. Set up a booth. We are going to promote this or that or the other. Whatever is important to them. Also, how do we make sure that there's enough money, we got to pay them a really nice wage, but then we also need a bonus plan in place that allows them to earn even more than a really nice wage For those people where this is the most important bucket, we need to have a way for them to fill that bucket more.

And so a bonus plan does it in a way that protects the company. We can pay more when we can afford it, so we need that. So we need the passion project, we need the bonus plan, and then we need to give people autonomy and control. She talked about them needing to understand what we're trying to do. We're trying to take the beach. She said, alright, well, what are we trying to do in a dental practice? If we're utilizing metrics tracking, we could say, look, we need to hit these five numbers. I trust you to make decisions minute by minute. That will help us hit those five numbers. We do have certain goals or certain rules, excuse me, certain rules in our practice that we're going to adhere to, but outside of that, I trust you to do your job throughout the day as you see fit, and I trust you as long as you understand we need to hit this goal and that amount of trust, as I even hear myself say it, I trust you.

I bet that most dental employees have never heard that. They've never been told, I trust you. They've never been treated that way. And so if I'm a CEO of a dental organization, I want this to be what it's like to work for me. I want them to earn good money and be able to earn more. I want them to know they're trusted and to have the autonomy, but also understand what we're trying to achieve. And of course, I want to support the passion projects that may have nothing to do with dentistry, although we hope it does have. We hope the hygienists are passion about learning facial aesthetics or learning new treatments, laser treatments for periodontal disease. We hope that dental assistants are passionate about helping oversee a big cosmetic case that changes a patient's life. We hope that, but not everyone is going to have an immense amount of passion related to teeth, and so we need to have some sort of avenue to support a passion that has nothing to do with teeth, but it's because they work for us that that passion gets promoted and maybe fulfilled. I think that if you're just listening to this for entertainment, you may listen to this episode and then when we're done, and it may mean nothing to you, but those of you mature CEOs or those of you that are self-aware enough to know you're at a crossroads in your life, this episode might've been insanely important to hear.

Are you struggling with finding and retaining employees? Learn something from this episode. Do something different. Or are you feeling like you're stuck in your career or you're stuck in your situation? You don't have as much money as you want, you don't have as much freedom as you want, you just don't feel as passionate as you want to feel? Well then it's time for a change. It's time to reset. What's the worst thing that could happen? Really, the worst thing that can happen is you're where you're at right now. You're literally living worst case scenario right now. You might as well try to do something new. This whole concept of resetting every five years, what a simple, clear, effective thing to recognize so that we don't get caught. Like when you're in a pool, you're swimming and your head's underwater, and suddenly you go up for air and you realize you swam sideways on accident, right?

We don't want to swim our career sideways for the next 20 years, only at the end to have some midlife crisis, mid-career crisis and say, what the hell am I doing? No. We want to put our head above water every so often, every few years and ask ourselves, Hey, are we going the right or has things changed? Do I need to reset? Do I need to point right? Instead of left? What a healthy thing for her to talk about? I hope this was interesting to you guys and helpful. As always, I appreciate you guys listening. Please subscribe. Please leave an online review for us help support this as we try to make this as valuable and as efficient as possible for you. I hope this is one of your weekly habits listening to this podcast on the way to work or as you work out. Until next time, my name's Scott Leune, and this has been the Dental CEO Podcast.