AADOM DISTINCTIONcast – 1 + 1 = 3: The Power of Growing People to Multiply Results
Great leaders know that true success doesn’t come from doing it all themselves — it comes from multiplying their impact through others. This session will challenge the way you think about leadership and equip you with practical strategies to help your team thrive.
Erika Pusillo, DAADOM, will guide you through how to harness the multiplier effect of leadership. When you invest in people, the results extend far beyond what one individual could ever achieve alone. You’ll walk away not just inspired, but with tools you can implement right away to strengthen your practice.
Learning Objectives:
- Recognize the multiplier effect of leadership – Understand how empowering others creates exponential growth.
- Apply practical strategies for developing team members – Learn how to grow skills, confidence, and ownership within your team.
- Shift from doing to empowering – Explore how to stop being the sole problem-solver and instead foster a culture where your team drives growth and success.
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Read the Transcript Now!
Kelly: Hi everyone, and welcome to a AADOM’s DistinctionCast, where we shine a light on some of the brightest leaders in dental management. I am Kelly Larson with AADOM, and today we’re excited to future Erika Pusillo, coming to us today from Lake Como, Italy.
Erika has been in the in dental industry for over 16 years and brings tons of experience in leadership, operations, and patient care. She’s the Operations Director at Spodak Dental Group, leading a world class team known for innovation and outstanding service.
Erika’s also a DAADOM, a Green Leader Award winner, and was recognized as a practice administrator of distinction for her amazing leadership and practice culture.
In today’s session called, “1 + 1 = 3: The Power of Growing People to Multiply Results,” Erika is gonna show us how leadership is less about doing everything yourself and more about growing the people around you.
She’ll share how investing in your team creates results far bigger than one leader could ever achieve alone. Plus, give you practical strategies to build confidence, ownership, and growth in your team. You’ll also hear how to make the shift from problem solving yourself to creating a culture where your team leads the way.
Help me give a big welcome to Erika.
Erika: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be on this Screencast again and to be with all of you. And, Kelly, thanks so much for the introduction. I’m happy to hop right in if we’re ready to go.
Kelly: Very good. Take it away.
Erika: Awesome.
So, you guys know a little bit about me. 16 years in dentistry, which seems like I should, you know, be a lot younger than that. I certainly feel like I am.
I wanna give some context here because we’re gonna be talking about growing your team. And, for those of you that don’t know who I am and how I started in dentistry, I actually started in sterilization as a sterilization assistant. You know, and then I had several positions in between there: ental assistant, the dental assistant team lead, then office manager, operations director, CFO, and now taking on more of that CEO role within my organization.
I am in my practice full-time, four days a week, which is really like 12 days a week it seems sometimes. I also manage four companies, in addition to our dental practice; they’re all dental work related.
I have no formal degree. And I think that that’s really key here is that for anybody that may be listening in that’s like, “Oh, okay, you know, she’s got the training” or you know, she, you know, was given a specific pathway and kind of knew all the steps to achieve all of these results. No, I had no formal degree.
Like I said, I started in sterilization as a dental assistant. That was, that was my degree, that was the extent of my formal training. So there, there is hope for us all.
I’m also a wife and a and a mother as well.
Turning Conference Inspiration Into Action
And so a couple of three key concepts, recognizing the multiplier effect in leadership. And you know, really what that is, is, you know, coming off of the heels of a big CE conference, the AADOM Conference, if you guys just went to that there in Texas, you know, you learn so, so much. And I think that you get really fired up to bring back all of these positive changes and ideas and things in our organization.
How can we possibly implement it all?
And I think that what happens is, you know, we get fired up and then certainly after a few months, we kind of lose some steam because, you know, whether we kind of took on more than we can handle ourselves or that same level of passion that we had, that team doesn’t share that same level and it kind of just dies out.
So we’ll talk about how we can actually get some more results and implement lots of things coming off of a conference like that versus the rate living step of having just ourselves, be the leader for change.
We’ll learn how to apply practical strategies for developing team members.I am very, very, very tactical, so we’ll spend most of our time there because I really like to give everybody, like, this is actually literally what I do in my practice. So, I wanna give you some real examples of what I do and how I grow my team.
And then, of course, shift from being the doer to empowering other people to do those things. And really what that is, is this is called engagement. You know, how do we step out of being the person that kind of has all the hats, tackling all the things within our practice, and kind of giving a little piece to each person within our team. We can achieve a lot more that way.
Moving Beyond Additive Leadership
So, the typical approach when it comes to leadership, and not that this is the bad approach. I think this is kind of where we all start, is that I’ll do this and you will do that. What you do and what I do, we are equally achieving two separate things at the exact same time.
You know, having a job description, having clear expectations, you know, making sure everybody has that specific role within their organization. And that’s typically how it works.
One of the things that I like to think of within this concept is, you know, if we look back at how we got into leadership in the first place, we had to stand out in comparison to everyone else within our organization. We had to have a skill that was amazing. We had to have results that were amazing. We had to be kind of the shining star within the organization and certainly outshine the people that were maybe competing for the role that we wanted, whether it’s a leadership role, the office manager role, or you know, you have your own practice yourself.
And so it’s really, really interesting. So I was the exact same way. Like I have got to be the best in order to have a shot at getting that next promotion.
But once you’re in a leadership position, actually to be effective in that role, everything changes. You no longer want to be the best. You no longer want to have all the information and the knowledge and you not only you wanna be the person that gets extraordinary results because then you’ll be that rate-limiting step.
So now it shifts to: How can I make other people brighter? How can I bring other people up and get their skillset to my skillset?
And so this is the concept that we’re talking about.
This one here, the typical approach is called additive leadership:
You + Me = Two
And now we talk about the multiplier approach, which is when I pour into you and I give you my skillset or part of my skillset, that then you’ll take that on and you will give your skillset or part of your skillset to someone else. And if we take that person, giving it to somebody else, so on and so forth, and now we have a team that is all sharing within that next level of skillset, and those results are then amplified at that point.
And so one of the things I like to think about too, within my organization is that, you know, there are certain risks that we have in our organization. And one of the risks that we have is if you have one person, let’s say maybe yourself, or maybe it’s somebody else that has all of the knowledge about this, maybe you have an insurance coordinator and they know everything insurance, and you’re just like, “Oh my gosh! Go ask best, Becky, that question.”
Or you’ve got a patient, “Hey, I’m gonna, I’m gonna punt this to Becky.”
What happens if Becky goes on vacation? If Becky gets sick? If Becky decides to leave? Does that part of your organization crumble?
And so from a liability aspect and making sure that the practice continues to operate regardless of the one person, you have to have multiple people to have those same skill sets.
And so this is why it’s also really, really crucial to have that.
Why Multiplying Your Team Matters
So we talk about the benefits of having a multiplier approach to your leadership is: one, it also creates freedom for you. It’s amazing to come into your organization and not say, “I’m the only person that has to do all of these tasks.” And sometimes there’s just not enough time in any given day.
And what happens is you end up working on your vacations or you know, you work really long hours and you can really get burned out very, very quickly.
But also what that can do is that if you have all of these responsibilities and you’re only able to do them, it actually prevents you from you being able to grow and to get to your next step because you just don’t have the time and the ability to do that and to handle more.
The other benefit is that when you bring other people up, it actually creates a sense of purpose and a sense of community. People feel like they’re contributing to the organization. They feel like they have some stake. They feel like they have an ability to really help shape what the organization looks like.
And I will tell you more and more within the generations, you know, that are up and coming. I’m technically a millennial, although I think I, I don’t identify as one, but more and more, people are working to make a difference.
And this is the point, is that you have to create an organization where people feel like they can make a difference.
And the other thing is the team needs to feel like they’re adding value to something. People need a way to say, “My life matters. What I say matters. What my skills do and what I do with my hands and my brain and my thoughts and my actions,” all of that leads to something bigger and better, because at the end of the day, we’re all trying to make a living, number one. And then number two, we actually spend most of our waking hours at work.
And so we certainly wanna make sure that our life stands for something. And so that’s certainly worth evaluating. And a benefit in it itself to do that.
Practice Strategies for Developing Your Team
So, let’s hop into the strategies, like how do we become a multiplier within our practice and develop our team?
The first thing that we wanna do is we have to identify what’s important to each team member because that is very, very different.
So a lot of times when I talk to people, they wanna skip over this step and they’re like, “Okay, cool, I got it. I’m gonna grow and develop team and I’m excited because I’m gonna host this training. I’m gonna say, ‘Hey, come on and do this,’ or ‘watch these videos and do these things.’”
And then the team doesn’t, and then they get unmotivated and they kind of feel a little bit defeated in some way to say, “You know what? I presented this opportunity to learn or to teach my team and they aren’t interested.”
Because we are teaching something, maybe, that is not important to them, that doesn’t motivate them, that’s not a good skillset for them.
And so when we talk about motivating team is ultimately motivation comes from helping someone else get what they want. And that’s what’s so important.
So we’re gonna talk about how do we learn what’s important to each team member.
So many of you probably do an annual review. You know, I certainly recommend checking in with team members more often than just once a year because it’s a way to, number one, have dedicated time to really talk to this person to appreciate what they’re doing, to learn a little bit more about them and what makes them tick.
It also is a way to kind of get aligned about the expectations that you have from one another and to be proactive in their employment. Because I think too oftentimes when we have failed work relationships is that comes from just maybe in a sense being, for us, the manager blindsided that someone was unhappy because we were too busy to see the warning times upfront.
And so when we have dedicated time to talk, when it isn’t an emergency, when it isn’t a fire, when it isn’t a conflict, it’s actually really, really good and gives us that chance to align before that team member feels defeated and maybe waves the white flag and walks away.
Structuring Effective Quarterly Check-In
So there’s a couple key things that we’ve done and developed within our check-in process. So we do these quarterly. You certainly can do these more frequently or less frequently depending on the amount of time that you have, the amount of team members that you have.
In the beginning, I did this for all of my team members, and I have quite a few. I have close to 50 team members, including doctors. And so yes, we also do this for our doctors as well, and we do these quarterly.
So what also happens when we talk about this multiplier effect and a little bit later on. So the reason why I have this structure is that now my leadership team members within my different departments will actually do these check-ins with their team members, which definitely frees up my time.
They also have better perspective of what’s going on. A hygienist, having a check-in with another hygienist, you know, they can actually real time problem solve and create solutions because they know what it’s like in that position more so than I do. Same with assistants. And so on.
But this structure also allows those team leads that have never done these types of things in these check-ins to provide a consistent experience, whether it’s the hygiene lead, giving this review or check-in to a hygienist that we know the dental assistant lead is giving the same experience and talking about the same types of things within the assistant team as well, so that we can make sure the entire team has that consistent, cohesive, leadership approach that we want.
A couple key things with this is that: one, the very first thing on this is that we talk about the alignment with our values. I think that when we come off of those big programs, you know, within AADOM, the AADOM Conference, and we understand the importance of having a vision, having a mission, and having values.
Well, how do you align those values with your team members? Especially if you are doing your job every single day. I’m not there supervising anyone else and watching someone perform pro fees or watching someone suction for a crown and prep. I don’t have time for that.
And so how do I appreciate the things that are actually really meaningful that our team is doing every single day?
And so these blank lines here. This is for our team members to fill out themselves, and then for that leadership team member to also take a look at that and to appreciate, “Wow, I didn’t know that you did these things,” or “I didn’t know that you got these results with our patients,” and it’s a moment to appreciate actual, real things versus just saying, “You’re so great!”
We wanna be specific: “You’re actually really great at…” this, this, and this. And that actually really aligns with the values we have within our practice.
The next thing we do as well as we talk about personal wellbeing and goals, like I wanna know my team members personally, I wanna know what they’re working towards.
And I think it’s so special because we hear time and time again that people are like, “I wanna buy my first home.” That really hits a lot differently.
I think for me as a leader, like I’m even more motivated to help that person get their home because I know what it was like when I got my first home. And so I work harder to help this person get what they need in order to make that happen. Like, we connect there on a human to human level.
Talking about what type of support and resources that we need. I think a lot of times team members withhold what they don’t do well for fear that they will maybe not get an opportunity for a promotion for fear that they might lose a job. That they almost have to pretend they’re good at everything, because if they admit that they’re not good at something, that it’s a negative versus the opportunity of saying, “Hey, actually I don’t know this and I’m ready to learn this next skill set.”
And so we kind of build that in to have that conversation ahead of time.
We talk about their annual vision. You know, a lot of times team members don’t l,ook at their lives or kind of pre-planned for their future, maybe as much as some of the leadership team does because we’ve had so much training and you know, so much experience. And even within our practice saying this year, three years, five years, we can kind of look longer term.
A lot of our team members that aren’t exposed to that seem level of continuing education may not understand that process, or may, may not have ever heard of that.
Excuse me, one second. It is hot here in it.
The next thing we like to do is talk about how they contribute to the team above and beyond what they do within any given day, because we also want to encourage and talk about the moments on how we can actually help one another get what we want out of this career and what we’re doing any a given day.
Some of the other things we talk about are a little bit more tactical, and we can do that maybe on another presentation there. But we talk about goals and we talk about some specific success metrics so that we can align to make sure that they know exactly how to measure their success within their position.
Expectations in Their Roles
So the next thing is, is making sure that everybody has their known expectations in their role. One of the things I think that we most often forget is to ask them what their expectations are in the role.
I think we just jump to what our expectations are within the practice. We give them the job description. Maybe we give them some success metrics, maybe they’re called KPIs. And we actually never ask them what they expect within their role. And sometimes we can be surprised by what they say.
This is an example of my job description here. I know it’s really long. I’m extra detail oriented. I love it. The more specific you can be, the better aligned you can be in those expectations, and they can really cater to what is most meaningful within your organization.
All of our job descriptions start off exactly the same. We are an SDGs, VOD Dental group, team member first, so we are here to support one another first above our specific job that we do within our practices.
Success Metrics
We talk about success metrics. This one’s in particular relating to mine since I gave the example of my job description. So we need to make sure that we know like, what’s a win? How am I doing well in this position so that I can make sure that I can talk about what I need in order to get to these results.
One: collections need to be great greater than this per month. That’s my ultimate priority. Profit needs to be greater than last year’s profit.
We also have to have positive team surveys. We use Gusto for our surveys, which is great. We use that for payroll as well.
And then we also, for me, I submit reports to the practice owners and have to have buy wins.
You wanna make sure that you have success metrics in each of these domains: financial, team experience, which is your culture, patient experience, which is your actual, your business and timeliness on when you need to return these things to your practice, to your team, or to your doctor.
The Training Pathway
So next we’re gonna go into the training pathway.
Sometimes what I find is that, and I’ve been really guilty about this myself, is I’ll say, “Well, everybody has all the opportunity to be what they want to be, and if I did it, they can certainly do it.”
But not everybody knows what I know. Not everybody knows what the opportunities are. Not everybody knows how they can grow, and so we need to have a training pathway so that they know how to upskill.
Okay. So this is an example of our career advancement pathway that is public for our team and that we have it for different positions. What we do is we wanna start out in, for instance, we have a blue level, which is our level. You need to have this skillset in order to be the most entry level within that position.
At levels a little bit silver is a little bit more, gold’s a little bit more deeper. Typically, that’s your cross-trained dental assistant. They have skills outside of what they do within a dental assistant, and then we have the leadership pathway.
Every single job description that we have, every single role that we have ends with the leadership path. If anyone in our organization coming in says, “I would like to be a team leader. I would like to be an office manager,” you absolutely can, regardless of the position is open.
We need to give our team the ability to try, the ability to grow and to know how to do that, and what skills fall in line so that they can easily take that pathway without waiting for you to meet with them every three months or every year to tell them how they need to grow. Give them the tools and let them grow at their own pace.
Upskilling
So, upskilling the way that we can help our team to upskill and office training, of course, if you have the bandwidth and ability to do that continuing education like courses like what we’ve done with AADOM.
There’s lots of online courses that you can do. And I know that there’s many consultants out there and many programs out there that have online CE for all of the different positions within your practice.
Mentorship, the one-on-ones, which is amazing. I’ve had many mentors, you know, along my pathway and that’s really helped me kind of see and learn what I didn’t know that I didn’t know.
Books and podcasts: I absolutely love this. I think this is like my number one, my most valued way to upscale.
Skill Transfers
Alright, last: skill transfers. Now we’re gonna level people up. Here’s how we do that. So what I do is I take the job description, so I typically have that team member bring their job description.
If we don’t have a formal one, I actually have them write it first. Like I don’t give them the answers. I wanna know what you think you’re supposed to be doing, and let’s align if that’s what the practice needs.
Now what we can do is I give it back to them as well, and I’ll say, “Okay, go ahead. Go ahead and highlight all of the things that are the easiest thing to transfer to somebody else.”
Now there’s an important context here. This is an example actually of one of our doctors and some of the things that this doctor was doing before they transferred this onto myself.
So what are the things that this doctor can transfer with very little time, effort and training so that we can get this off the plate right away, gets this off the plate of let’s say the owner doctor, and it transfers to the next person in line who will be taking on these next skills.
That person will do the same within their job description. Let me highlight all the things that I can transfer now, so on and so forth.
Then we go in with another highlighter and we kind of take a look at, “Well, what can we transfer after some more extensive training, but some things that we say, Hey, after maybe three months, these are the additional things that we would like to transfer to your plate.” So we can see a clear PA path in how we can get to this new position.
One of the things that I find most oftentimes when people go through this is that they have a guilt to say, “Oh, well now I’m transferring all these kind of crap things and putting them, you know, on your plate, all of this low level stuff.”
Like this is my like crap stuff. Let me get all of this off my plate and let me focus on all these important things. And to a certain extent that is true.
However, what you do effortlessly and easily is someone’s opportunity for growth.
So that person, if you think about when you became an office manager and when you were taking on some of these responsibilities, was it easy? Was it simple? Was it something you do, you know, with your, your eyes closed and were you proud once you really learned how to do it and to become efficient and effective?
This is not passing down to dump on someone. This is pulling someone up to give them a new skillset, a new opportunity to learn and to grow and to, you know, make more money. And so that’s how we have to look at it. No one can grow unless you give them the ability to do things that they’ve never done. And when you have freed up time, you can take on bigger things that now only you have that unique skill set in order to do.
So that’s what’s really important.
Shift from Doing to Empowering
So last, we’re gonna shift from doing all of the work to empowering other people within the team to also do that work.
The first thing is, is we need to give our team some autonomy, some ability to make decisions within the practice without having you, the decision maker, you know, be the bottleneck because you’re not always going to be available if you’re with a patient, for instance, if you’re on vacation or if you’re doing another task, to be able to answer all of these decisions./
But you do need to have guidelines. This is what’s most important when you do transfer any type of responsibility onto that next team member.
First, what is the goal or the result that you’re trying to achieve?
A lot of times what we do is we pass things down to team members and we say, “Hey, these are the four things I need you to do. This is the new system I’ve created. This is the widget or the thing that we are implementing.”
And we give them all of the answers without giving them the why, and then ultimately telling them what we’re trying to do as a result of it.
So we actually have to start with the result, and then we can reverse engineer all the steps and the guidelines. This is also how you create engagement. When people ask, how do I get my team engaged? Don’t give them the answers, give them the results, and allow them to fill in the answers and the processes themselves.
Why is this important?
It’s really important to also reiterate because maybe we actually forget to communicate that. And I think the more that our team understands why is it important for us to implement this, why is this important for us to change, so they can help be a part of solving the problem?
But you can’t solve a problem until you know what that problem is. That’s why you need to iterate why is it important.
If it’s possible, including any team members during the creation of the expectations as far if this is a new hygiene protocol, making sure that you’re including as many hygienists as it makes sense to be a part of that.
You know, if, if I’m making a decision on behalf of another team, I need to have feedback and I need to have buy-in from those team members that are actually going to be implementing that specific new process.
Writing down your expectations is so important. Whether you do that in an email, you do not have to do this. Is this part of becoming a multiplier?
I think typically what would happen is, “Okay, cool. I’m so excited. You said yes. We’re ready for this next opportunity, and I’m going to send you the expectations in an email.”
Now I just added one more thing to my plate.
Let’s have an opportunity where our team can feel aligned and I can check that they understood the conversation that we just had, because I know what I mean. Do they know what I mean?
So then I’ll say, “Hey, go ahead and send me an email. Write down the expectations that you have for this job, this role, this process, whatever it happens to be. Go ahead and, you know, write down, it doesn’t have to be super fancy, but go ahead and send me an email. That way we can make sure that we’re on the same page.”
Have them do it.
Next set waypoints. How do we know what the team members are working on is actually getting closer to those results? So these, those are gonna be your KPIs, your success metrics, your stats, surveys, reviews, whatever it is that we can use to measure that we are actually getting closer to what we wanna see.
And then finally give them a budget if that’s applicable. Because you don’t want them to come back and say, “Hey, I’m in charge of this new marketing thing and we wanna get t-shirts. Can we buy t-shirts and can we do this and can we do the health fair? And it’s cost $500 for the table or whatever it happens to be.”
Say, “Hey, you have X amount of money,” if it makes sense to do that, “for this project. You decide what’s most important and how to spend that money.”
And you’ll be amazed at how, kind of prudent, how strategic they are on how to spend that money because they know they have a fixed amount versus, you know, you have a fixed amount and they have to ask you yes or no each time, but they don’t really know what number you’re trying to add up to.
Okay. Let’s give an actual example. Our Invisalign team. So, when I’m growing other leaders, I give them projects, not titles. Okay, so I wanna give them projects and I wanna give them the opportunity to exercise their ability to lead and to help coach, and to help mentor them, and to help them see those results without putting fast track, putting them into a position of leadership.
We know they’re going to fail. It is inevitable, it’s gonna happen. But instead of doing that on a larger scale, let’s go ahead and do it on the project by project project basis.
So we have an Invisalign team, for instance. This is the results that we wanna see. We wanna be a diamond plus provider, for instance. Why is this important in our practice to achieve this result?
This is leadership development for our team. Invisalign for us is a way that we can get healthy patient smiles. You can also reverse this for any type of clear aligner therapy. I know there’s many of them out there.
This also helps us increase our collections when we increase the number of Invisalign cases that we do. And when we increase collections, that means that there’s additional money for the team.
Now we set our clear metrics. What is a Diamond plus provider? A hundred cases a quarter.
And then what’s the budget for this team? In this instance, our budget for our practices $1500 a year. And part of what they do within that budget is they will decide on how to market events that we’re gonna sponsor for the Invisalign team, potentially any promotions or fun things that we do within our office for achieving our goal for our team.
The other thing that we like to do is that within our team, we have a large team, so take this into context. If you have a smaller team, sometimes that means fewer people take on more roles.
But within our team, we have the ability to have one representative from each department. When we are doing something massive on a practice wide scale, I wanna have perspective and feedback from each department because as we make decisions there, I wanna know, hygienists, this works for doctors. Does it work for you? Where’s gonna be the barrier and where’s the hangup gonna be and let’s problem solve for that.
And so, we have a doctor, a treatment coordinator, a hygienist assistant and admin on this Invisalign team. And these are some of the roles that they do within that.
So our Invisalign team meets. They meet at least once a quarter. They talk about the strategies that they’re gonna implement and how we’re going to achieve these goals. And then they communicate with their respective teams on all the new things that we’re going to do so on and so forth.
Onboarding Products
So next example is how do we onboard products?
Now I am bringing new leaders often instead of me as the office manager having to research what products fit within our practice and how to onboard them and, you know, all of the details that go along with that.
Most oftentimes onboarding new products is typically more on the hygiene side because they’re more products that we’re selling to our patients, patient facing.
So, some of the results that we’re gonna say, we wanna onboard some new products, hygiene team. This is gonna be owned by you.
The results that we wanna see is the product is brought into the office and our team is gonna recommend for our patients to buy.
Why is this important? One: the leadership development for the team. This is their ability to run something autonomously. Try on their ability to be that leader on a small project scale. Creates healthy patient smiles, increases collections, bonus for team.
So it’s kind of a lot of the same lines that we have from all of the different projects that we have.
Some of the answers that were going to be needed. So before I just give this project to the team, I also wanna make sure that they know what I’m expecting them to return back to me.
And so I’ll have a list of questions to say, “Go ahead. I need to know the cost. I need to know how much we’re gonna sell this for. I need to know how many we need to purchase to stock within our practice.”
We’re gonna need a tracking code, we’re gonna need marketing materials, and we’re gonna also need some team training. And so I wanna make sure that the team is coming back to me and they have answers with all of these things.
Here’s a quick little example of some of the details and some of the things. In particular we onboarded protector hygiene team onboarded that product.
So costs: costs of the scanners, the impression materials, the gel. How much time, chair time is this new product going to add to our chair time? Five minutes, for instance, for that scan. If they’re doing the scan, it does require next visit to deliver those trays.
Tracking code, lab fees, any training that’s required for the team members. And, for instance, the hygienists need the peri protect training.
Any timeline for implementation, any specific process or any type of marketing, and they go ahead and fill in all of those answers there.
Where the Fail May Happen
So the fail of being a multiplier, this is what I most commonly see, is that one: the leader themselves, ourselves, sometimes we fear that if we give somebody else the ability to do what we know how to do, that that takes away from our personal value.And it actually is the opposite.
The most valuable thing you can have in any business is to have a leader that can grow other leaders.
The second thing is, is that a lot of times we have many team members that are capable of doing all these things that want to do all of these things, but they’re waiting for someone to give them permission. They don’t know that they’re allowed to speak up. They don’t know that they’re allowed to get involved. They don’t know what the next levels are or what the pathway is that maybe you have known or maybe someone else has shown you.
And so it’s our responsibility to make sure that we’re showing our team members the pathway and giving them the permission to be able to step up, to be able to step outside of their skillset and to learn something new and to add more value back into our practice.
Keep Growing with Ongoing Leadership Resources
If you want some more information, we have a free podcast all about these things. And actually, a slightly different perspective. This is about the doctor owner and office manager in particular, and how we’re shifting the responsibilities between the two of them and some of the things that go wrong and doesn’t always, you know, go right and kind of really being open and candid.
And so, you can find this on Google and YouTube. It is the Bulletproof Dental Practice. It is the 1 + 1 = 3 Podcast. It is free. And, happy to share that information with you guys.
So, Kelly, I’ll take it back to you. And, that concludes what I’ll talk about today.
Kelly: Wow, Erika! That was jam packed with practical, you know, wisdom and advice. I just, thank you so much for sharing, you know, some of what you’ve learned with your journey with Spodak Dental Group.
You know, a lot of people talk about the importance of communicating, you know, core values with your team, but you really showed practical and real life examples about connecting with your team on a personal level.
Erika: Yes. Yeah, I think that’s sometimes, we think that we have to be really fancy to get results. Like I think when I was really early on as an office manager, I’m like, “I have to create these really elaborate stuff and I have be super fancy and I have to come across as so smart.”
But really it comes down to just being really simple and, you know, you can kind of get a lot farther that way.
Kelly: Wow. Well, I mean, what a privilege to be able to be one of your team members. So, yeah, I’m very excited about what you had to share.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for, you know, joining us on your vacation. A well deserve vacation. I hope you enjoy the rest of your time.
To our AADOM community, thank you for joining us. And be sure to, you know, watch us or check out our socials so that you can see more great education, like what we heard from Erika in future DISTINCTIONcasts and PODcasts.
And, Erika, thank you. We so appreciate your time and your wisdom.
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Learn About Our Presenter:
Erika Pusillo, DAADOM
Erika has dedicated over 16 years to the dental industry, bringing expertise in leadership, operations, and patient experience. She serves as the Operations Director for Spodak Dental Group, where she helps lead a world-class team focused on innovation and exceptional care.
Erika is a proud DAADOM (Diplomate of the American Association of Dental Office Management), a Green Leader Award recipient (2023), and was recognized as a Practice Administrator of Distinction for her excellence in practice leadership and culture.
