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Who Leads Your Office Attitude?
Anyone who has a young person in his or her home or has been a young person in a home has definitely heard a lecture on attitude. These lectures come from well-meaning loved ones who replay the mental tapes handed down from generations of parents and other loved ones.
Usually, when an attitude tape begins, the eyes and brain of the intended target for the message shifts into neutral as the person enters a mental fog that lulls them virtually sound asleep. Like it or not, we play our own attitude tapes for either: people we love, people who work for us, or people we dislike. Although that seems to cover just about everyone, it doesn't. People who are doing "OK" or presenting themselves as we would do it are spared the attitude tapes. It's just those we love, those we hate or those who work for us that need our valued input on attitude.
As I travel around America talking to dental offices, speaking at conventions, and providing attitude information on how to deal with angry people, a series of facts seem to strike me as being quite odd.
1. The people who love you and who would lie down in front of a truck about to hit you are often the people whom we treat with most of our anger about their attitudes.
2. The people who work for you (or more accurately, whom you work for) are quite often a reflection of your own attitude as the ordained leader of the dental office. In this situation, we should be playing the attitude tapes for ourselves, as we must not have heard or understood their messages when the same tapes were played for us.
3. The people you dislike don't even care what you think anyway! Still, they are blessed with the drive-by, random attitude tape demonstrations played on massive speakers that shower them with your library of attitude intelligence just in case it might work this time.
The leader of the dental office is quite often the dentist. But it could be the dental assistant, the dental hygienist or even the dentist's spouse.
Whoever leads the office will set the tone of the office: up or down, positive or negative, warm or cold, and caring or impersonal. Tone is another word for -- you guessed it -- attitude. And, it is the tone of the office that blasts loudly to the public more than words could ever say. The tonal feeling of your office will make it thrive with an abundance of new patients needing a barrel full of dentistry. These happy patients voluntarily burn their dental insurance forms in the urn just outside the door of your office and wheel in buckets of greenbacks they happily hand over to be treated by genuinely happy people in a caring environment. These happy people obviously will understand unexpected problems better and will work to help situations rather than hinder them.
Yes, it's all about attitude, and if you don't believe it you need to read this editorial again. Now, since I can’t reach it, will someone help me turn off my tape recorder … till next month?
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