Howard Speaks: Transparency vs Opaque

Transparency vs Opaque. I was wondering why successful dental leaders are transparent and not opaque until it became clear to me that if your not it’s clearly offensive. Does your dental office team know the daily breakeven point? Do they know the office overhead? Do they get to see the accounting reports for the balance sheet, statement of cashflow, and statement of income? Management transparency is the key to trust and the foundation for strong management-employee relationships to analyze and grasp how the practice is doing and where we’re going.

Are collections meeting expectations in the 30/60/90 day periods? How’s are overhead looking and could we lower it? Are costs being managed? What’s helping us achieve our goals? What are our obstacles? Everyone in the entire company has complete visible transparency into the budget, how and what we’re spending, what our results are, and does everyone have a voice on how we can improve our performance. How often have you heard that people leave a job because of the manager not because of the company?

It's true whether it’s a small family dental practice or a large dental group practice DSO. One of the common complaints you hear from disgruntled employees is they don’t trust their dentist or office manager who is not very transparent, and have no idea what they're thinking, what is happening, the performance of the office and don’t know what’s coming up in the future. If you can’t trust your opaque non-communicating dentist, office manager or team leader then your life and work become an exhausting challenge day in and day out.

The late Herb Kelleher (1931-2019) co-founder & CEO of Southwest Airlines was the only airline CEO who was a member of his own pilots union because he knew how important that relationship was. His book was called Nuts!: Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. Maybe it’s time to go nuts and start trusting your employees to help you become successful.