Episode 413: Leadership That Sticks: Building Change That Lasts with Liz Lord

Lester De Alwis: Welcome to the Less Insurance Dependence podcast. I’m your host, Lester De Alwis, and this show is dedicated to helping dental professionals build stronger, more profitable practices with less reliance on insurance. Today I’m excited to welcome Liz Lord, president of Liz Lord Coaching and Consulting. Liz has been in dentistry since 1988 and has coached dental practice owners since 2002, helping them build leadership capability and turn daily operations into intentional and sustainable growth. Today’s episode is called Leadership That Sticks: Building Change That Lasts. We are going to talk about why so much change in a dental practice fades over time and what it actually takes to make it permanent. Liz, welcome to the show.

Liz Lord: Thank you so much for having me.

Liz Lord: I spent a dozen years clinically, and that is where I fell in love with dentistry. I had gone to hygiene school and was on the track to go to dental school, but a back injury took me out of the contortionist clinical positions you can find yourself in sometimes. I went back to school, studied business more, worked in the business office of a practice, and then I just jumped right into coaching. When I switched to coaching, it was really about taking care of all the people that take care of all those patients, so I can have a much bigger impact in patients finding themselves in practices that are just extraordinary, the kind of place you want to be and would never think of leaving.

Liz Lord: The practice that I went to work in had such a powerful, strong leadership component in communication. That is really where I started to learn about the power of communication in dental practices. I became a student of communication and leadership, and it makes all the difference in a dental practice.

Liz Lord: How many times have people gone to continuing education? They come back really excited, but then the inertia of the practice just takes over. This year I have actually transformed my business to the Professional Transformation Institute, because now we are talking about what has change be lasting. We have to identify with ourselves what shows up that has things staying the same way. Everything you love about your practice, if you are a practice owner, you should be so proud of yourself, because that is a reflection of you. And then you have to look at everything that is not how you would have it be, and get that that too is a reflection of you, but not in a way where something is wrong and there is something to blame. It is information. When we move ourselves, the practice moves with us. That is how you achieve lasting change.

Liz Lord: You can willpower your way through anything for a period of time, but if you are really going to have lasting change, it is because you are going to go to work on what is happening between your ears that has it continuing to go that way. Not from a place of blame, from a place of discovery.

Liz Lord: One of the things I have done in transforming my business is create a two-day intensive. It is online, because I want people literally digitally talking, and it has an AI thinking partner with it. Even if they have never worked with AI, we make sure they know how to do it, because they are literally just dictating. On day one, we are getting to the source of what is the thinking behind the operations in the practice. The thinking that we are not even present to, but it leads us down a path of familiarity. We discover that on day one so that we can take it into day two and re-engineer the business in a way that aligns with the way we would have it be.

Liz Lord: Once we can distinguish something, then we have the power of choice over it and we can make new choices and practice that. It is not like I ate broccoli today and now I am healthy forever. We continue to practice that over and over, and then it becomes so familiar, it is a habit, and then it is just who we are.

Liz Lord: If you want to reduce insurance, you have got to have a way to communicate that with your patients in a way that is empowering to them, so that the right patients choose to stay in your practice. That is not something you would want to execute haphazardly. That takes a lot of thought and intention. You really have to have congruency in how you are being and how you are communicating, and your team is as well, in order to enroll those patients in a new business model.

Liz Lord: They were never in network, but they accepted assignment of benefits, and they went to a practice that was doing complete fee for service. How do you retain patients and grow your practice and not just kill it doing that? We grew the practice substantially and still lost a third of the patient base. So it is very doable, but communication is so vital when you want to be a fee-for-service practice.

Liz Lord: Leadership is everything. When I work with a practice, I do not look at leadership as just the owner of the practice. Leadership is a team effort. It is leaders leading leaders. I had a conversation with a client a couple of weeks ago. When I started working with them 15 months ago, there was so much breakdown in the team and so much dysfunction. He told me they had a team meeting, and the assistants and the manager were dealing with a problem. He said, I did not even know it was a problem, I just sat back and listened and they were on top of it. That is leadership.

Liz Lord: Leaders always look to themselves first before they look for who is to blame. I really do not even care for blame. I care about what the results are, and whether they are aligned with what we want. Then we look at ourselves. Have we been clear about our expectations? Have we provided all the resources necessary? Have we shown them how to be successful? Have we given them feedback? If we cannot say yes to all of those, then the place we need to shift first is where we are.

Liz Lord: As a practice grows and scales, the owner can become the bottleneck. If you want to scale beyond your own footprint, you have to replace yourself. Great leaders are always looking to replace themselves with people who are as good, if not better, than they are in particular areas, because you do not have to be a master in everything.

Lester De Alwis: To everyone listening in, speaking about growth, if you want to grow your practice, just like how Liz was explaining, the team at Ekwa Marketing, who is sponsoring this episode, is offering a complimentary marketing strategy meeting at lessinsurancedependence.com/msm or you can book a complimentary coaching strategy meeting with Gary at lessinsurancedependence.com/csm That meeting is basically analyzing your marketing, your online visibility, and finding where you are missing out and getting your practice to the next level. Ekwa Marketing has been working with dental practices for the past 19 years.

Liz Lord: Leadership can absolutely be taught and trained. It is just like anything else. You can train a new muscle. What is really critical about learning leadership is putting yourself in the right environment to learn it, because leadership is experiential. There are a lot of books on it, but it is kind of like learning to ride a bicycle. You do not learn to ride a bicycle by reading about it. You learn by getting on the bicycle and discovering balance. Once you discover balance, you can ride any bicycle. Leadership is the same way. It is discovered, and you are going to bump up against old ways of being that were not aligned with your leadership.

Liz Lord: If we stop and take ourselves out of it, almost like we are watching a silent movie, we can see how it actually occurs for that person. Does it occur as frustrating, or dangerous, or stupid? You can shift it and get curious about how else it could occur. Maybe I am kind of curious what would have them take that behavior. Now I can ask a question instead of just reacting to what I am seeing. When you ask a question, you are leading them down a path of inquiry, and yourself. You have taken that emotional charge and diffused it, maybe from a seven to a three. You are going to operate much more powerfully from a three than from a seven.

Liz Lord: You will see new ways of behaving, new ways of being show up. You will start to elevate the quality of the problems you have. We think of problems as something we want to get rid of, but problems are a sign of life. We just want better quality problems. In a practice, it can be a problem that our schedule has a lot of late cancellations and missed appointments, and it looks like Swiss cheese. Then we go to work on it, and now we have another problem. Now we cannot get people in soon enough. That is a much better quality problem to tackle. You know things are becoming permanent when you are elevating the quality of the problems you are solving.

Liz Lord: The people on his team look at that practice like it is their own. I want them to feel like this is my practice. They do not own the practice, but they own the practice. That is when change is permanent. Especially if they are looking to move away from insurance, all of those things are scary to take on. There is a lot of fear that comes with it. But when you bring leadership and go to work on being the best leader you can be, and then train your team in leadership and communication, that is when all of those fears are just false evidence appearing real.

Liz Lord: Being in inquiry, especially when something is not going right. You are going to have a way that you just automatically react, a well-defined neural pathway. When something does not feel good internally, instead of whatever would happen normally, making a demand of people, asking who is to blame, critiquing, or just getting frustrated and mad, notice that. Ask yourself, what is going on here? How does this occur for me? What is the thinking? And then ask yourself, if everything were going exactly how I want it to go in the practice, how would I get to be then that I do not get to be now?

Liz Lord: When the leader shifts, the whole practice shifts, because you are going to get a different set of results. If you are somebody who normally starts yelling at people, it is going to take them a little while to trust that you are not going to do that again, so you have to be patient. Leaders deal with themselves first. Show up powerfully, not dominant, but powerful, and ask questions. Questions are your best friend. Be patient with yourself too, because you will be successful at times and you will fall on your face at times. All of that is learning.

Liz Lord: Certainly my website is a great way to reach out to me. As I said, my business is in a transformation currently. You can go to lizlordcoaching.com, which is the former one, but I would recommend going to professionaltransformationinstitute.com, because that is really what this is. It is mentorship, coaching, and consulting. Consulting is about what you do, and we have plenty of that. Coaching is about the people who actually have to execute on that and how they can do that in a way that brings a whole new level of success.

Lester De Alwis: You can get that link in the show notes of this episode. Liz, thank you so much for spending your time with us today.

Liz Lord: Thank you so much for having me. It has been such a great conversation.