Episode #398: The Conversations That Set Practices Free with Katherine Eitel Belt

Lester De Alwis: Welcome to the Less Insurance Dependence podcast. I’m your host, Lester De Alwis. This podcast is dedicated to helping dental professionals build stronger, more profitable practices with less reliance on insurance. Today I am honored to welcome Katherine Eitel Belt, Founder and CEO of LionSpeak, and the creator of the Lions Principle. Katherine is known across the US, Canada, and the UK as dentistry’s unscripted communication expert, a Certified Speaking Professional, and the author of the upcoming book, Something’s Gotta Change: Mastering Courageous Conversations to Create Clarity and Inspire Change. For 35 years she’s coached dental teams and leaders on the conversations that actually move practices forward. And today we are talking about how those conversations connect directly to a practice’s freedom from insurance. Katherine, welcome to the show.

Katherine Eitel Belt: I’m so glad to be here. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on your podcast, so I’m glad to be back.

Katherine Eitel Belt: There are a few things that happen naturally in almost every single practice, especially if you have the vision for reducing your insurance dependence. One is friction. People have different ideas, different beliefs, and different visions. There is also naturally occurring confusion. Rarely do all the team members see the future objectives and the steps to achieve those objectives the same way we do as owners or leaders. And so there often is confusion, and that all leads to underperformance and disappointment. Those things happen naturally in most small businesses and in most practices. And there’s only one thing that helps with that, and that is leadership, the way that owners and managers communicate differently to alleviate the friction, erase the confusion, and lift the underperformance.

Katherine Eitel Belt: I always introduce leaders to this idea of reframing conflict. Conflict in and of itself can actually be a good thing. It says we have a variety of opinions and ideas. Many counselors I follow have said a version of: if your relationship has no conflict, you’re likely not growing. The cost of avoiding it is essentially misalignment. We spend an enormous amount of time at LionSpeak helping our clients gain alignment between owners, leaders, and employees on where we’re going, what we’re building, what the future looks like if we’re successful, and who we need to be or become along the way. If we can get alignment on that, you can accomplish anything you want including insurance independence.

Katherine Eitel Belt: The vehicle that starts you off on the road of alignment is something we call the invitation conversation. I’m going to share with your listeners a couple of resources, one of them being a flowchart we call the leadership conversation trifecta. It’s three conversations. First is the invitation conversation. That leads to ongoing coaching conversations, very different from supervisory conversations. And then occasionally you have to have what we call a courageous conversation, confronting a boundary or a standard that’s not being met. But I contend that if you have the first two right, you’ll have fewer courageous conversations. And when you do have to have them, they’ll go better.

Katherine Eitel Belt: The invitation conversation requires that owners clarify what they want, what they’re building, and what their vision is for the future. No owner of any small business should have to apologize for creating what they want or justify it. They just need to state it clearly: this is where I’m going, this is what I aspire to, and I’m looking to build a team that aligns and is as excited about this future as I am. And I respect that, if you listen to my vision and decide you’re not in alignment, I would respect that. My job is to get clear on it and present it clearly so you can make the best decision for you. But if you walk across the threshold tomorrow morning, you are essentially raising your hand and saying, I sign up for your vision, your values, your work, that push and that coaching. I’m in.

Katherine Eitel Belt: Expect it. Expect people not to do this perfectly. Change is messy. If you’re asking people to step out and say things differently, organize things differently, present things differently to patients or to each other, they’re not going to do it perfectly right out of the gate. I call these what’s negotiable and what’s not negotiable. Going here is not negotiable. Gaining these skills is not negotiable. How we do it, very negotiable. I’m open to your ideas. I’d love to know what you need and what you want, and how we get there quickly together. That’s a team that is in it.

Katherine Eitel Belt: We think if we hold the standard and we speak the truth, we’re going to destroy the relationship. I’ve had lots of doctors say to me, Catherine, I would love to have these conversations, but I’m afraid that if I say we’re going insurance-free and you haven’t been on board, they’re just going to quit. I think that’s a valid concern. But that’s saying there are only two options: have the conversation and risk losing the employee, or don’t have it and tolerate the behavior. I’m suggesting there’s a third option. You can learn some simple skills to speak the truth and preserve the relationship, uplifting the other person at the same time. That’s the skill most leaders have never learned. And that’s the skill we teach.

Lester De Alwis: Ekwa Marketing is a digital marketing agency offering digital marketing services for dental practices, and their team is delivering a complimentary marketing strategy meeting for listeners. If anyone wants to book a marketing strategy meeting, you can book your session at lessinsurancedependence.com/msm. What their team will do is look at your practice, look at where your online visibility is, and give you a roadmap on where you need to go from where you are. You can also book a complimentary Coaching Strategy Meeting with Gary Takacs at lessinsurancedependence.com/csm

Katherine Eitel Belt: Younger generations don’t want work-life balance. The research shows they want work-life integration. They want one life that feels as good to go to work as it feels to go home. They want to feel connected, feel passion, feel engaged. Gallup does a world workplace study every year. What all the current research is telling us is that people want collaborative teams and ongoing coaching. Not coaching just at onboarding and then never again. Not feedback only at an annual review. At LionSpeak, we recommend a minimum of a once-a-month, 15 to 20 minute coaching check-in with each of the people who report to you. Those are coaching conversations, not supervisory ones.

Katherine Eitel Belt: Supervision is scanning the environment for what’s wrong and swooping in and fixing it. Coaching is scanning the same work environment and noticing where is the untapped potential. When you have a supervisory conversation, there are a lot of sentences, periods at the end of statements. Coaching, the bulk of it is questions. A lot of question marks. You’re guiding people to their answers, guiding people to think. I always ask my audiences: raise your hand if you want to work on a team filled with people who are self-starters, problem solvers, critical thinkers, good teammates, accountable, self-confident, and mature communicators. Everyone raises their hand. And I say: if that’s the team you want, you will not find it. You will build it. And that requires coaching.

Katherine Eitel Belt: If there’s one conversation you’ve been avoiding, the one move you could make to have it this week is first to do a little mindset work on yourself. If you go into that conversation fearful, frustrated, angry, fed up, resentful — any negative emotion — my framework won’t help you. The first thing you have to do is shift internally into confidence that regardless of how this conversation goes, you’re going to be fine. My favorite definition of a great leader is this: in any situation, the leader who will emerge is the person who can articulate the reality of the situation — meaning they can speak the truth — without any judgment, without any fear, and without any blame. That’s the standard. And it is something you can learn.

Katherine Eitel Belt: They can certainly go to our website, which is lionspeak.net — not .com but .net. We have a virtual leadership academy that a lot of owners, managers, and team leads come through, and we are having amazing results training leaders to have better conversations and get the results they want. If you just want to get in relationship, I do a Monday Morning Stretch — I’ve written that blog for almost 20 years, and every Monday morning it comes out free. You can also shoot us an email at info@lionspeak.net and we’re happy to jump on a quick 10-15 minute call and hear what your challenges are and offer some solutions. And I will send for your show notes a QR code and link so that your listeners can download for free my gift to them — the ARCH framework support sheet and the conversation trifecta flowchart.