Leadership Lessons from Ted Lasso — Cont. Filling Out the Roster

An Open Position Is an Opportunity to Build a Better Team

Richmond needs a striker.

Not simply another player. A striker.

So Ted and his coaches hold tryouts. Plenty of people show up. Some clearly aren’t good enough. Others are talented, and a few possess qualities Ted finds intriguing.

But that creates an interesting problem.

Finding another good player isn’t necessarily the same as finding the player the team needs.

Dental practice owners face the same opportunity every time someone leaves. Unfortunately, we rarely see it that way.

A hygienist gives notice and almost immediately we say, “We need another hygienist.” An assistant leaves and we need another assistant. Someone at the front desk moves away and we start looking for another front-desk person.

Then the pressure begins. The schedule is already full. Someone has to cover lunch. Another employee stays late. The doctor starts doing things they haven’t done in years, quickly remembering why someone else was hired to do them.

The empty chair starts screaming:

FILL ME.

And that’s when we make the mistake.

An open position isn’t merely a problem to solve. It may be one of the few opportunities a practice owner gets to deliberately make the team better.

Instead of asking, “How do I replace the person who left?” we should be asking, “What does the team we have now need to become the team we want next?”

That requires picking our heads up and looking at the whole field.

Suppose a terrific hygienist leaves. The natural reaction is to look for someone with similar experience, similar skills and perhaps even a similar personality. In effect, we begin searching for Susan 2.0.

But why?

The practice Susan joined five years ago may not be the practice you have today. The team has changed. Your patients may have changed. Your goals certainly may have changed.

Perhaps Susan’s departure exposes something you hadn’t noticed while she was there. Maybe you already have plenty of technical skill in hygiene but need someone who develops extraordinary relationships with patients. Maybe nobody wants to lead the department. Perhaps the practice is moving toward more comprehensive care and needs someone comfortable identifying disease, asking better questions and helping patients understand the connection between oral and overall health.

Maybe you don’t need another Susan at all.

That’s what coaches understand about rosters. They don’t simply replace the departing player with the closest available copy. They look at what remains and ask what addition would make the whole team stronger.

Because teams are ecosystems.

One person brings energy. Another brings calm. Someone naturally teaches. Someone anticipates problems before they occur. Someone can walk into a room with an anxious patient and lower the temperature almost instantly.

Those qualities rarely appear under Skills on a résumé, yet they may determine whether a team becomes stronger or weaker after the hire.

That’s also why I’ve never been particularly impressed by employment ads demanding “five years of dental experience.”

Five years doing what?

And how well?

Experience may represent five years of growth, or it may represent one year repeated five times.

Some of the best people I’ve worked with didn’t arrive knowing everything. They became exceptional because they were curious, coachable, cared about people and wanted to improve. Someone looked beyond what they could do that day and saw what they might become.

That brings us back to Ted.

He isn’t simply evaluating the player standing in front of him. He’s trying to understand what that person might contribute to everyone around her.

And that connects directly to the question from the last episode:

What’s her story?

A résumé tells you where someone has worked. Their story tells you considerably more.

How do they respond when they make a mistake? Do they become defensive or curious? Do they help the person next to them? Can they accept coaching? Do they make other people better? What matters to them?

Those answers may be far more important over the next five years than whether they already know how to use your practice-management software.

Software can be taught.

Other things are considerably harder.

Of course, this kind of thinking becomes difficult when Monday morning is approaching, patients are scheduled and the remaining team is stretched thin. Urgency has a way of narrowing our field of vision.

We stop asking, “Who would make this team better?” and start asking, “Who can start Monday?”

That may solve next week’s problem while creating next year’s.

Dental teams are small. One wrong hire doesn’t disappear into a corporation of thousands. In a ten-person practice, one person represents ten percent of the organization.

Everyone feels it.

Other people compensate. Communication changes. Resentment grows. Strong performers become frustrated. Eventually someone says, “The culture just isn’t what it used to be.”

Culture rarely changes mysteriously.

There’s usually a cause.

And sometimes it can be traced back to the moment we stopped trying to build a better team and simply filled an opening.

That’s why, when someone leaves, I’d resist the impulse to immediately post an ad.

First, look around.

What does this team already do exceptionally well? Where are we weak? Which talents do we have in abundance, and which are missing? Is someone already here capable of assuming greater responsibility? Most importantly, what will this practice need two years from now that it doesn’t need today?

Then decide whom you should add.

An employee leaving rarely feels like good news. There’s inconvenience, disruption and occasionally disappointment.

But there’s also something we don’t often get when every chair is occupied:

A choice.

We can use the opening to recreate the team we had yesterday.

Or we can use it to build a better team for tomorrow.

That’s the difference between filling an opening and filling out a roster.

So the next time someone hands you a resignation letter, after the initial aggravation wears off, pick your head up and look at the whole field.

Don’t ask how quickly you can fill the opening.

Ask what the team needs now.

Because the goal shouldn’t be to get back to where you were.

The opportunity is to become better than you were.