About seven years ago, I told my office that I had decided to drop $125,000 on a machine that would make dental crowns in the office. The normal protocol was that we sent out for crowns, a process that took a lot of time. Having the technology in the practice would allow us to make the crown on the spot and have it ready for a patient in about an hour. I thought it was a great idea, and even though I’m the one in charge of making the purchase, I respect the opinions of my employees. Especially if they disagree with me, because this means they trust me enough to know that I am not going to fire them for having a difference of opinion.
So right after I pitched my plan on this $125,000 machine, my office manager and my assistant both stood up and told me it was a waste. My assistant said we should be investing money in an office makeover, since the place hadn’t been touched up or redone in more than 10 years. My office manager said the money would be better spent marketing to get new patients. They both had great points.
Here I was, focused on the part of the business I loved the most: the dentistry. I wanted to have this awesome new technology to offer to patients. Meanwhile, my assistant and my office manager were focused on the areas that they were most passionate about.
In the end, we pursued all three areas. We remodeled, we got a great marketing firm to work with us, and I got my CAD/CAM machine.
But let’s take a look at how quickly the story could have gone from a great ending to a terrible ending. Imagine that my assistant and my office manager didn’t trust or respect me enough to speak their minds without fear of repercussion. Or imagine that I didn’t respect my employees enough to even inform them of major decisions. While I may have greatly improved one part of my business, I ran the risk of completely neglecting other areas, and worse, disrespecting the very people I hired to make my business better.
As a business owner, I’ve found that trust and respect must go both ways. Employees must know they can speak their minds, and business owners must feel comfortable presenting ideas to their teams and hearing the feedback.
The following excerpt is from my new book, “Uncomplicate Business: All It Takes Is People, Time, and Money.” The book comes out in October 2015 and is available for preorder at HowardFarran.com.
Excerpt: One of the biggest signs of trust is that all of your employees can argue with you freely, out loud, and feel safe. That’s even one of my company’s core values: Strive to make everyone feel safe, valued, and important.
That begins and ends with trust and respect.
Trust and respect are two business concepts that too often get left out of business school curriculum. We get so busy talking about cash flow, shareholder value, and meeting the bottom line that, most of the time, the idea of treating staff well gets put on the back burner. But here’s the thing: if you want to have cash flow and you want to meet your bottom line, you need happy employees. This is where trust and respect come in and why I believe they warrant an entire chapter.
You wouldn’t turn your eye to someone getting robbed, but you’re going to let people in your company get emotionally abused? Don’t ever tolerate employees saying bad things about others in your company. People aren’t going to have fun, or be passionate and enthusiastic, when they have to spend every waking minute with the office jerk. Humans are very emotional and complex, and they are very sensitive. If they’re not respected they’re not going to give you their best performance, and they might not even want to continue working for you. …
Trust is hard, especially for those of us who like to have our hands in many pies at once. I love knowing what is going on in all my departments. But I’ve learned that micromanaging rarely yields positive results. It shows your employees you don’t trust them, don’t value their work, or don’t believe they are capable of completing a task on their own. You can’t give someone the responsibility for something without giving her the authority to make it happen.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you give your employee, Greg, the responsibility for taking care of the landscape maintenance at your company, yet you require that he run every decision by you first. He’s not authorized to fire the existing lawn service company if he decides it is not up to par. He’s not allowed to bid out for services, and if you receive bids for three different price points, he’s not allowed to pick the right company.
How is Greg going to feel? Greg is going to feel demoralized and as though he isn’t accomplishing anything. …
Trust branches out into more areas than just trusting employees to be responsible and accountable to their job tasks. It also includes trusting the way your employees manage their time. For example, when I started in dentistry, offices wouldn’t allow personal phone calls during office hours. I always thought, “This is crazy!”
If you have hired independently motivated people, this should never be a problem. This is a trust issue. You don’t keep a spouse faithful by keeping her locked in the closet at home. You’ve got to let the spouse stay faithful on her own. You’ve got to let go. …
Too many people in the business world refuse to delegate; they insist upon controlling every single aspect of the business. That’s why so many of them are stressed out. They don’t delegate because they don’t fully trust their employees. …
Respect doesn’t just mean respecting them as people, but also respecting their time and the quality of their work. The line between work and home gets blurry. To promote the balance between personal life and professional life, you can’t devise a structure that dictates the daylight hours from eight to five are all work and no family, and evening hours from five to ten are all family with no work. Those are old concepts that come from the industrial revolution and working on an assembly line. They don’t apply now. It’s so important for bosses and employees to have a balance between family life, professional careers, health, and spirituality. If employees feel a mutual respect, these blurred lines won’t be an issue for anyone.
The anticipation for your book is huge for me! This excerpt is nothing but truth! Thank you for giving a voice to a frustration that we have all felt one time or another. I hope this opens up a very comfortable dialogue for employers and teams to resolve any issues and get back to the task at hand.