If your team keeps walking out the door, your instinct is probably to raise pay. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: that rarely fixes it, because pay is something anyone can find slightly more of down the street.
You can’t control the labor market.
Roughly 90 percent of practices say hiring is extremely or moderately hard right now, and that’s not going to change because you wish it would. What you can control is the ground you’re growing your team in.
Scott’s rule is simple: if you want to grow the practice, grow the people first. You can’t give patients great care if you’re not giving your team great care first. Team is patient number one.
There are three things that actually keep people, and none of them is a bigger paycheck on its own:
A mission bigger than the job. People want their work to mean something past the hours they clock.
A real path to earn more inside your practice. Anyone with no path to make more money where they are will find one somewhere else. Count on it.
A workplace that lifts them up. Your practice is doing one of two things to your team every day: lifting them up, or dragging them down. They feel it. So do you.
Here’s where most advice gets it backwards: training versus transformation. Training is a script you hand someone once and forget. Transformation is ownership, built the way a sports team builds it, through practice, repetition, and review. Training fades by next week. Transformation compounds.
Run this gut check on yourself: every interaction with your team either deposits into their trust in you, or withdraws from it. Think back over your last week. Which one were you doing more of? The team is always a reflection of the doctor.
The cheapest fix, and the highest-leverage one, costs nothing: a real morning huddle and a real end-of-day huddle. Not numbers off a clipboard. Set the tone, reset the tone, every single day.
Turnover is rarely a market problem. It’s almost always a culture problem, and culture is the one thing you fully control.
Scott goes deeper on the three things every team member needs and the full huddle rhythm here: “Dental Team Building: 7 Ideas That Actually Reduce Turnover”.
