"Singing From The Same Songsheet" With Blair Headley of Aligned Dental Partners

🎶 🌻 Systems → Training → People. Are you putting these in the right order? If you're wondering how to create an organizational environment where employees can thrive, the new episode of Kinda Different with Blair Headley, Director of Consulting at Aligned Dental Partners, LLC is for you. She shares a ton on building organizations where good culture blossoms and everyone sings from the same songsheet.

You can listen on Spotify/Apple or watch below. A transcript is also included below.

You can find more about Blair and Aligned Dental Partners at the following places:
Website: https://aligneddentalpartners.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aligneddentalpartners

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Transcript
What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Kinda Different, your favorite dental podcast, where we talk about innovation in dentistry. We connect with some of the best guests out there, and today is absolutely no exception to that.
And we talk about how we can all together make dental care more human. I think we're gonna have some really insightful things to hear today, to learn from our guests today. Blair Headley, who is the Director of Consulting at Aligned Dental Partners, really thoughtful person.
If you've ever heard her at a meeting or interacted with her in any way, I think this has some really great things that, in terms of patient experience, might be coming at it from a little different angle. And I think you're gonna be really insightful for us. So Blair, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
For all of those listeners who are out there who don't know who you are, please just give us a little bit more about you. Tell us who you are and then we'll dive into it.
Sounds great. Thanks, Matt, for having me today. Really excited to spend this time with you on the podcast.
So for those who don't know me, my name again is Blair Headley. I'm the Director of Consulting at Aligned Dental Partners. I'm in my 10th year of dental practice consulting.
Early on in my career, I really started within the four walls of the practice. So back then, solo practice was a little bit more prevalent than the group practice space. We certainly have seen that trend over the last decade of the consolidation of dentistry.
So really focused on same store growth and putting systems and processes in place that would help practices grow within their own four walls. As that transition from more solo practice situations to group practice was taking place, I made a jump to another consulting firm that focused more in the group dental space before transitioning with one of the largest DSOs in the country where I was for some time before I joined the Aligned Dental Partners team in 2019. Here we really focus on group practices and DSOs sort of in three different buckets, strategically, high-level legal structures, accounting, which I'm kind of a spreadsheet nerd myself.
I like the numbers very much. And business development activity. We also work in the operational space within the four walls of the practice with the amazing consulting team that we've pulled together here, as well as some clinical consulting with hygienists and dentists to help define the standard of care, raise the standard of care and practices, and help drive great patient outcomes.
So it's, again, great to be here with you, excited to chat today, and looking forward to jumping right in.
Well, let's do that. And, you know, we always start with innovation. I am excited to hear your perspective on some of these questions, because I think that, I guess, the angle that we'll take in some of this might be a little bit different from some of the other conversations that we've had on the pod.
And I think it would just be really interesting to hear how you're thinking about this. We've had several conversations offline about this. You know, you shared this on a recent webinar, this idea of getting everyone within the practice to kind of sing in the same song sheet.
And this idea of, like, just creating alignment and consistency within a practice. You even mentioned that just in terms of creating these systems and kind of standards of care, right? That kind of all goes back to this consistency piece.
Tell us why in the current modern dental environment that is an innovative thought, because I think it really is. And so I'd love to hear, you know, I think we all wish it wasn't. I think we all wish that, like, everyone was just, like, singing the same tune all the time.
That's not the case. And so why do you think that's the case? And what are some of the things that you feel like you and the Aligned team do to kind of really help create that consistency within the practices?
Well, if it's not in the name, I don't know what better it could be. You know, that's what we do is alignment. And, you know, we, I think when you look at past years and you look at how the industry has moved from that solo practice situation into more of a scaling and growing situation for group practices and DSOs, the need for alignment and consistency has quadrupled.
You know, it's way, way more important because when you're a single practice, you can kind of do whatever you want, right? And we, I kind of equate it with my clients to like having a bunch of kids, right? Like when you have one kid, you know, it's either a one-on-one or a zone defense type of thing where you can kind of get away with a little bit more than you can.
When you start to grow and scale, you can't be in two places at one time, right? So you rely on your systems and you rely on that consistency to be able to provide a patient experience that's memorable. I tell clients in trainings all the time that if I blindfolded you and spun you in a circle and shoved you into the practice across the street, what would be different about the feelings that you had while you were in there?
What would be different about your experience? Because they all smell the same. They all sound the same.
They mostly look the same. There's not a whole lot that's different. So you have to be able to differentiate yourself, create a consistent experience for your patient coming in so that they're able to rely on the service that they're going to get.
Otherwise, they just go to the next practice, right? I ask people how they're differentiating themselves or why their patients like them. They kind of all say the same thing.
They're always like, oh, we build great relationships. Our patients love us. They drop off gifts to us at the holidays and whatnot.
I say, yeah, but if I asked any practice that question, the answer would be the same, right? So what are you really doing that's different? And what I find is that when you define a process, and I give my clients these all the time.
I call them Blairisms. But one of the biggest Blairisms that I throw out there all the time is this concept of systems, training, and people. And everybody always wants to jump to holding people accountable before they've really done the systems and the training part.
And it's those three steps, but also in those three orders. So when we're creating a system or a process, it's critical that that system is documented. It's the Blair's Dental Practice way to do something, that it's written down and that it's not enough for it to just be written down and live in a binder on a dusty shelf somewhere in the office manager's office.
But it has to be lived and breathed every day. And I'm sure throughout this chat we'll talk about culture as well because I'm a huge culture nut for practices. But when you create a system, a way that you're doing something that's super documented and Bible to your organization, and you train individuals to believe in what it is that you're telling them that they need to do, and they've got all of the tools that they need to be successful, everybody puts their hand in the circle and says, go team, go, we're all on the same page.
And then, and only then, can you really hold those people accountable. Far too often in our industry, especially in small practices or small group practices that don't have enough infrastructure to really oversee the consistency of these systems, we bottle up feelings related to accountability and have explosions and then people end up being upset and it's not fun. This just creates what I would call a fun work environment.
You know, to me, fun isn't about like going to Topgolf or Happy Hour or, you know, doing team activities. Those things are fun and they're important to do with your team, but it's really more about creating an environment where they feel safe, they feel supported, they feel like they know what's expected of them and that's very clear to them and they have a developmental path forward and all of that starts at the very basic level of having your song sheet, right? And when you can get everybody singing from that same song sheet, as I've said many times in the past on air, it's a really beautiful thing and it's not just a great thing for your team, it's not just a great thing for your business, it's also a great thing for your patients and you can ensure that the quality of care that your patients are receiving is going to be top notch.
I love it. There's so much in there in terms of, okay, well, here's I think where you did a good job of kind of helping us understand, hey, here's where the profession has come from and maybe why some of the systems and kind of standardization and consistency is difficult for dentistry in general based on our history as a profession. But I think what you're talking about there, obviously, not only applies to an overall organization just in terms of, hey, we're going to create consistency, but you mentioned that word culture.
To me, that obviously flows out of that, the culture that is created within a practice. Culture will happen, whether that's good or bad. And so if you ignore those things, you're probably going to have a pretty bad culture.
You're going to have a culture where you're like, hey, I have to try to take people out to Topgolf or buy them something nice or whatever, just to make them not leave and hope they don't leave because things aren't great on a daily basis. People want to show up and be able to perform their best. When you think about that idea of innovating around culture, why is that so important to you?
Obviously, you described yourself as a culture nut. Why is that so important to you? Tell us maybe a good recent example of like, hey, here's something that somewhere we came into and really had a lot of success reshaping what that culture looked like.
Yeah, 100%. I believe that the driver of all practice success, whether it's helping more patients get healthy and stay healthy, which is the basis of everything that I implement from a consulting standpoint. So a lot of times people are like, oh, consultants, they're all about the money, they're all about the numbers.
And it's like, sure, we're about the numbers, but how else do you measure how many people's lives you've impacted? Or how else are you supposed to measure how many people you got help to get healthy and stay healthy? And I think that that's a really, really important lens to look through from a consulting standpoint, because I've worked at three different firms over the course of my career, all of which I've been very fortunate, have been able to take that view.
But I hear horror stories all the time, especially when working with a team early on in an engagement where they're like, I've had consultants in the past and it's kind of scary. And they're worried that everybody is going to come out and be like off with their heads because their, you know, overhead is too high, like you offset high overhead by producing more, helping more people get healthy and stay healthy. So I think it's really critical to use that slightly different lens when we're trying to implement anything in a practice.
And culture is sort of like at the crux of creating the momentum to help people get healthy and stay healthy, which is what we're trying to accomplish in this industry. So, you know, in terms of a recent example, I've got about a hundred. But I actually on the call that I had just ahead of this one, there was a bit of a culture meltdown.
And generally speaking, when when talking to this particular client who happens to be an ortho client, they feel pretty good about their business. And I've worked limitedly with the team. I mostly work in a strategic capacity with him.
But the they've always seemed relatively happy. And he got on the call. And the very first thing he said is, I know we usually talk about the peed side of the business because that's where we've been spending most of our time recently.
But I had a real bad day in ortho yesterday. We need to talk about it. And he had two employees quit yesterday, one employee that walked out.
And I mean, this just happened in the last 24 hours. And one employee walked out and there was this big meltdown. And I had to get on my culture soapbox with him today because he's a sweet man, nice guy, very talented orthodontist.
And I had to stand up and say to him, these people are not leaving you because of money. A lot of people are like, culture, like, oh, they're giving me notice because they're going to get paid $1 more down the street. No, that's not why they're leaving you, sir.
So, you know, they say that to you because it's the easy thing to say, not because it's the real reason that they're leaving you. And, you know, what we've coached him to do and what I should be getting a text about in the next hour on how this went, but we've done many, many times with other clients, is that he needs to sit down, especially with this fellow who walked out, you know, and based it on a pay conversation. His complaint on a pay conversation was, come from a place of concern because you genuinely are concerned that this is out of the box behavior and it feels to you like it's coming out of left field.
So when you throw your arms up in the air and you say, fine, you want to walk out, fine, walk out, and you let them leave, that might be the outcome anyway, sure, but you didn't get any information back from that to help you course correct and do something different and more meaningful in your business. You genuinely are surprised or concerned about why this went down the way that it did. Let's go into him and say, hey man, this is really outside of the box.
I'm super concerned because I thought we were all on the same page here, I thought we were all singing from the same sheet, I thought we were helping more patients get healthy and stay healthy, I thought we were rowing the boat in the same direction towards our ultimate vision and mission, which is to help more kids get straight teeth. What did I miss? I'm really worried.
Are you okay? Are you alright? And again, it's critical that you care about your team enough to notice these changes in behavior, which clearly he's missed some cues here and is now making up the difference.
But I hope through that conversation, whatever the outcome may be, whether this person ultimately leaves, which could be a sad thing for the practice, but also might be a good thing for the practice. We know that sometimes there's folks who aren't willing to get on your culture train, and I challenge clients to look at what people are unwilling to do more than what they're willing to do, because it helps you understand a little bit more who they are. But worse comes to worse, he moves on, right?
And best case scenario, we figure out what happened to cause this breakdown. And again, I primarily work with the pediatric side of his practice, which is like booming and doing great. Right now, we've put a lot of work in over the last six, seven months to improve the culture on the PED side of his business, which he's not overly focused on as a practicing orthodontist.
But it's clear that as a practicing orthodontist, the responsibility to be an advocate or the trendsetter of his culture has fallen to the wayside, and he needs to immediately get back on that bandwagon. And I think that, again, when you have a culture where people see a path forward, a great example of this system that we implement with almost all of our clients is a pay band management system. So we sit down and define where the pay bands are, what are the skills and things that you need in each of the bands to be able to work towards your ultimate goals.
And we're extremely transparent in that with our clients. So we say, hey, go lay this out in front of your team at their annual evaluations or during their quarterly or monthly one-to-ones. Show them the path, right?
Show them where their next move is or what the next skill is that they need to obtain. Just giving arbitrary raises year over year doesn't create culture. But unfortunately, that's where I think the industry has found itself in a majority of practices and those that are a little bit more wage transparent in terms of where the levels are and what people need to do to get there, those that spend the time detailing out development plans, professional development plans for their team members, those that really live and breathe the culture of that practice that they're trying to set every single day with a top-down mentality.
Those are the practices that are blowing up. Those are the practices that even in tough economies will overcome. Those are the practices that during pandemics didn't lose 80% of their staff.
Those are the ones that stuck around. To me, in order to serve patients best, in order to have profitable practices, it all starts with the culture. It all starts with that supportive place.
If you don't have that, it's going to be a shaky foundation to build off of.
I love it. I feel like so much of what you talked about in there, too, is just the power of knowing where you want to go, right? The mission and vision and those pieces as well, but then also just the daily lived values of transparency and honest communication and all of those pieces that are just so relational, that matter so much.
I think obviously that's so crucial.
I might add on to that, Matt, just one quick thing, because I think this is also a really important example. I teach to many of my teams that I work with this results triangle. I always tell them, draw like a food pyramid and put three lines on it so you got four spots.
If you just simplified everything down to this results triangle, you'd be amazed at how many examples fit into this and what it does to a team's ability to course correct and change. That bottom level is your experiences. It's all of the things that you go through, whether that's in work, out of work, whatever.
Those experiences shape then your beliefs and based on what you believe, drives your actions and your actions are going to drive your results. The example I always use is if Suzy comes late to the huddle every day because Thursdays are big party days in anywhere USA and every Friday she misses the huddle, but she never gets in trouble because she's Doc's right hand man. Everybody else on the team is experiencing the fact that Suzy doesn't need to be there and that she's not going to get in trouble.
So what does the belief become? That everybody doesn't have to come to the huddle and that they're not going to get in trouble. So then the action is that nobody starts showing up.
And then what does that do to your result when your whole team is missing the huddle? We don't know what plays we're calling today. We don't know where our opportunities are for the day.
And how are we best serving our patients if we're not prepared? So when you were just mentioning the experiences thing there, it made me think of the results triangle. And I think that that's an interesting concept to apply when you're thinking about where your culture might be going wrong.
I love it. Yeah, that's great. I'm sure that there are, you know, I learned something from that.
And I'm sure that our listeners will learn something from that as well. So thank you for sharing. Let's learn a little bit more about you.
One of my favorite, you know, like we all experience health care, right? And so I like putting ourselves in that lens. And I would love to, if you're willing to share, just tell us about your most formative experience as a patient.
What happened? Like, why do you, you know, how does that shape your view of health care? You know, yeah, give us some insight into, you know, your most formative.
Yeah, I mean, looking back on, you know, growing up, I'm from a health care family, actually. So we've always placed, like, a high value on whether it be, like, your six month, you know, recall appointment or your annual physical or whatever that might be. It's always been important to me.
I think I've, you know, aside from being in the industry, high dental IQ, I'm close with my personal dentist. Like, we text, like, his family is close with my family. So I think from that perspective, I've always had a healthy, like, respect and love for the health care industry and the dental industry as a whole.
When I reflect on it now, though, some of the things that stick out to me as, like, I can't believe things were done that way for so long, there's two examples that come to mind. First is, and everybody's experienced this, and this is why I say from a cultural standpoint or a systems-based standpoint, like, don't be that girl, don't be that guy. You go in, you call up the doctor's office and you say, I'm sick.
They're like, oh, tell me what's wrong. And you're like, oh, my throat really hurts. I've been coughing for three days and I'm running a little bit of a fever.
They're like, let's get you in. So you get in, then they give you a piece of paper. Why are you here?
You write all the same stuff down. Then you get into the operatory and they're like, so tough. The nurse is like, tell me what's going on.
And you tell them. And then the doctor comes in, is like, so what brings you in today? And you end up telling the same story over and over and over again.
And I'm like, why? It didn't dawn on me in the moment, of course, when it was happening. But looking back on it and using that very simple, has happened to everybody type of experience, it gives me the desire to want to make that experience different for our patients.
So what I see so often when I go into practices is that they will do beautiful transfers, like beautiful handoffs. The dental assistant will have taken their intro photos and their PAs on a limited exam, and then they'll pull the doctor in the hallway and they'll give this great handoff, right? And there was no benefit to the patient at all by doing that.
And I just say to them, just go back in the room and do that in front of them, right? So that they don't have to, everything we say in front of the patient is for the benefit of the patient. And once the patient hears something a few times, right?
So hygienist is saying to the patient, hey, Mrs. Jones, I'm really concerned because you can see this picture up here. And if we didn't do anything about that, this is what's gonna happen. And what the doctor normally does in a situation like this is something like that.
Let's go ahead and get him in here to take a look. And that then doctor walks in and hygienist just gets to say, hey, doc, I was just talking to Mrs. Jones about this tooth here on the screen and how I'm really concerned and that this might happen. And, you know, what you would normally do is this.
And he goes, great, let's take a look. Patient didn't have to like go through the whole rigmarole all over again. The other thing that sticks out to me as a formative experience and one of the things I share with my clients all the time on what not to do or what to do is that even at my own personal dentist, who I love, I think he's great, my husband is like one of those big burly guys who's afraid of the dentist, right?
So it's always the big burly ones that are afraid to get in the office. And after a very long time of not going to the dentist, I finally convinced him like, sir, you need to go to the dentist. And he goes in, of course, he's got like freaking perfect teeth after like, you know, not going to the dentist forever, go figure.
But he goes in and he comes out, gives me a call, I'm at work or whatever, he gives me a call, he goes, Blair, they took pictures of the inside of my mouth. And I said, as they should, like, you mean like x-rays? He's like, no, like real pictures.
And I said, that's wonderful, they took intro photos of you. That really makes it a lot more relatable, doesn't it? And he was like, yeah, like when you look at those x-rays, you have no idea what you're looking at.
And it's very confusing for patients with, even with high dental IQs, to be able to look and derive something from an x-ray. But when you take an intro photo, he was like, man, I saw that I do have a little bit of recession on, you know, my gums. And all of a sudden, he's just like talking like a doctor, talking like a hygienist.
And I think that that's really formidable because if we have more experiences like that, it really opens our eyes to what's going on. It helps us see the value. It helps us understand the consequences of inaction, of not dealing with our dental problems.
It helps us as patients create a sense of urgency. Because what I say to clients all the time is that patients aren't saying no to you. They're just saying not right now because you haven't done a great enough job of creating a sense of urgency.
And as we all know, most dental issues don't reverse themselves. So they only get worse and more invasive and more expensive the longer and longer they carry on. So I think that that has those two examples, albeit early in my career and maybe through childhood, they really helped form how I can relate to a client now and help practices overcome just being another practice or setting themselves apart from the run-of-the-mill practice across the street.
I love it. Yeah, and I think you talked about pediatric practices earlier, obviously share a lot of that same belief in terms of like, when you have those good conversations with people at a young age, it teaches them, hey, we want you to be involved. We want you to be somebody who's driving care forward in these ways and involved in your decision making and all of those things.
You are not a passenger. You're not a recipient of this care. You are a co-creator of it, and if you're doing that at an early age, how much of a difference that can make time after time after time.
You become an adult and you're like, oh, great, I know how to deal with this. I really love that idea just in general and that being a longitudinal idea. It doesn't just happen at one appointment at a point in time, but it happens over time, which really creates this really beautiful, I think, interaction between patient and healthcare system, whatever staff you're involved with.
Okay, let's talk. We got one time for one more question, making dental care more human. Obviously, we need to kind of think about this.
I think this is interesting from your perspective, thinking about consulting as well. But the idea of making care more rooted, more human, more connected, you've already kind of given us some ways that you do that. How do you think about your role as that in terms of facilitating that for your clients so that they can go and in turn do that and in turn make those kind of interactions?
So it's kind of like a few steps away, but obviously you have a big role as the coach essentially in a situation of helping the players on the field actually have success. And so describe to us kind of how you do that in your work with your clients. I would love to hear a little bit more about that.
Yeah, and I think, you know, there's many humans to serve in our industry, right? Like it's not just serving patients. You know, in a group space or a DSO type environment, especially as you continue to grow and scale, there's patients to serve.
There's boots on the ground, team members to serve. There's corporate support folks that you need to serve. There's doctors, associate doctors that you need to serve.
And I think it's important, as a consultant, to be able to consider the impacts of all of the lives that we're able to touch here. One of the big things that I advocate for and Aligned Dental Partners advocates for, and in fact, we just had a huge presentation about this last week at the AADGP, and this sounds like not human at all, but it comes full circle, even just in how you set up your legal structure, can make the human nature of the practice and the group space so much more intimate. Being able to impact the lives of your associate dentist by having a creative legal structure that offers paths to partnership.
That's going to impact their lives, their family's lives, their patient's lives, because now they're more bought in on the whole practice situation. They're not just an employee, they're an owner. Being able to set up a creative legal structure so that non-dentists are able to participate with some form of equity.
So your support team or those key people who helped you get where you are today are able to participate in your practice in some way, shape, or form. We've now influenced a bunch more folks who are going to ultimately impact the lives of our patients. And as a consultant, I think it's important, as I was saying earlier, the bottom line for me, like the bare bottom where I'm coming from, the lens I'm looking through is how do we help more patients get healthy and stay healthy.
Sometimes that means having a partner, an associate that can turn into a partner in a way that's not going to dilute the practice owner financially. Sometimes to help more people get healthy and stay healthy, we have to put that structure in place for support team. For the folks who are boots on the ground, I think providing them that structure, helping them live in a space that they already want to live in.
Most people, I mean, I don't fit much outside the personality profile of your regular dental practice person. I like a lot of structure. That's something that I like.
I can be creative. I like to flex creative muscles from time to time, but I'm a linear thinker in a lot of ways. And so are many people that are on our team.
Set them up to be successful by giving them a line of thinking that they can follow. It doesn't have to be so abstract all the time. People like having guardrails.
It makes them feel safe. And when you really think about humanizing our industry, I think the popular approach would be all about patient care, which again, I'm down to that same level as well. But if we're not taking care of our people who are taking care of those patients and we're not setting them up for success, then we're really doing ourselves and our patients a big disservice.
So I think for me, the number one way that we're humanizing dentistry is by bringing more people into the fold, particularly with solving the partnership issues, getting the associate doctors their equity, putting these creative legal structures in place to help the support teams. All of that is going to lead to better retention with your teams, happier team members, and ultimately happier patients and better patient outcomes. So I think that's where I'm at.
It's a beautiful way to end our episode today, Blair. Thank you for sharing. Love that perspective.
Again, I think your place in the industry has allowed us a really interesting take on a few of these questions today. That we don't normally hear. So really appreciate you taking the time to join us and share.
I would love, I'm sure there are people out there who are going to be like, yeah, I would love to talk to Blair more and know more about Aligned Dental Partners. If they want to know more about you or Aligned, tell us where to go, where to find more information.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, they can always check us out on LinkedIn. You know, we're pretty active.
Our whole group is pretty active on the socials. And then definitely check out our website at www.aligneddentalpartners.com. Tons of great information there.
We're always happy to chat at any time. You can reach out to us any time and we'd be happy to jump on a call.
Awesome. Well, I again, really, really appreciate your time, your experience, your expertise, just your enthusiasm for doing what you do and helping these dental practices ultimately create oral health in their patients and in their communities and to create healthy teams within these organizations as well. So thank you so much for taking the time.
I really appreciate it and look forward to continuing the conversation maybe on a future episode of a podcast or certainly at an in-person meeting soon. Thanks so much.
It's been my pleasure, Matt. Thank you.