Making her debut as a Practice Plan speaker at the Dental Business Theatre at the Dentistry Show at the NEC last month was dental business coach, Dr Bhavna Doshi of Dental Wealth Builder.
The theme for this year’s sessions was “Dentistry’s Biggest Questions answered” and Bhavna joined Lucie Simic, Mark Topley and Dhru Shah to offer solutions to the question ‘How can I keep my team happy and motivated?’
Bhavna has been a qualified dentist for around 30 years. However, 15 years ago she ventured into the business coaching and mentoring arena with her husband, Rahul, and soon found she had discovered her true passion. “I started off small,” she says. “I was just helping a few colleagues by answering their questions and helping them through some processes; things that I’d seen happen in my businesses.
“My philosophy is that we are human beings and human beings are the same everywhere. It doesn’t really matter where they are. We have similar needs and requirements. So, I started helping and then that sort of flourished into a coaching programme which is what I now do.”
Change of perspective
Bhavna has plenty of experience of offering solutions as to how to keep a team happy and motivated which she hopes to share during her panel session. “One of the biggest questions I get in my coaching life is ‘how do we motivate our team so that they can do the things I need them to?’ However, I think the whole perspective of that question is wrong because we are looking at things from our point of view.
“So, if I want to buy a business, I’m looking at that from my own point of view, which is rightly so in some respects because we’ve invested a certain level of risk, and we’ve got a lot to lose if things don’t work out. So, it can make us reactive and very hypersensitive to what’s actually going on around us.
“Sometimes, when we’ve just qualified, we haven’t really learned communication skills, people skills, and how to interact and work cooperatively with people. So, when you buy your first business, you’ve only ever worked on and been responsible for yourself. If you wanted success, you’d go and do more courses, you’d learn more, read more and so on. As soon as you move into that different category where you’re a business owner and now have team members you are responsible for, it’s a different ballgame. Your perspective has to change. Success, I feel, is a by-product of a higher level of thinking in leadership. And, because people don’t understand that they get themselves into all sorts of problems.”
Leadership systematised
In a bid to help people become better leaders, Bhavna has written a book called ‘Lead to Grow’ which is due to be published in the next few weeks. Her aim was to provide a one-stop-shop for all things leadership. “I wanted to create something that would mean you would have everything you needed in order to manage or work successfully with your team after reading the book. I feel that people have misunderstood what leadership is about and hence all the disadvantages that we see where the team are not motivated, there are problems with team retention, recruitment, all the issues that adversely affect how your team members are feeling. That feeds into whether they will stay with you, whether they’ll be loyal employees, whether they’re happy or whether they will give you more of themselves. These problems all stem from negative misconceptions and perspectives of what leadership is.
“I feel everyone’s got leadership confused. And so, in the book I’ve systemised leadership. So, it’s a practical guide for small business owners in healthcare, that can help them flourish because of the systems that are put into place.
It’s not about you
“My philosophy on leadership is that it’s about others. It’s not about you. The moment you call yourself a leader, even if you’re only responsible for even one person, it’s not about you anymore. It’s about them. The more you can learn to maximise your team’s potential, elevate your team around you, then success, profitability, and meeting your objectives will simply be a by-product of the right kind of leadership behaviour.
“So, even if they are not a natural-born leader, I want people to feel confident out there. As soon as they are in a position of leadership, as business owners, managers, sometimes just senior team members, I want them to feel confident that this is how you do it, and it’s not hard. I think people have just overcomplicated it. So, I want to give confidence back to business owners in all of healthcare because they’re all struggling with the same issues.”
About Bhavna
Dr Bhavna Doshi has more than 30 years’ experience in dentistry including 15 years as a practicing dentist. She, along with her husband Rahul, has been running their dental business coaching and consultancy, Dental Wealth Builder for the last 15 years, creating unique bespoke solutions to increase their clients’ profitability and the innate value of their businesses.