Practice Ninjas

A guest article from Carol Somerville Roberts, Founder and Principal at Evolve Dentistry.

The concept of a Practice Ninja came to me when I heard about another practice using the term Lead Ninja.

That person’s role was different to a TCO in that their sole responsibility was to follow up every new patient and once they have booked in, then the TCO took over.

I had thought for some time about how the concept of a brand ambassador could work in a dental practice but essentially, all team members should consider themselves as such, so appointing individual team members as brand ambassadors could be counter-productive.

This thought evolved into the concept of a Practice Ninja.

Initially, we used this term for one of my nurses who had learned to use our iTero to scan patients.

She has really taken up the challenge to become as fast as possible, every time she beats her previous best time, she celebrates.

We called her The Scanning Ninja.

I asked her to be the “go to” person for anyone wanting to pick up tips on how to scan efficiently.

The Practice Ninja was born.

After that I realised that there are other team members who have taken on tasks and made them their own so I thought it would be a good idea to recognise anyone in the practice who could be the “go to” person for a skill or responsibility.

I got badges made that say “Practice Ninja” and planned to give these to the team members at our next team training day.

However, instead of me suggesting a skill or responsibility to the team member, I asked the team to think of it themselves, thereby giving them ownership and accountability.

At the end of our team training day, we went round the table and have now identified a Scanning Ninja, a DPAS Ninja, a Dengro Ninja, an Eco Ninja and a Compliance Ninja to name but a few.

The team loved it and I hope that in practice this will work well.

Another part of our team training day was to give large wooden puzzle pieces to each team member with their name on it, this was to emphasise how each of us are an essential piece to making the whole team and we only work effectively as a whole.

It was a good day.