Ep. 176: 5 Biggest Mistakes with Staff Training
In this week’s episode, Jeff is launching a new series focused on staff development, starting with an episode about common training mistakes. Tune in as he breaks down five key reasons why your training process might not be as effective as it could be—and how to fix it.
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DDS Success - https://ddssuccess.com/
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Questions From This Episode
Why does Jeff say great staff aren't hired, they're made, and what does that mean for how you should approach a new hire?
Someone arriving fully able to do a job with little or no instruction is extraordinarily rare, so the real work starts after you've found a genuinely good candidate, turning them into the ideal employee through real training. Starting from that assumption changes how you respond when someone makes a mistake, since in the large majority of cases it traces back to something they genuinely didn't understand yet, not a lack of care.
What's the first mistake, and why is there no longer any real excuse for it?
Having zero training materials at all, or materials so outdated they no longer reflect how the practice actually operates. With a smartphone, a cheap tripod, and an inexpensive clip-on microphone, it's genuinely simple to record real training video, and tools like AI can turn a spoken explanation of a policy into a usable written document, so something, even a single recorded video, is always better than nothing.
Why is training sequence so important, and what's a common example of getting it backward?
Training has to build like a pyramid, starting with the easiest parts of a role and working up to the more complex ones, both to see whether someone can genuinely produce any result at all and to give them early wins that build real confidence. The classic example of getting this backward is putting a brand new hire straight onto the phones, the very first point of contact with the practice, before they actually know anything about how the office runs.
Why doesn't simply having someone read a manual actually count as training?
Reading alone doesn't confirm someone can actually apply what they've read, it has to be paired with real doing, role playing a phone script, practicing in demo software, or performing the task in front of you, before they're ever let loose on a real patient or call. Training that consists purely of reading materials, with no practice built in, consistently fails to actually prepare someone for the job.
What should actually happen when a well-trained, well-meaning employee makes a genuine mistake?
Sit down with them, find out specifically what happened and where the gap in understanding was, rather than simply getting upset, then drill that specific scenario until it's fully corrected. If the mistake keeps recurring despite real training and drilling, that becomes a genuine signal about fit, but the response to a first mistake should always start with figuring out what they didn't know, not assuming bad intent.
Episode Transcript
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I mentioned at the end of last week's episode that I was going to spend the next few episodes on the subject of personnel and staff, and we've got quite a few coming. The plan right now is at least four episodes. For this week, we're getting into staff training, and then we have a three episode series coming on the hiring process. After that, we may take a short break from personnel before coming back with more on training and onboarding.
We already know staffing is a big issue, that needs no explanation. But let's say you've found a good candidate, now you need to get them up and running and genuinely productive. That's where training comes in. Something I realized many years ago as an executive is that one of my primary jobs, beyond making sure the team delivers the goods, was being, for lack of a better word, a teacher. If I have a team member filling a specific role, assuming I know how to do that function myself, and if I don't, I'd better learn, part of my job is getting them to a point where I don't have to do it anymore. That's the ideal, and honestly, that's the stuff real expansion is made of.
One of the most rewarding parts of my own career hasn't actually been watching a company grow, it's been watching a team member I helped develop through training become more competent, more confident, and genuinely happier, watching someone move up within the organization, maybe starting from an entry level position. That's what makes this genuinely fun. With that in mind, I want to cover what I consider the five biggest training mistakes when bringing on a new employee. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
One of the first things we tell clients going through executive training, especially around staffing, is that great staff aren't hired, they're made. If you find a good candidate, and this is part of the underlying problem, people often go looking for that perfect person who can walk in and do everything well immediately. I won't say that person never exists, there are unicorns out there occasionally, that's exactly why they're called unicorns, they're rare. There are genuinely great candidates available, but someone arriving fully ready-made, able to do everything with little to no instruction, is extraordinarily rare. So you start with a good candidate, and then it's your job to turn that person into the employee you actually need.
Here's something I've noticed over the years: if you find yourself upset about something an employee didn't do, or did wrong, nine times out of ten, and I'd honestly go further, 99 times out of a hundred, it isn't because they didn't care or intended to mess things up. They simply ran into something they didn't understand, or didn't realize the importance of. In my experience, that consistently traces back to training. I've found it far more productive, when something isn't functioning or someone isn't performing, to sit down with that person and ask what happened. That doesn't mean I won't get genuinely upset if someone deliberately messes something up, but usually, walking through it together, you find they hit something they simply didn't know how to handle. Once you walk them through it properly, that specific mistake typically doesn't happen again.
I'm not trying to excuse genuine non-performance, that's not the point. The point is that in most cases, it wasn't born out of malice, it was born out of simply not knowing. You have to walk in with that assumption: if you've hired a good candidate, they generally want to do a good job. Most people genuinely do, not purely out of a desire for recognition, but because most people are decent and want to do good work somewhere they can actually stick with, hopefully building something like a real career. If you operate from that assumption, and keep training people to do progressively better work without letting genuine mistakes or carelessness slide, you'll end up with a genuinely solid team over time.
Before getting into the five mistakes, let's talk about where you'd actually start with a brand new employee, regardless of position. Say you've hired someone for an administrative role, this obviously wouldn't apply the same way to a provider or dental assistant, with zero prior dental experience, say for the front desk. What do you do with this person first?
The first thing I'd want is making sure they're actually learning the terminology, since they're entering a profession with an entirely unfamiliar vocabulary. Dental terminology isn't common knowledge, they won't know what tooth surfaces are, what different instruments or procedures are called. So you need some form of a dental dictionary. We have one we give clients, I'll put it as a download on the episode webpage, covering basic dental terms as well as terms specific to running a practice, including insurance terminology, since all of this gets thrown around constantly.
Think about talking to a software developer if you have no background in that field, they start using terms and you have no idea what's going on. I actually covered this exact phenomenon in episode 172, on barriers to study. You don't want a new hire sitting there listening to everyone discuss an EOB, or the buccal surface of a tooth, or a two-surface filling, with no idea what's being said. So if someone has zero prior experience, get them genuinely acquainted with dental terminology early on.
An important piece of this, and I'll get into it more as one of the five mistakes, is that you don't want to simply hand someone a dental dictionary and tell them to go read it, since then they're not connecting it to anything real. If they read the definition of an implant, show them an actual implant model. If they read what a crown is, and maybe they've never had one done themselves, walk them back to the lab and show them an old, undelivered lab case with a crown on it. You want them associating what they're learning with real, physical things. Same with a CDT code, show them an actual EOB with that code on it. Do this consistently, and they'll pick up the terminology quickly.
One thing worth noting, even with a licensed provider, a dentist or hygienist, don't assume that because they have a dental degree or completed hygiene school, they automatically know how things are done specifically in your practice. They're licensed to practice dentistry, and if you're bringing on an associate, you obviously want someone genuinely skilled clinically, but they don't know your specific exam procedure, or how you handle a patient with outstanding treatment. You still have to teach them that. This is true in any company, an accountant knows accounting, but every company has its own specific procedures, and even with the right degree and license, you still have to teach them how things work in your particular practice.
This is exactly why I've always recommended something a number of our clients do: at some point during the year, maybe several times, your hygienist is going to need time off, and rather than canceling the schedule, you bring in a temp. Part of the problem with a temp hygienist is they don't know where anything is or how anything works, whether they can just call the doctor in for an exam or need to wait, and so on. So it's worth having a short write-up or manual specifically for a temp hygienist. If a patient's coming in at eight, have the temp meet you at seven fifteen or seven thirty to walk through where everything is and how the practice specifically operates, so they integrate smoothly and you don't lose a step just because your regular hygienist took a day off.
Here's an interesting side effect of this, since hygienists are always in high demand: I've seen this genuinely work in a client's favor, when a temp comes into a practice that clearly has its systems together, they're often impressed enough that if they're later looking for full-time work, that office becomes one of the first places they call, precisely because it felt so well organized.
Alright, with that groundwork laid, let's get into the five big training mistakes. Mistake number one: having zero training materials. In this day and age, there's genuinely no excuse for having nothing to train someone with. I know, plenty of people have some form of manual, maybe purchased at some point, that's never actually been customized, or a manual customized six years ago that no longer reflects your current software or procedures. When someone reads it, they're genuinely confused about what they're even looking at.
Today there's really no excuse. You have real video capability in your pocket, the camera on a current phone would have seemed impossible on a phone twenty years ago. Grab a $30 tripod and a $30 to $50 Bluetooth clip-on microphone off Amazon, and you can record genuinely high quality video. There's no reason to have absolutely nothing for a new hire, even if it's just a video of you explaining what you want done, or a brief written outline, something is always better than nothing when it comes to training materials.
Back in episode 154, I talked about using AI to help build training materials, and the response on social media afterward was genuinely wild, a lot of people assumed I meant using AI to replace dental staff, which had nothing to do with the actual point. The idea was simple: record yourself explaining a specific policy, say your payment policy, patients paying in full save this much, or paying half down works this way, feed that into something like ChatGPT with clear parameters for how you want it written, and it generates an actual usable policy document you can hand to someone. That's genuinely all I meant by using AI, not replacing staff, just making it far easier to actually generate training materials.
If you're bringing on a new hire and all you have is a rough, imperfect job description or a policy that isn't especially well written, that's still considerably better than having nothing. And the beauty of building this out gradually is that if you write even one policy a month, after five years you've got sixty policies, it genuinely doesn't have to happen all at once.
We run an online training platform, DDS Success, I'll put a link on the episode webpage, covering positional training for roles like treatment coordinator and scheduler, which can get someone roughly 85 to 90 percent of the way there. What it can't do is reflect your own practice's specific quirks. Our scheduling course explains how to build a dental schedule generally, how to handle cancellations and no-shows, but it doesn't know your office hours or your specific procedures. So you could build a short manual covering just your practice's specifics, and pair it with a course like that, and that combination genuinely counts as real training. It doesn't need to be some massive, polished manual.
As a matter of course when hiring new employees going forward, give them something, even a basic job description and overview, but then you actually have to train them. Say your office manager is doing the training, maybe using some existing video resources like DDS Success, but also recording video specific to your own practice. Give each of them a microphone, you may want to check with your attorney about consent for recording new staff, but once you have that video, you can use it multiple ways. First, if you lose that employee later, you can show that same video to the next hire instead of your office manager repeating the same training over and over. Second, there are plenty of platforms, some of which I covered in that AI episode, that can transcribe the video, and you can feed that transcript into something like ChatGPT to generate a written policy from it, giving the next person both a policy to read and a video to watch.
This is actually part of why we built DDS Success in the first place, so I could record a course on communication or finance once, and someone could simply watch it, rather than me delivering the same material live over and over. I still run plenty of live seminars, but having it recorded means it's memorialized, and I can update it anytime something changes or I want to add supplemental material. You can do the same thing in your own practice, and a cheap learning management system subscription, or even just a well-organized cloud drive, Google Drive or OneDrive, works fine, just make sure your recordings don't disappear and stay easy to find and use for training. That's mistake number one, having nothing at all to train someone with.
Mistake number two: having no real sequence to the training. Imagine being told on day two of dental school to go do a crown prep in clinic, that obviously wouldn't work. Or imagine training public speakers and putting someone on stage in front of 3,000 people on day two of a six month course, that would be genuinely unkind. Training has to follow a real sequence, almost like a pyramid, each piece building on what came before.
For any position, look at all the functions within that role and recognize they vary considerably in difficulty. Take a treatment coordinator as an example. What's the easiest task for that role? Probably calling patients on the incomplete treatment list to schedule a hygiene visit or a consult with the doctor, that's not especially difficult. So if you're an office manager training someone into that role, start there: here's the incomplete treatment list, here's who's overdue for hygiene, call them and get them back on the schedule, since once they're back in for hygiene, the doctor has another chance to discuss their outstanding treatment.
The same logic applies to training a scheduler, start with hygiene appointments specifically, there's genuinely little variance involved. Ask anyone how long it takes to train someone to schedule a routine hygiene visit, it's not long, confirm their age isn't three, check when they were last in so you know whether they need a new initial exam, and so on, there's not much complexity there, especially with overdue patients specifically. Starting there accomplishes two things: if someone can't handle even this with minimal training, they're probably not going to work out, so there's little reason to invest more time training them further. You're not expecting them to match a dental assistant who's been with you twenty years and can schedule hygiene in their sleep, but you do want to see some genuine sign of productivity before investing in more advanced training.
Pick the easiest parts of a role and start there. And as a side note, something I've said on this podcast before, this is exactly where a lot of practices go wrong. When a new administrative hire joins the front desk, what's usually the very first thing they're trained to do? If you guessed answering the phones, you're right, and that's a genuinely poor idea, for a couple of reasons.
That's the very first point of contact in your practice, for new patients and patients of record alike. If a patient of record calls and whoever answers has no idea who they are and sounds completely lost, that's alarming, think about a business you've dealt with for years, where you have a genuine rapport with the staff, and suddenly someone answers who seems to have no idea what's going on. Now imagine how a brand new patient reacts to that, especially if they're put on hold repeatedly because the person answering doesn't know what they're doing. Even if they technically answer correctly, thank you for calling, my name is Bill, how can I help you, it still doesn't reflect well on the practice. I wouldn't let someone loose on the phones until they genuinely know the practice well, especially since you're spending real marketing money specifically to generate those calls. If your new patient conversion is weak, this might be exactly why.
So build your training sequence starting with the easier tasks, confirm they can actually produce a result, and it has a nice side benefit too, it gives them early wins. Picture someone with zero dental background walking into a practice full of unfamiliar terminology, you're teaching them dental vocabulary, maybe an hour or two a day, not as a full-time task, while the rest of the day they're on the phone calling overdue hygiene patients, since you've trained them specifically for that. Within a couple hours they genuinely know how to do it, and they start scheduling and filling the hygiene book successfully. That gives them a real win, which makes them more excited to keep learning, and it also genuinely helps the business, since it takes some of the load off the rest of the team. Give them the easy stuff first, then build up to the more complex work as training continues.
Which brings us to mistake number three: having someone simply read materials with nothing else. Here's the manual for the scheduling position, it's 120 pages, go read it in the break room. They come back, did you read it, good, here's your desk. That's a genuinely bad approach. You want people to actually associate what they're reading with real application, which is exactly how we build our own courses at MGE. Even in our live seminars, we cover a subject and then have people actually practice it, essay questions that make them consult their own understanding, role playing, or going out and applying it in the real world, so what's on the page actually gets turned into something they can do.
If you're handing someone a manual, pair it with real doing. They've read how to schedule an appointment, now give them access to a demo version of the software, or read-only access to the real system, so they can actually practice. You might even build in a step where, after reading, they demonstrate the task in front of you. It genuinely cannot be reading alone.
On the MGE Power Program, which runs 78 days and roughly 600 hours across 22 courses and six or seven seminars, there's real course material and seminar manuals involved, but if I simply mailed you a stack of books and said, get trained, that wouldn't actually be training. That's exactly why people come into our course room, to make sure they're genuinely absorbing and applying the material as they learn it, with their questions answered along the way. The same principle applies in your own practice, training built purely around reading simply doesn't work.
The real counter to this is drilling, actual practice exercises. Say you had me read the script for how you want the phone answered in your practice. What should happen next? We'd role play it, first making sure I've got the script down exactly as written, no alterations, no mistakes, until I could do it without the page in front of me. Then you'd introduce different types of calls, assuming you've already taught me how you want various scenarios handled, say a stockbroker calling for the doctor, am I supposed to interrupt a root canal for that, or take a message, and how exactly do I take that message. You'd drill me on each of these repeatedly until I had it completely down.
Same with a new patient intake form. Once someone's proven capable and you want them handling new patient calls, run them through that intake form multiple times, starting with simple scenarios and building toward more complex ones, until they can genuinely think on their feet with it, before ever letting them handle it live.
Which brings us to mistake number four, closely related to mistake three: not enough drilling. People consistently underestimate how much drilling or role play an employee actually needs. I had a client whose associate genuinely struggled building rapport with new patients, a fairly introverted person. So that client role played with the associate for a full hour, playing the new patient while the associate practiced being the doctor meeting them for the first time, starting easy and gradually getting more difficult, a more challenging patient personality, until the associate felt completely comfortable.
This matters especially for anything involving real interpersonal interaction, but it applies elsewhere too, say someone's following up on an insurance claim, how exactly do you handle the insurance company, ask for a supervisor, whatever the specific steps are, drill it repeatedly. And I'd genuinely recommend filming these drills, since there's often enormous value captured in them, especially if the person training a newer hire is someone who's excellent at handling new patient calls themselves. You're capturing real, expert scenario handling, do you take my PPO, how much is a crown, watching them expertly navigate a range of situations while training someone else. Get that on camera, and you can turn it directly into additional training material or show it to other staff.
The goal is drilling someone until they know it cold, until they don't have to think about it at all. Here's a common example of what happens without this: a practice wants more referrals, so at a staff meeting the doctor says, we have a lot of happy patients, let's start asking for more referrals this week, and then nobody actually asks anyone. Have you actually drilled the team on how to do it? Maybe they genuinely feel uncomfortable asking. You can work through this in a staff meeting without singling anyone out, make it lighthearted, I'll be the patient, how would you ask me for a referral, and you'll often see people blush or freeze up. Show them how you'd do it, then have them practice it themselves until it no longer feels awkward or embarrassing, and you'll typically see referrals genuinely increase as a result.
That's mistake number four, not enough drilling, and it applies to essentially anything. The core goal throughout all of this is getting someone to a point where they don't have to think, they can simply execute.
Which brings us to mistake number five. Say you've trained someone, drilled them properly, they're working, and then you notice they've made a genuine mistake. Mistake number five is letting that mistake continue unaddressed. This connects back to where I started the episode, if this person were genuinely malicious, and you've actually done real training and drilling with them, you'd likely have already picked up on that. So assume instead that they genuinely want to do a good job but muffed a new patient call. You're reviewing recorded calls and see they clearly mishandled it.
What do you actually do? Don't just get upset. Sit down with them and ask what happened, walk through it together, you were supposed to do this, but instead you did that, what happened there. Maybe the honest answer is they simply didn't know something. Find out exactly what went wrong, fix it, and drill it again, repeatedly. Maybe it was a scenario you'd genuinely never covered before, in which case you now know to build that into training and drill it specifically going forward. With a genuinely good team member, that particular mistake typically stops happening entirely from that point on, though of course everyone makes new mistakes occasionally, that's simply part of being human.
The key is not letting those mistakes sit unaddressed. If someone's consistently mishandling a specific type of call, say they struggle with price-shopping callers and consistently fail to schedule them, and a meaningful share of your incoming calls are exactly that type, you're quietly losing real opportunity every time it happens. Get them properly trained on it, get them genuinely capable of handling it, and record everything you can along the way, keep it centralized so you can turn it into manuals and training material for future hires too.
So those are the five big mistakes. There are certainly others, but these are genuinely common and genuinely easy to fix. One last thing worth mentioning: when training someone, you should have a rough baseline for how long it should reasonably take to train the average person, not necessarily your best-ever hire, just a typical solid candidate. Say you've started someone on reactivation calls, expecting them to eventually become your receptionist. If you have a general sense of how that training usually goes, and two weeks in, despite working with them daily, they still haven't booked a single appointment, that's probably not going to work out.
There's a point where you hit real diminishing returns, where continuing to invest time simply isn't worth it, and you need a different candidate who's better suited to learning and applying the role. At the same time, you don't want to swing too far the other way, giving someone five minutes and writing them off immediately, potentially losing someone who could have become a genuinely strong team member. Developing a rough baseline for how long various tasks should reasonably take to learn gives you a much better read on whether someone's actually a good fit.
I hope this was helpful. I'll put links to DDS Success and the MGE Power Program on the episode webpage. If you'd like to learn more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com, or call us at (800) 640-1140. Folks, have a great week, and we'll see you at the next episode.