Ep. 72: How to Work with Your Spouse (or Other Family Members) Successfully
We’ve all seen articles insisting it’s a bad idea to work with family, but the reality is that in many small businesses (including dentistry) it’s very common. And it CAN be done successfully. In fact, many of our most successful clients are spouse or sibling teams and are very happy both at the office and at home. So, what’s the secret to making it work? That’s what Jeff discusses in this week’s episode!
Links:
Learn more about MGE - https://www.mgeonline.com
Listen to full episode :
Have a question for Jeff?
Fill out the form and he will get back to you.
Questions From This Episode
Why does Jeff say clearly defining roles matters so much when a spouse joins the practice?
A spouse coming into the business, especially after leaving another career, tends to have real skin in the game and genuine enthusiasm for the practice's success. Without clearly outlined responsibilities, that enthusiasm can lead to both the spouse and the owner doctor trying to wear the same "owner" hat, creating clashes rather than a coordinated partnership.
What workplace etiquette does Jeff recommend for couples working together in front of staff?
He gives the example of an office manager who refers to their doctor spouse as "Dr. So-and-so" in front of staff rather than by their first name, since that's the professional identity the role calls for at work. Jeff says bringing a husband-and-wife dynamic into staff interactions, rather than a boss/employee or coworker one, creates confusion for the team.
What's the "road" rule Jeff and his spouse use to keep work from following them home?
On their drive home, they designated a specific road about two blocks from the office as the cutoff point, work topics could come up before crossing it, but once they passed it, work discussion was over for the day. Jeff says applying this consistently, even during COVID when working from home, noticeably calmed their home life.
Why does Jeff say working from home has made this harder for people generally?
While remote work offers real flexibility, he argues that without a clear physical or behavioral line between work and home, people end up never fully leaving work mode. He and his spouse addressed this during shutdowns by maintaining defined workspaces and closing them out at the end of the day, rather than letting work bleed into the rest of the house.
What does Jeff say about hiring family members who end up underperforming?
He holds family members to the same standard, or slightly higher, as any other employee, and is upfront before bringing them on that the arrangement is strictly professional so it can end cleanly if it doesn't work out. Jeff argues that letting an underperforming relative slide indefinitely actually harms everyone involved: it breeds resentment among staff, denies the relative the chance to succeed on their own merit, and hurts the business itself.
Episode Transcript
-
Should you work with your spouse or another close family member? In the US, and really in most of the world, dental offices tend to fall under the heading of a small business, and in a lot of cases, small businesses are family businesses, whether that's generations working in succession or several family members working together at the same time. So it's not an uncommon occurrence, whether it's in a dental office or any other kind of business, for someone to be working alongside a family member. But is it actually a good idea? If you Google it, you'll get mixed results, some people will sing its praises, others will tell you it's a terrible idea, and then you'll get the neutral articles that just list pros and cons.
Here at MGE, a lot of our clients work with their spouse, whether that spouse is the office manager or another dentist, running the practice together. It's genuinely common, but we teach our clients several guidelines to follow, to make sure working together doesn't wreck their home life, their work life, or both. That's what I want to cover in this week's episode, specifically four things you can do to make it work when you're working with your spouse or another family member.
My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host. To give you an idea of what inspired this episode: down the hallway here at MGE leading to our seminar room, in the breakout area where clients grab snacks and coffee, we have posters on the wall of clients who've completed the MGE Power program. These aren't every graduate in the program's history, but there are quite a few notable ones up there. I was walking down that hall last week and actually did a bit of a count, and over 60 percent of the clients pictured on those posters work with their spouse. So this is clearly something that can genuinely work, which made it feel like a timely subject for an episode.
Maybe you're already working with your spouse and can apply what we're covering here to smooth things out so it doesn't interfere with your home life. Or maybe you've considered bringing your spouse in to help manage the practice and talked yourself out of it because it seemed like a bad idea. Here's how to make it work. Let's look at the four things, or rather, I'll walk through how it tends to go wrong, and what to do instead to make it go right.
The first issue, and as an aside, I work with my spouse myself, you've heard Sabri on this podcast before, she's my wife, so I've genuinely lived what I'm telling you and what we teach clients. One thing that tends to break down is this: when you bring your spouse into the business, they now have real skin in the game, and that's of utmost importance to understand. Say your spouse was working in banking and comes on to help run your practice. Obviously it matters to them, they've just given up their career, they want your practice to be successful, and they're deeply invested in it. But if you don't clearly outline whose job is whose, that enthusiasm, that eagerness to see you succeed, ends up with both of you doing a bit of the same job. You end up with the spouse trying to wear the owner hat and the doctor owner also trying to wear the owner hat, and you get clashes.
This is worth thinking about more broadly. In life, you play several different roles, and each one comes with different duties, purposes, and expected outcomes. Take me, for example, I'm a dad, a husband, an executive, a son, and each of those roles comes with different expectations and a different way I act within them. It would be pretty strange if I came home from work and tried acting like the boss with my wife at home, that's a quick way to get shut down hard, because it just doesn't fit the situation. So if you're bringing your spouse into a working environment with you, you want to clearly outline, right from the start, who's responsible for what, so you're not stepping on each other's toes.
You also want a clear set of protocols or etiquette for how you handle yourselves around other staff. You don't want a situation where you're airing an argument from home while you're at the office, because at work, you're coworkers, or a boss and someone reporting to them, not husband and wife, or whatever your relationship is. That identity doesn't belong at work. If you bring that in, if you're bickering about this or that in front of the team, it creates real confusion for staff about how to handle the situation, and it becomes a genuine problem. So separate these roles clearly. It's not enough to just say "why don't you come run my practice with me," you need to spell out, this is my job, this is your job, this is how it works, so everyone, including your staff, knows exactly what to expect. I've seen offices where the office manager, even though they're married to the doctor, still refers to them as "Dr. So-and-so" in front of staff rather than by their first name, because that's the etiquette the practice expects. You want that kind of thing worked out ahead of time, so you're not slipping into being a husband or wife at work when you're really supposed to be the office manager or the owner doctor.
The second issue has to do with office policy. Because a spouse or family member you bring in has this strong sense of loyalty and a real desire to see the business succeed, they'll often notice areas without clear rules and want to create some. That has to happen in coordination with you, since the owner doctor should be the one approving policy in the practice. You want clearly defined policy across different operational areas so the two of you aren't arguing over how the practice should run. Some of this has become more relevant with how much more digitized things have become over the last few years, we found this ourselves here at MGE, plenty of things that used to be done on paper aren't anymore. But unless a change actually goes through some form of agreed-upon policy update, people tend to just keep doing things the old way out of habit, even when it's clearly outdated. Someone shouldn't be able to just decide unilaterally that something's dumb and stop doing it, changes need to be agreed upon and then implemented properly. So if you're bringing in a family member, you need clear guidelines and policy in place, along with an agreed-upon, easy process for proposing changes when they spot something that should be updated.
The third point, and to me this is the biggest and toughest one to actually enforce, is: you have to leave work at work. You might think, of course we do that, but you may not be as good at it as you think. I've worked side by side with my spouse since 1995, we're closing in on 30 years now, and there's nothing worse than bringing the office home with you. I remember a client telling me once about lying in bed at 11 p.m., lights off, about to fall asleep, and his wife, the office manager, started venting about their financial coordinator and what they were going to do about an insurance issue. That doesn't work.
One thing we implemented early on was treating it almost like taking off a jacket when we leave the office. That's my job, I take the jacket off, hang it up, and I'm no longer that job once I walk out. I'm not the executive anymore, I'm your husband, or I'm dad, or whoever I am in that moment. When we get in the car, we don't talk about work at all. It's actually a little funny, because a lot of couples spend dinner asking each other how their day at work went. I already know what my wife did at work, and she knows what I did, since we were both there. So there's really no reason to rehash it, otherwise you end up feeling like you're always at work.
Something we did early on: there's a main road about two blocks from our office on the drive home. We agreed that if you wanted to mention something from work, good or bad, you could, right up until we crossed that road. Once we crossed it, work was over. Doing that consistently made home life noticeably calmer, because we weren't carrying the operating mode of work, the attitude, the way you act in a professional environment, into the house. It just doesn't fit there. Think about it like this: the way you act hanging out with your buddies is different from how you'd act around your grandmother, different roles call for different behavior. So when you're in the car heading home with your spouse, you're the husband or the wife in that moment, not worried about what happened at the office, because you'll be back there tomorrow for eight or nine hours, and that's when you can think about it. That's actually the whole point of going to work in the first place.
This is part of why I think the broader shift toward working from home has created real problems for people, even outside of dentistry, obviously we can't do that in this field. Sure, no commute, more flexibility, but the downside is you're never really leaving work, you're always at work. Even during COVID shutdowns, we applied the same rule: when we were working, we were in our designated workspaces doing that, and when we were done, we closed those workspaces and were done. Can you do this every single time? No, emergencies happen, and sometimes you'll need to bring up a work subject at home. But enforcing this as consistently as possible takes real discipline from both people. When we first started, one of us would catch ourselves slipping into a work topic on the drive home, and the other would say, hey, remember we're heading home now, and we'd course-correct. Eventually it just became automatic, we simply don't discuss work at home unless it's a genuine emergency, which is rare. When you're home, you're home. When you're at work, you work. And that's not just a mindset, it's something you have to actually practice and follow through on consistently.
That brings us to the fourth point, which also tends to break things when working with a family member: hiring someone, maybe not your spouse, maybe a sister-in-law or brother-in-law, who simply can't do the job you've hired them for. If you're considering bringing a family member into the business, you shouldn't be doing it just because they're related to you, you should be doing it because you genuinely believe they can fulfill the role. It's the same hiring standard you'd apply to an office manager or anyone else, the person has to actually be able to execute the job. Their genuine investment in your success is a bonus, not a substitute for competence.
When I bring a family member into a business, I make a point of judging them by the same standard as everyone else, if not a slightly higher one, which is the opposite of what usually happens. A lot of the bad reputation "working with family" gets comes from situations where someone hires a relative who just isn't good at the job, but keeps getting unlimited chances or is allowed to get away with things other employees couldn't, simply because of the relationship. So I'm upfront before bringing a family member in: I want this to work, but you have to actually be able to do the job, and if problems come up, I need to be able to discuss them honestly with you, so that if it's not working out, we can part ways professionally without destroying our personal relationship. This is strictly a business relationship while we're working together. The person needs to understand and agree to that before they come on. If a few weeks in it's clear this genuinely isn't going to work, you can handle that in a way that isn't embarrassing for anyone, something like, "it just wasn't the right fit for Joe," but they need to know upfront that being related to you doesn't mean unlimited chances or different treatment than any other employee.
On the flip side, I've also seen owners bring in a family member who isn't performing and just let it continue indefinitely, because, well, they're family. I'm not a fan of that. If I had a non-family employee underperforming in a role, I'd eventually let them go if they couldn't improve, and in a lot of cases, that's actually a wake-up call that pushes someone to get their act together and go find something they're genuinely good at and fulfilled by, which raises their own self-esteem in the process. If I keep a family member around despite consistently subpar work, I might think I'm doing them a favor, helping out a brother-in-law, say, but I'm actually not. I'm doing a disservice to them, to my staff, and to myself. For the business, that means lower productivity and weaker performance. For the rest of the team, it breeds real resentment, they notice that Joe gets away with things because he's family, and they don't like it, it undermines trust in how fairly the practice is run. And for Joe himself, he needs the chance to actually succeed on his own merit and know he earned it, and deep down, he probably already knows he isn't performing. Letting that continue does him no favors either. So I handle a family member's performance the same way I would anyone else's, and I make sure that expectation is set clearly before they ever start.
Those are the four main issues I've seen come up. I genuinely enjoy working with family, I work with my spouse, and I also work with my sister and brother-in-law, and plenty of our clients do too. It can be an extremely workable, even fun, situation, since you're working alongside people who share your interests and your level of commitment and loyalty to making the business succeed. But you want to keep these four points in mind so that working together doesn't start bleeding into your home life and creating problems there instead.
This was a bit of an oddball episode, it doesn't fit neatly into any one category, but it's something I've wanted to cover for a while. I hope it helps, it felt timely given how many of our clients, and dentists generally, end up working with a spouse or another family member. By keeping these four things in mind, I hope it helps make that arrangement work for you. That's all I have for you this week. If you have any questions or want to learn more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. Otherwise, have a great week, and I'll see you at the next episode.