How do we measure our performance? Many orthodontists and orthodontic teams look to make improvements and practice better. Aspirational goals are wonderful to have, but our daily habits and our actual performance truly dictate what we can achieve. Most of us aim to do better but struggle with figuring out where to invest time and effort to get the returns on investment. Those improvements could be clinical, financial, or productivity-based. The challenge is that we tend to focus on optimal results as human beings and don’t necessarily review our typical results.
How vs. What
While our optimal performance can be related to our aptitude, our attitude often influences our typical performance. Consider the methods we use to evaluate someone’s potential. For example, a potential new hire will highlight their major accomplishments in a job interview. What they did right, and puts them in a positive light. And yet, as the employer, what you are truly interested in, is their typical performance at their previous job and how they will truly perform in your office every day.
We often prefer a consistently good team member rather than the intermittent star player. And yet, when interviewing, we spend much more time on applicant resumes, testing results, and other optimal performance indicators that make a candidate look good on paper. How someone performs under normal conditions is even more important. We can assess this typical performance by reviewing their personality traits, peer appraisal, interests, and attitude. In our practice, we often say: Hire for attitude, train for skill.
Typical Indicators
Any clinical lecture you have attended focuses on optimal performance. Orthodontists will select their best cases to present and showcase their clinical prowess and orthodontic performance using the best results. There can be a lot of value in learning from this optimal work and hopefully take some best practices that will benefit us when we return to our orthodontic practice. And yet, we may look for similar optimal performance results to confirm what we have learned. Instead, we now live in a great time with an opportunity for data gathering and measuring typical performance indicators. Rather than selecting an optimal case result, we can measure consecutively treated cases and key practice measures to evaluate our techniques for efficiency, quality, and patient satisfaction.
What someone else does is what someone else can achieve. When following deliberate practice and learning, the critical measure of success is what I can achieve and what my team can achieve. The best indicator is how well something is working for my performance.
Influence of Observation
We see optimal performance when work is observed. Team members will perform optimally when they know they are being monitored and tested. When someone is watching over us and critiquing our results, we try harder and do better. Take examinations such as board certification. The cases treated under these conditions are testing maximum and optimum performance. We select cases that we can be proud to showcase, and we spend extra time polishing the result and the records for these cases. It is not necessarily a measure of typical performance since observation motivates us to take additional steps to achieve our best abilities.
How can we take advantage of this influence to improve results and our teams? We can leverage the effect observation has by measuring what matters. When we commit to reflection and post-treatment evaluation, we signal we monitor what matters and hold ourselves accountable. When we present cases regularly to our peers and team members, we set initiatives to do better because others are looking. Not just will our patients benefit, but we learn to raise typical performance closer to optimal execution.
