How to work fewer hours in a healthcare practice with Ruth Mannschreck
In this episode (quick summary):
Self-propelled business systems are the foundation of this conversation with Ruth Mannschreck, founder of Shoreline Strategies. Ruth explains how a family health crisis forced her to redesign her dental practice, reduce her hours dramatically and build a more resilient operating model around systems, culture and team capability. She also breaks down what practice owners can learn about hiring for empathy, mapping the client journey and leading across generational differences in today’s healthcare workforce.
TL;DR:
You can teach process, but you cannot always teach the soft skills that make a practice feel safe, organised and trustworthy.
What you’ll learn:
- How Ruth rebuilt her practice so it could deliver high-quality care in fewer founder hours
- Why mapping the client journey is essential for smoother handoffs and better client experience
- How to hire for empathy, compassion and self-direction instead of relying only on technical skills
- Why younger team members often need clearer outcomes and more space to solve problems creatively
Ruth Mannschreck’s quote: “You can teach somebody how to work with your software … but you can’t always train for those soft skills.”
Best for: Group practice owners, clinic operators, founders, practice managers and healthcare leaders who want better systems, better hiring and fewer hours trapped in day-to-day operations.
Key terms: self-propelled business, client journey, patient care, healthcare systems, hiring soft skills, empathy and compassion, organisation/organization design, leadership boundaries, generational workforce, healthcare operations
Self-propelled business: how better systems help practice owners work fewer hours
“You can teach somebody how to work with your software … but you can’t always train for those soft skills.”– Ruth Mannschreck
Ruth Mannschreck, founder of Shoreline Strategies, joins Dan King for a practical conversation about what a self-propelled business really looks like inside healthcare. Drawing on her experience as a dentist and business owner, Ruth explains how a serious family health crisis forced her to rethink everything about her practice. She had to compress five days of clinical work into two and a half, which meant redesigning systems, reclarifying roles and building a model that could function with less founder dependence. For group practice owners carrying too much documentation load, operational complexity and emotional fatigue, her story is a grounded example of how a self-propelled business can create more capacity without compromising care.
A major theme in the episode is the client journey. Ruth argues that practice owners should not start by asking how to work harder, hire faster or simply squeeze more output from the same people. They should begin by mapping what happens from the first phone call onward: who owns each step, what information needs to move across the team and what emotional experience the client should leave with after every interaction. In her dental example, a patient calling in pain does not just need an appointment; they need comfort and security. That focus on experience applies just as directly to therapy, psychiatry and multidisciplinary clinics where referrals, intake, scheduling and clinical quality all depend on consistent handoffs.
That is where systems and people intersect. Ruth makes the case that many practices over-index on hard skills and under-value the soft skills that hold patient-facing work together. Software, billing rules and task workflows can be taught. Empathy, compassion, poise and self-direction are far harder to build from scratch. Her hiring advice is especially relevant for practices trying to improve retention, boundaries and day-to-day culture: use shadowing, role-play and real-world scenarios to see how candidates respond under pressure rather than relying only on polished interview answers. A self-propelled business depends on people who can protect client trust even when situations are messy, emotional or unpredictable.
The conversation also explores a tension many owners feel but struggle to name: generational differences in work preferences. Ruth does not dismiss the frustration of leaders who feel younger clinicians or team members want fewer hours and more flexibility. Instead, she reframes that difference as a leadership challenge and an opportunity. If owners move beyond top-down habits and define the outcome clearly, they can often unlock more creativity and initiative from the team. That matters in any group setting where practice growth depends not just on adding clinicians, but on improving how the organisation operates under pressure.
Another valuable thread is Ruth’s emphasis on professional boundaries. In healthcare, patients and clients expect steadiness. Ruth describes the importance of recognising when someone cannot bring their full professionalism into the room and creating a culture where stepping back is allowed when needed. That message has clear relevance for clinician wellbeing, leadership maturity and sustainable operations. A self-propelled business is not a cold machine; it is a business where the right systems support human performance instead of exhausting it.
For mental health leaders especially, the episode offers a useful lens on operational design. Cashflow, referrals, admin strain and clinical standards all improve when roles are clearer, emotional labour is better understood and team members are selected for the qualities that match the work. Ruth’s framework is not about removing owners from leadership. It is about removing unnecessary founder dependency so they can focus on higher-value decisions, stronger clinical leadership and a healthier relationship with the practice they have built.
Takeaways
- Start with the client journey, not the org chart, when trying to fix bottlenecks in a busy practice.
- Define the emotional outcome for each client interaction so your team knows what good service actually feels like.
- Hire for empathy, compassion and self-direction before you train for tools, software or process.
- Use role-play, shadowing and live scenarios in interviews to reveal how candidates behave under pressure.
- A self-propelled business is built by reducing founder dependence through systems, clearer handoffs and stronger team ownership.
- Generational differences can improve innovation when leaders define the outcome clearly and give people room to solve problems.
Transcript: self-propelled business with Ruth Mannschreck
“You can teach somebody how to work with your software ... but you can’t always train for those soft skills.” — Ruth Mannschreck
Read the full transcript
Dan King:
[0:00] Hello, everyone. Daniel King here with another episode, and I am looking forward
Dan King:
[0:04] to what I am very confident is going to be a thoughtful conversation with Ruth Mantrak. She's the founder of Shoreline Strategies. Ruth, welcome. Would love you to tell folks the basics of your origin story.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[0:18] Sure. It's so good to be here. Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate many of the topics that you've covered on your podcast. I'm a dentist. I started my practice from scratch. We were doing really well. I was practicing five days a week. We had two little boys and life was wonderful. Then my daughter was born, had some traumatic events, and she was in intensive care for weeks. When she came home, she had to see eight different doctors every week. So we had to completely change our business model in my practice. So we took five days of work and we scrunched it down to two and a half days.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[1:01] We changed our business model. My team stepped up. I have to say that what we did was a group effort. My team and I, not just me, put together a machine, a functioning practice that we got everything accomplished in two and a half days. We worked on our culture, we worked on our systems, and we worked on the people who were actually in our practice. And... One day I met the doc from the office next to mine in the hallway, and he said, Ruth, what's going on in your office? He said, you're never here, and yet the doors are still open, and I see happy people coming in and out. And he actually became my first client. That's how we started teaching people this process we use to help a founder or a practice owner work fewer hours. Not usually as drastic as, you
Ruth Mannschreck:
[1:52] know, cutting your time in the office in half, but taking a good chunk. We aim at generally taking 10 hours out of a founder's weekly hours in the practice.
Dan King:
[2:06] That would be an awesome thing, I think, for a lot of our listeners. So if our typical listener runs a group practice with 30 clinicians, it's a busy therapy practice where there's a lot of patients. They may be understaffed from an admin perspective because there's billing and compliance to do and it always seems to be behind. How on earth can someone like that cut 10 hours off of their work week?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[2:28] I know. So we start with the systems. I like to start with what I call your client journey. From the moment someone answers the phone step by step by step, what are the steps that a client goes through. What are the steps from, same thing for your providers when you're hiring providers or enrolling providers, what's the first step from the phone call and then what happens next and what happens after that. And in between those steps, what's the communication that has to happen so that the information from an intake phone call is communicated adequately and timely to the next person. Say it goes intake phone calls, scheduling all those steps, At every step along the way, who's responsible for what happens in that conversation? And what is the, I think probably the most important part of this is, what is the emotion or the feeling that you want the client or the provider, depending on which system we're talking, what is the feeling you want them to leave that step having? And does your team know how to elicit that feeling, that emotion, how to help your client get to that emotion by the end of the phone call or the scheduling or the handoff to the next person. Does that sound right?
Dan King:
[3:52] It does. So can you give us an example of an emotion and how you would train the team to elicit it?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[3:59] Sure. So when someone calls, I'll just give a dental example, in pain, calls a dental office and is a little bit panicky because pain does that. So the feeling that you want the patient to have at the end of just the phone call. We're not getting them out of pain, but we're giving them comfort and security. And security is an incredibly important feeling for your patients, no matter what kind of professional you are. Security is a huge thing for you to give your clients, even on that very first phone call. So it may be the questions that we ask them. It may be the feedback that we give them. And we do have team training sessions where we review phone calls and learn techniques and conversation starters that get our client from where they are one or two steps further along in the comfort scale or in the security scale.
Dan King:
[4:58] Do you find, is it natural for most team members to learn how to elicit emotion
Dan King:
[5:03] in the healthcare universe, or does that tend to be a tougher task?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[5:08] That is a tougher task And it's, It's something that we handle in the next phase of our, when we're going through and helping founders work fewer hours, is actually focusing on your team. The first step is to focus on your systems. The second step is to focus on your team. Because many times in healthcare professions, we have to hire a lot of people. And we tend to think about the hard skills that we want those people to have. And we don't always think about the soft skills that we want them to have. So to increase your chances of having someone who knows how to have a conversation to move someone along the security scale of emotion, you need to start with a person who has soft skills like empathy and compassion and a desire to learn.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[6:06] So it goes back to hiring the right people who will be able because you can't train everyone to be compassionate you can't train everyone to be empathetic so when we hire we focus first on those soft skills what do i want them to be able to do you know i want self-directed people I want confident people. I want empathic people. Whatever it is you need in the mix, that's what you hire for. Because think about it. You can teach somebody how to work with your software. I can teach them how to be a chair-side assistant. You can teach them how to fill out an insurance claim form in the right order so that you get reimbursed properly. But you can't always train for those soft skills. So a big emphasis we put when we get to the team part is how are you hiring people? Where are you finding them? And how are you encouraging them after they're part of your team? How are you helping them grow?
Dan King:
[7:10] One of the things I've experienced in hiring is anyone can say anything in an interview. How can we screen for empathy, as an example, in our hiring process?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[7:22] So I encourage professionals, don't make your hiring process simply a series of interviews because there are people who are just brilliant at interviewing, you know. But I like to bring in engagement, bring in participation, put people in an unusual situation so that they have to think on their feet. They have to show a little bit more of the real them than just knowing what answers to say to what questions you ask. So it might be bringing someone into your office. We have candidates come in and shadow us because if the sight of blood makes you faint, I want to know before we get too far in. Sometimes my team will take a candidate out for lunch and just watch and see how do they treat the waitstaff. in the restaurant? How are they carrying on a conversation? To get them out of the mode of interviewing and into real-life action,
Ruth Mannschreck:
[8:26] because that's what you're going to see during the workday in your practice with them.
Dan King:
[8:30] I love that. A very wise friend of mine built a recruiting company, and one of the things he taught me to do was create test projects. So as you find a different role, as an example, we've been hiring a controller recently, and some people involved in the hiring process and I decided we would create basically a spreadsheet test where we're going to have them do some modeling, right? A candidate may interview very well, but as you've been saying, there are certain people who are just so brilliant at gaming interviews. So if you have a well-designed test project, to some extent can mitigate your risk.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[9:11] Sure. I like role-playing. I like to bring someone in and say, all right, you're interviewing to be my office manager, so you're going to have to handle upset clients. And they come into the office and we have one of the team members from the office next door come in and pretend to be an irate client patient and just kick up a row at the front desk. And I'll, Go take care of that just to see what they'll do. Is their first thought to create safety for this person who's having a meltdown? Do they think to move them into a conference room or do they try to out yell them? It's just to put a little action in to see what is their default response. How do they think to handle it first? Are they thinking about the client or are they thinking about themselves?
Dan King:
[10:02] Do most candidates sense that this is a test or not?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[10:05] Oh, we tell them ahead of time. Oh, you tell them ahead of time. We tell them, before they come to the office, we say, you're going to be shadowing. You're going to have a contrived interaction. And it's just for us to see how your mind works. You know, relax. There's no right or wrong. We just want to see how it goes.
Dan King:
[10:22] Have you seen candidates show a wide variety of different responses?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[10:26] Yep. The best was a woman turned around after the little meltdown scene and she looked at me and she goes, you got to be kidding. I'm supposed to deal with this? and perfect because if you're not good at saving people when they're not at their best, because you and I both see patients, clients who are just having a bad day and it happens in our office and we have to care for it, you know?
Dan King:
[10:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that even though they know it's a test, see, a part of me would say, knowing that it's a test, is there some way that that's going to relax them a little bit more than in the real situation? But if you design the test well, it sounds like you can get pretty good data from it.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[11:07] Right. The other thing that I think is important in both our industries is... Having employees who are able to separate their life outside the practice from their behavior inside the practice. In our practice, we had a very liberal paid time off because, think about it, in a dental practice, myself and my assistant are eight inches away from the face of a patient. So if my assistant and I are having, if either one of us is having a bad day, like something went wrong at home, if I bring that into the operatory while I'm trying to work on a patient and I'm simmering inside myself, it's going to be very obvious too. So we have a rule in my office. When you walk in the door of the practice, it's showtime. You have to be able to set aside everything that's happening outside your world. And if you can't, that's fine. I am happy to give you the day off or the morning off, whatever you need. You find somebody, and my team just knows, you find somebody to replace you.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[12:15] But when you're in the office, your sole concern is how to care for our patients. Not everybody can do that. And that's something to dig for in the interview process or in your hiring process. And you can't do that just with interviews.
Dan King:
[12:31] No, you can't. You can't. Yeah, that's beautifully, beautifully said, Ruth. There's no question setting boundaries. I think in most industries between our work and our personal lives is a very healthy thing. And it's entirely possible. I haven't thought about this at times, but it's entirely possible some people just can't do it. But I think it is trainable to an extent.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[12:53] To an extent. And sometimes all you have to do is remove that person from direct patient contact. You know, so it might be they're OK in their little cubicle working on insurance stuff. They're able to keep it all together. But there's just something different when your client is, you know, eight inches away from you or two feet away from you in the setups, the cubicles for your providers, you know?
Dan King:
[13:18] I think across health care, even the mental health is my specialty. My father's a doctor. I work with lots of other kinds of health care businesses. And I think there's a general patient expectation that they're treated with a certain amount of professionalism. And society has almost, doctors especially, but healthcare professionals in general, society sort of stereotypes them as these distant figures. And there's benefits and drawbacks to that.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[13:48] Sure. But it's finding someone... Who is able to set aside their ego, their immediate brain crisis, to care for the person that's in front of them. And I think that's hugely important in both our industries, you know.
Dan King:
[14:06] Question, yes. How did you improve in that respect yourself?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[14:12] It took a lot of practice. It was, and I did have to have days when I just said, you know, I can't do this today. It was very traumatic with my daughter, and there were just days when I could not function 100%, you know? So what I was doing was role modeling to my team what I meant when I said, it's showtime. When you're in action in the office, it's showtime. There's nothing. And I am happy to help you step aside and care for yourself, self-care. we stopped talking about so many years ago. And I think it's vitally important in both our professions that we care for both our providers and our team members, our staff.
Dan King:
[14:56] I couldn't agree more. And one of the more interesting subjects that comes up with practice owners that I'm working closely with is the issue of how many hours clinicians work.
Dan King:
[15:08] So I'm not sure how much of a thing this is in dentistry. I guess it's probably a thing in our universe, there's a lot of practice owners who are baby boomers or kind of older folks who employ mostly millennials and especially generation Z now. And that difference in preferred workload between those two groups of generations, I found to be a mix where I have sat so many tables with owners of practices where they say, Daniel, they won't even work 20 hours a week. I hear this all the time. Huh? Is that familiar to you?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[15:46] Oh, very, very. All my kids are millennials, so I have seen it in action their whole life, you know? And I think, yes, it's different for those of us boomers to have to figure out, how do I do this? And yet, if we don't let that be the whole picture of them, if we say, you know what else that allows them to do? because they know that that's what they want in order to function well. They bring a creativity that we, in our push to work more hours, we sacrifice creativity. We sacrifice big thinking, you know? So I encourage people, if this is a thorn in the side, to see providers who are not doing enough hours. Find ways to tap into their other characteristics and talents that could serve the practice so well, you know. And I like what you said at the very beginning. It's not about working more hours. It's about serving clients better so that they get better results and then charging appropriately.
Dan King:
[16:55] So many different thoughts pop into my head when you say that, You know, intergenerational diversity, age diversity, I've thought is a huge advantage that many organizations don't tap into enough. Right. Where each generation's unique upbringing and context, you hope, and my belief is, at least in our organization, I can see how the uniqueness of the perspective each of us brings shapes the ultimate decisions that we make in a very positive way. Have you experienced the same?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[17:28] Yes, and it causes you to think... This is different, but it's not bad. This is hard, but it's not bad. And those thoughts help me get out of my blinders and say, now, what else comes with this? Because it's a whole package. It's not just this one little irritating part of them. They come as a complete person. And what else are they bringing to the table
Ruth Mannschreck:
[17:59] that I'm not looking at or seeing right at that moment?
Dan King:
[18:03] You know creating space to have a conversation with them to encourage them to say you know what i see this issue with the practice maybe i could help with it right encouraging them to problem solve in a wider way than their nitty-gritty frontline contributor role might enable you
Ruth Mannschreck:
[18:22] Know and that that leads to the question of leadership styles because boomers we were raised in a very top-down leadership style. Even in school, I know all the information. I have all the experience, so I will be telling you how to do this from the top down. And you're a good employee if you do exactly what I tell you to. That's not what these younger kids are looking for. They want, give me a problem and let me solve it. They want to use their creativity, their ingenuity, their intuitiveness and say, let's do it this way.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[19:02] So, as a dentist, that's incredibly scary because if you don't want me to tell you how to do a procedure or how to sterilize my instruments, somebody could die in my chair. So, this is a very serious topic to me. So, what it made me do was I have to paint a very vivid picture of what I want the outcome to be. Before I turn somebody loose and say, find me a new way to do this, that outcome has to be crystal clear in their minds. And I have to have parameters. You can't maim someone. You can't scar them emotionally. You know, whatever your parameters are and a very distinct picture at the end and turn them loose and see what happens. You know, many times they come back and their solution is what I figured out over 40 years of doing it. but many times it's a better, different way to approach it.
Dan King:
[19:58] Can you think of an example off the top of your head to get people thinking here, Ruth?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[20:02] So we do full mouth reconstructions. I had presented a case and the, the woman had picked out the color that she wanted. We have like 38 shades of white. And she had picked out the whitest white I have ever seen, kind of like your kitchen sink. And I said, that's not going to look good. Your teeth should not be that white. And I tried to explain, you need shades, you need all different colors. And she wasn't having it. She only wanted that color. And I almost set the case down and said, I can't, I can't help you because I know it's not going to be something attractive when you, when you get done. And I went back in the back and I was so discouraged. And I said to my assistant, I don't think I can do this. And, and she said, well, let me go and try to talk to her. And she went and talked to her about what's the story? What is it that makes you feel that this color is exactly what you need? And she launched into this big explanation, which made perfect sense. And because they built that relationship, she eventually talked the woman out of changing the shades. But when I came in and said, professionally, I know that that color is not going to be attractive, she wouldn't hear anything about it. We both got to the result that I wanted. She just went a totally different way about getting there.
Dan King:
[21:31] I love that. One of my close colleagues was reminding me yesterday of the wonderful expression, choose curiosity instead of judgment.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[21:39] Yeah, very cool.
Dan King:
[21:42] Ruth said, this has been a really, really rich conversation. I am confident people will get a lot out of it. We'd like to end on a human note. We've been talking about business stuff, although there's been a lot of humanity in here, but we're going to end on a human note. I'm going to ask you, what do you do for fun when you're not helping health care practice owners work fewer hours and systematize their businesses?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[22:01] I love to be outdoors. We live on a lake. And so me kayaking around the lake, we have two big dogs. So it's me and my dogs out on the lake. I also love to try new wines. My relatives in Germany had vineyards, so I've always grown up around. And I started a wine group 25 years ago, and we're still going. So those are some of the fun, relaxing things that we get to do with our kids. We have four kids and five grandchildren.
Dan King:
[22:34] Fantastic. Such a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you for your insights.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[22:38] Yes, thank you so much. This was great. Thanks, Dan.
Transcript: self-propelled business with Ruth Mannschreck
“You can teach somebody how to work with your software ... but you can’t always train for those soft skills.” — Ruth Mannschreck
Read the full transcript
Dan King:
[0:00] Hello, everyone. Daniel King here with another episode, and I am looking forward
Dan King:
[0:04] to what I am very confident is going to be a thoughtful conversation with Ruth Mantrak. She's the founder of Shoreline Strategies. Ruth, welcome. Would love you to tell folks the basics of your origin story.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[0:18] Sure. It's so good to be here. Thanks, Dan. I really appreciate many of the topics that you've covered on your podcast. I'm a dentist. I started my practice from scratch. We were doing really well. I was practicing five days a week. We had two little boys and life was wonderful. Then my daughter was born, had some traumatic events, and she was in intensive care for weeks. When she came home, she had to see eight different doctors every week. So we had to completely change our business model in my practice. So we took five days of work and we scrunched it down to two and a half days.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[1:01] We changed our business model. My team stepped up. I have to say that what we did was a group effort. My team and I, not just me, put together a machine, a functioning practice that we got everything accomplished in two and a half days. We worked on our culture, we worked on our systems, and we worked on the people who were actually in our practice. And... One day I met the doc from the office next to mine in the hallway, and he said, Ruth, what's going on in your office? He said, you're never here, and yet the doors are still open, and I see happy people coming in and out. And he actually became my first client. That's how we started teaching people this process we use to help a founder or a practice owner work fewer hours. Not usually as drastic as, you
Ruth Mannschreck:
[1:52] know, cutting your time in the office in half, but taking a good chunk. We aim at generally taking 10 hours out of a founder's weekly hours in the practice.
Dan King:
[2:06] That would be an awesome thing, I think, for a lot of our listeners. So if our typical listener runs a group practice with 30 clinicians, it's a busy therapy practice where there's a lot of patients. They may be understaffed from an admin perspective because there's billing and compliance to do and it always seems to be behind. How on earth can someone like that cut 10 hours off of their work week?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[2:28] I know. So we start with the systems. I like to start with what I call your client journey. From the moment someone answers the phone step by step by step, what are the steps that a client goes through. What are the steps from, same thing for your providers when you're hiring providers or enrolling providers, what's the first step from the phone call and then what happens next and what happens after that. And in between those steps, what's the communication that has to happen so that the information from an intake phone call is communicated adequately and timely to the next person. Say it goes intake phone calls, scheduling all those steps, At every step along the way, who's responsible for what happens in that conversation? And what is the, I think probably the most important part of this is, what is the emotion or the feeling that you want the client or the provider, depending on which system we're talking, what is the feeling you want them to leave that step having? And does your team know how to elicit that feeling, that emotion, how to help your client get to that emotion by the end of the phone call or the scheduling or the handoff to the next person. Does that sound right?
Dan King:
[3:52] It does. So can you give us an example of an emotion and how you would train the team to elicit it?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[3:59] Sure. So when someone calls, I'll just give a dental example, in pain, calls a dental office and is a little bit panicky because pain does that. So the feeling that you want the patient to have at the end of just the phone call. We're not getting them out of pain, but we're giving them comfort and security. And security is an incredibly important feeling for your patients, no matter what kind of professional you are. Security is a huge thing for you to give your clients, even on that very first phone call. So it may be the questions that we ask them. It may be the feedback that we give them. And we do have team training sessions where we review phone calls and learn techniques and conversation starters that get our client from where they are one or two steps further along in the comfort scale or in the security scale.
Dan King:
[4:58] Do you find, is it natural for most team members to learn how to elicit emotion
Dan King:
[5:03] in the healthcare universe, or does that tend to be a tougher task?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[5:08] That is a tougher task And it's, It's something that we handle in the next phase of our, when we're going through and helping founders work fewer hours, is actually focusing on your team. The first step is to focus on your systems. The second step is to focus on your team. Because many times in healthcare professions, we have to hire a lot of people. And we tend to think about the hard skills that we want those people to have. And we don't always think about the soft skills that we want them to have. So to increase your chances of having someone who knows how to have a conversation to move someone along the security scale of emotion, you need to start with a person who has soft skills like empathy and compassion and a desire to learn.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[6:06] So it goes back to hiring the right people who will be able because you can't train everyone to be compassionate you can't train everyone to be empathetic so when we hire we focus first on those soft skills what do i want them to be able to do you know i want self-directed people I want confident people. I want empathic people. Whatever it is you need in the mix, that's what you hire for. Because think about it. You can teach somebody how to work with your software. I can teach them how to be a chair-side assistant. You can teach them how to fill out an insurance claim form in the right order so that you get reimbursed properly. But you can't always train for those soft skills. So a big emphasis we put when we get to the team part is how are you hiring people? Where are you finding them? And how are you encouraging them after they're part of your team? How are you helping them grow?
Dan King:
[7:10] One of the things I've experienced in hiring is anyone can say anything in an interview. How can we screen for empathy, as an example, in our hiring process?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[7:22] So I encourage professionals, don't make your hiring process simply a series of interviews because there are people who are just brilliant at interviewing, you know. But I like to bring in engagement, bring in participation, put people in an unusual situation so that they have to think on their feet. They have to show a little bit more of the real them than just knowing what answers to say to what questions you ask. So it might be bringing someone into your office. We have candidates come in and shadow us because if the sight of blood makes you faint, I want to know before we get too far in. Sometimes my team will take a candidate out for lunch and just watch and see how do they treat the waitstaff. in the restaurant? How are they carrying on a conversation? To get them out of the mode of interviewing and into real-life action,
Ruth Mannschreck:
[8:26] because that's what you're going to see during the workday in your practice with them.
Dan King:
[8:30] I love that. A very wise friend of mine built a recruiting company, and one of the things he taught me to do was create test projects. So as you find a different role, as an example, we've been hiring a controller recently, and some people involved in the hiring process and I decided we would create basically a spreadsheet test where we're going to have them do some modeling, right? A candidate may interview very well, but as you've been saying, there are certain people who are just so brilliant at gaming interviews. So if you have a well-designed test project, to some extent can mitigate your risk.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[9:11] Sure. I like role-playing. I like to bring someone in and say, all right, you're interviewing to be my office manager, so you're going to have to handle upset clients. And they come into the office and we have one of the team members from the office next door come in and pretend to be an irate client patient and just kick up a row at the front desk. And I'll, Go take care of that just to see what they'll do. Is their first thought to create safety for this person who's having a meltdown? Do they think to move them into a conference room or do they try to out yell them? It's just to put a little action in to see what is their default response. How do they think to handle it first? Are they thinking about the client or are they thinking about themselves?
Dan King:
[10:02] Do most candidates sense that this is a test or not?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[10:05] Oh, we tell them ahead of time. Oh, you tell them ahead of time. We tell them, before they come to the office, we say, you're going to be shadowing. You're going to have a contrived interaction. And it's just for us to see how your mind works. You know, relax. There's no right or wrong. We just want to see how it goes.
Dan King:
[10:22] Have you seen candidates show a wide variety of different responses?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[10:26] Yep. The best was a woman turned around after the little meltdown scene and she looked at me and she goes, you got to be kidding. I'm supposed to deal with this? and perfect because if you're not good at saving people when they're not at their best, because you and I both see patients, clients who are just having a bad day and it happens in our office and we have to care for it, you know?
Dan King:
[10:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that even though they know it's a test, see, a part of me would say, knowing that it's a test, is there some way that that's going to relax them a little bit more than in the real situation? But if you design the test well, it sounds like you can get pretty good data from it.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[11:07] Right. The other thing that I think is important in both our industries is... Having employees who are able to separate their life outside the practice from their behavior inside the practice. In our practice, we had a very liberal paid time off because, think about it, in a dental practice, myself and my assistant are eight inches away from the face of a patient. So if my assistant and I are having, if either one of us is having a bad day, like something went wrong at home, if I bring that into the operatory while I'm trying to work on a patient and I'm simmering inside myself, it's going to be very obvious too. So we have a rule in my office. When you walk in the door of the practice, it's showtime. You have to be able to set aside everything that's happening outside your world. And if you can't, that's fine. I am happy to give you the day off or the morning off, whatever you need. You find somebody, and my team just knows, you find somebody to replace you.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[12:15] But when you're in the office, your sole concern is how to care for our patients. Not everybody can do that. And that's something to dig for in the interview process or in your hiring process. And you can't do that just with interviews.
Dan King:
[12:31] No, you can't. You can't. Yeah, that's beautifully, beautifully said, Ruth. There's no question setting boundaries. I think in most industries between our work and our personal lives is a very healthy thing. And it's entirely possible. I haven't thought about this at times, but it's entirely possible some people just can't do it. But I think it is trainable to an extent.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[12:53] To an extent. And sometimes all you have to do is remove that person from direct patient contact. You know, so it might be they're OK in their little cubicle working on insurance stuff. They're able to keep it all together. But there's just something different when your client is, you know, eight inches away from you or two feet away from you in the setups, the cubicles for your providers, you know?
Dan King:
[13:18] I think across health care, even the mental health is my specialty. My father's a doctor. I work with lots of other kinds of health care businesses. And I think there's a general patient expectation that they're treated with a certain amount of professionalism. And society has almost, doctors especially, but healthcare professionals in general, society sort of stereotypes them as these distant figures. And there's benefits and drawbacks to that.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[13:48] Sure. But it's finding someone... Who is able to set aside their ego, their immediate brain crisis, to care for the person that's in front of them. And I think that's hugely important in both our industries, you know.
Dan King:
[14:06] Question, yes. How did you improve in that respect yourself?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[14:12] It took a lot of practice. It was, and I did have to have days when I just said, you know, I can't do this today. It was very traumatic with my daughter, and there were just days when I could not function 100%, you know? So what I was doing was role modeling to my team what I meant when I said, it's showtime. When you're in action in the office, it's showtime. There's nothing. And I am happy to help you step aside and care for yourself, self-care. we stopped talking about so many years ago. And I think it's vitally important in both our professions that we care for both our providers and our team members, our staff.
Dan King:
[14:56] I couldn't agree more. And one of the more interesting subjects that comes up with practice owners that I'm working closely with is the issue of how many hours clinicians work.
Dan King:
[15:08] So I'm not sure how much of a thing this is in dentistry. I guess it's probably a thing in our universe, there's a lot of practice owners who are baby boomers or kind of older folks who employ mostly millennials and especially generation Z now. And that difference in preferred workload between those two groups of generations, I found to be a mix where I have sat so many tables with owners of practices where they say, Daniel, they won't even work 20 hours a week. I hear this all the time. Huh? Is that familiar to you?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[15:46] Oh, very, very. All my kids are millennials, so I have seen it in action their whole life, you know? And I think, yes, it's different for those of us boomers to have to figure out, how do I do this? And yet, if we don't let that be the whole picture of them, if we say, you know what else that allows them to do? because they know that that's what they want in order to function well. They bring a creativity that we, in our push to work more hours, we sacrifice creativity. We sacrifice big thinking, you know? So I encourage people, if this is a thorn in the side, to see providers who are not doing enough hours. Find ways to tap into their other characteristics and talents that could serve the practice so well, you know. And I like what you said at the very beginning. It's not about working more hours. It's about serving clients better so that they get better results and then charging appropriately.
Dan King:
[16:55] So many different thoughts pop into my head when you say that, You know, intergenerational diversity, age diversity, I've thought is a huge advantage that many organizations don't tap into enough. Right. Where each generation's unique upbringing and context, you hope, and my belief is, at least in our organization, I can see how the uniqueness of the perspective each of us brings shapes the ultimate decisions that we make in a very positive way. Have you experienced the same?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[17:28] Yes, and it causes you to think... This is different, but it's not bad. This is hard, but it's not bad. And those thoughts help me get out of my blinders and say, now, what else comes with this? Because it's a whole package. It's not just this one little irritating part of them. They come as a complete person. And what else are they bringing to the table
Ruth Mannschreck:
[17:59] that I'm not looking at or seeing right at that moment?
Dan King:
[18:03] You know creating space to have a conversation with them to encourage them to say you know what i see this issue with the practice maybe i could help with it right encouraging them to problem solve in a wider way than their nitty-gritty frontline contributor role might enable you
Ruth Mannschreck:
[18:22] Know and that that leads to the question of leadership styles because boomers we were raised in a very top-down leadership style. Even in school, I know all the information. I have all the experience, so I will be telling you how to do this from the top down. And you're a good employee if you do exactly what I tell you to. That's not what these younger kids are looking for. They want, give me a problem and let me solve it. They want to use their creativity, their ingenuity, their intuitiveness and say, let's do it this way.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[19:02] So, as a dentist, that's incredibly scary because if you don't want me to tell you how to do a procedure or how to sterilize my instruments, somebody could die in my chair. So, this is a very serious topic to me. So, what it made me do was I have to paint a very vivid picture of what I want the outcome to be. Before I turn somebody loose and say, find me a new way to do this, that outcome has to be crystal clear in their minds. And I have to have parameters. You can't maim someone. You can't scar them emotionally. You know, whatever your parameters are and a very distinct picture at the end and turn them loose and see what happens. You know, many times they come back and their solution is what I figured out over 40 years of doing it. but many times it's a better, different way to approach it.
Dan King:
[19:58] Can you think of an example off the top of your head to get people thinking here, Ruth?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[20:02] So we do full mouth reconstructions. I had presented a case and the, the woman had picked out the color that she wanted. We have like 38 shades of white. And she had picked out the whitest white I have ever seen, kind of like your kitchen sink. And I said, that's not going to look good. Your teeth should not be that white. And I tried to explain, you need shades, you need all different colors. And she wasn't having it. She only wanted that color. And I almost set the case down and said, I can't, I can't help you because I know it's not going to be something attractive when you, when you get done. And I went back in the back and I was so discouraged. And I said to my assistant, I don't think I can do this. And, and she said, well, let me go and try to talk to her. And she went and talked to her about what's the story? What is it that makes you feel that this color is exactly what you need? And she launched into this big explanation, which made perfect sense. And because they built that relationship, she eventually talked the woman out of changing the shades. But when I came in and said, professionally, I know that that color is not going to be attractive, she wouldn't hear anything about it. We both got to the result that I wanted. She just went a totally different way about getting there.
Dan King:
[21:31] I love that. One of my close colleagues was reminding me yesterday of the wonderful expression, choose curiosity instead of judgment.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[21:39] Yeah, very cool.
Dan King:
[21:42] Ruth said, this has been a really, really rich conversation. I am confident people will get a lot out of it. We'd like to end on a human note. We've been talking about business stuff, although there's been a lot of humanity in here, but we're going to end on a human note. I'm going to ask you, what do you do for fun when you're not helping health care practice owners work fewer hours and systematize their businesses?
Ruth Mannschreck:
[22:01] I love to be outdoors. We live on a lake. And so me kayaking around the lake, we have two big dogs. So it's me and my dogs out on the lake. I also love to try new wines. My relatives in Germany had vineyards, so I've always grown up around. And I started a wine group 25 years ago, and we're still going. So those are some of the fun, relaxing things that we get to do with our kids. We have four kids and five grandchildren.
Dan King:
[22:34] Fantastic. Such a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you for your insights.
Ruth Mannschreck:
[22:38] Yes, thank you so much. This was great. Thanks, Dan.