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E14: Podcast: Steve Parker and what dentists can learn from other industries

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Hello and welcome to Ascent Dental Radio. A program dedicated to the balance between the clinical aspect of health care and the business of health care. And now here is your host, Dr. Kevin Coughlin.

Kevin: Welcome. This is Dr. Kevin Coughlin. You’re listening to Ascent Radio. My website is www.ascent-dental-solutions.com with a focus on knowledge, consultation, development and training. Today’s podcast, we’re honored to have Mr. Steve Parker.

Mr. Parker has been in the dental industry since 2000, but he’s been in business for the last 30 years. He’s considered a thought leader and he’s the CEO of The Profitable Dentist and Excellence in Dentistry.

Mr. Parker, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. I have so many questions and I can’t wait to listen to your responses. My understanding is you have a program called Five Star Dental Practice Coaching. It’s a program that you’ve been developing over the last 30 years with your expertise. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that?

 

Steve: Sure, Dr. Coughlin. First of all, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you again. As always, it’s a pleasure, and to speak with your listeners. The Five Star program grew out of literally 30 years and thousands of coaching and consulting clients that either I had or Dr. Woody Oakes had.

 

He’s the founder of Excellence in Dentistry, The Destin Spring Break Seminar, The Profitable Dentist Magazine. He was really one of the pioneers in the coaching movement in the last 70s and early 80s. What we’ve done is in my becoming involved with him and really, for lack of a better term, upgrading a lot of the content and the products and the coaching, was we determined that there were really five key elements that determined a good practice or determined a successful practice.

 

These aren’t really five elements that determine uniquely a dental practice, they’re five elements that really determine a good business. Essentially, the areas that we focus on are leadership, team building, money; meaning finance, metrics; meaning measure, just measure your business, and systems that you put in place.

 

So with Five Star Coaching, what we’ve done is try to break it down in more bite-size chunks and keep a dental business owner focused on those elements of their business, and then keep the clinical part of the business separate. In fact, one of the systems is a clinical committee where you discuss clinical things, as much as if you would in any business, you’re kind of discussing the operations part of your business.

 

We determined was if we could focus on these five things, get an honor to focus on these five things whether it’s a sole practitioner or it’s a small group, I’ve done a lot of consulting with large groups you’ll find that even in a group of 150, 200, 300 dentists, there’s still a business there. And these are really the five core elements that if you understand them, manage them, measure them and make these what you do every day, you have a very, very, very successful business.

 

Kevin: For our listeners, one of the reasons I was taken by Mr. Parker is he’s been involved, not just in the dental business, but you’ve also been involved with Fortune 500 companies. Can you tell us a little bit about your past experience and that expertise that you’ve now been able to bring to the dental profession?

 

Steve: That is a great question. One of the things that I learned, and my background is management finance, is business is fundamentally business no matter what it is you’re in. You have resources which are typically time, money and effort that you have to put towards a product or a result that you want for your business.

 

So if you’re in the plumbing business, the result you want is a lot more profitable plumbing jobs. If you’re a dentist, what you want are a lot more happy paying patients.

 

I grew up in some different industries. When I was very young, I got into the restaurant equipment industry. And it happened to be the time when companies were franchising; McDonald’s and Hardee’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Jack In The Box and instead of being one, two, three little restaurants, it now became 5,000 restaurants. One customer would do an expansion and it would be 15,000 restaurants, 15 new McDonald’s over this year.

 

You have to approach those differently than 15,000 individual restaurants. The infrastructure the way you approach it, the support systems, the management systems, the knowledge base and talent, all have to be different than if it’s a lot of individuals.

 

I sold that business and moved into the telecommunications infrastructure at a time when cellphones were just emerging. Again, you would have instead of everybody having a landline, and there were that many landlines around the country, suddenly everybody had a cell phone or two.

 

I read a statistic that Apple has now sold more iPhones than there are people since 2007 when they came out. So the infrastructure to address that is completely different than it is with everybody having a phone in their phone and a phone in their business.

 

What I see in dentistry is very much along the same growth pattern. While there are huge growth in groups, that doesn’t necessarily mean growth in giant groups, it can mean growth in small groups, in five or ten or twelve dental practice.

 

But at the end of the day what’s happening is the business of that profession is starting to override the clinical part of it. I personally don’t believe that’s compromising clinical principles, I think it just means giving the resources to the right people at the right place at the right time to do better dentistry.

 

So my background has been in a lot of industries that grew and aggregated and matured over time and I believe, interestingly enough, I’m living that again in dentistry. I see the same pattern than I saw over the past 30 years in other industries.

 

Kevin: I think what you’re referring to is the explosion of Dental Service Organizations or Dental Support Organizations, commonly referred to as DSOs and MSOs, Managed Service Organizations or Managed Support Organizations.

 

I’ve heard you talk and make presentations in the past. Perhaps you can explain to the listeners what your prediction is. What you think is occurring and how you think it’s going to evolve over the next 10 or 15 years.

 

Steve: Again, great question. I do a lot of interviews, I’m asked this question repeatedly, in fact, I would say it’s 80 plus percent of the time. At some point in the interview somebody says, “You’re a business guy, so are you pro or con, are you for or against DSOs?”

 

And my answer is always the same; I don’t know why you have to choose. A market allows for all kinds of different businesses and sizes of a business in a particular industry.

 

As long as you have a business that provides value to a customer and you can demand the price that you need to be profitable and stay around and give you a comfortable living, I think the sole practitioner, I don’t think they’re a dying breed, I think they have to evolve in a general sense.

 

I don’t think as a solo practitioner it’s a challenge to manage insurance filing and it’s a challenge to find employees that can do a lot of different things when the competition is maybe a group down the street that says, “Wow, this person is really good as an insurance manager, we’ll hire him or her away and we can pay a little more wage.”

 

What you’ve really done is trained your competition. I think you just have to be smarter in the way that you approach it as a sole practitioner. I think the same thing applies to somebody who gets together with a group and I’ve consulted and coached groups that are four, five or six docs who all struggled on their own but have done terrific as a small group.

 

They’ll be an ownership group of five or six and now they’re 25 or 30 practicing dentists, the rest of them are employees. I think that is a model that really didn’t exist 20 years ago, really didn’t exist 10 years ago, but it makes sense today. So they all can come out ahead.

 

But at the end of the day, the dentist working in a DSO or an MSO or a group are still dentists. They still have to meet certain standards. They still have standards of care. They still have to make their customers happy and want to come back as a business owner or you’re going to go out of business quickly. So the same fundamentals apply.

 

I think there’s room for sole practitioners, I think there’s room for large groups, I think they offer unique and different thing. And I think as we’ve talked in the past, the ones who are more entrepreneurial understand that.

 

I actually think that the sole practitioner as a future will be a lot more financially stable because they understand the nature of their business, therefore, they have to compete in a unique way that works for them, versus trying to copy a large DSO.

 

Kevin: I was going to say Steve, your presentation and program Excellence in Dentistry and The Profitable Dentist, you have a phenomenal seminar generally in April in Destin, Florida.

 

What I noticed is the attraction of younger dentists, more entrepreneurial dentists, dentists that know that they need to keep their clinical acumen up, but they’re smart enough and astute enough to realize that you have to have this marriage between excellent clinical care, excellent customer service, but you have to understand basic business. And each time I’ve had the opportunity to speak with you, I’ve learned something that’s valuable for business.

 

Is there a way or knowledge about upcoming seminars that you’re having or planning where the dental community can reach out and hopefully participate and listen to what your organization has to share and educate us in?

 

Steve: Sure. In fact, the 2017 Destin Seminar, which is in its 26th year, Dr. Oakes kind of pioneered the private dental seminar field, if you will, the theme for that is where are you taking your practice.

 

What we hope that communicates is, back to the earlier part of the discussion, is that you are the CEO of your practice. I’ve always said dental school taught you how to be a clinician and you can hone those skills for the rest of your life and you should, as anybody in any business should. You should always strive to get better in what you do in that vocation.

 

But they don’t teach you very much about how to run a business. And that’s the interesting thing about dentistry is, the vast majority for generations that will graduate are going to be business people, but you get very little business training. You come out with a lot of clinical skills but not many business skills.

 

So what I try to do and what we try to do with The Profitable Dentist and with, again, Five Star Coaching is to get you to understand the elements of a strong business and focus on that. With where are you taking your practice in Destin, the idea is to bring people in who can help you with clinical.

 

We always include — the ration has changed a little bit over the years, we’re probably at about 40 percent clinical because that’s what our attendees and readers and listeners ask for, but about 60 percent is your practice. The mechanics of running a dental business are becoming more in demand.

 

You hit the nail on the head about younger dentists or newer dentist. My experience is that newer dentists understand they’re in a business, they’re running a business and they want to get those kind of skills. So that’s really what we’re trying to provide more of.

 

There’s a lot of clinical content out there, we will continue to provide it, but what I’m getting asked for more and more everyday is how do I build over time a plan for my employees? I’m going to hire my second or third or fourth dentist and I want to quit kind of bungling through it, is there a form or a platform or a system or something that we can use?

 

There are, but again, this is an evolving piece of dentistry, the idea of small groups. So what we try to do is focus on that and provide the tools and resources that anybody who wants to — again, if they want to be a sole practitioner, we’re going to give them to you. If they want to be a small group, we’re going to help you. If they want to be an emerging larger group, we’ll give you those tools and resources too.

 

Kevin: Steve, at the beginning of this podcast we talked briefly about the Five Star Dental Practice Coaching program and you elicited five salient points. One of them was leadership, another was metrics, another was system.

 

In this podcast, if you were to stimulate our listeners, is there one particular point in each of those five categories that you would put the highest emphasis on? So if you were to say in leadership, is there a particular one quality that sort of trumps all the other qualities? The same with metrics, if you had to look at one metric, is there a way that you can summarize and stimulate our listeners to want to reach out, sign up for the program and learn more about it?

 

Steve: Sure, in fact, great question. Let me kind of go down the list real quick. I would say with leadership, I always try to leave each client with the understanding that you are the boss. That doesn’t mean that you’re bossy, that means that you are in charge, you make the decisions, be prepared to do that.

 

Too many times when I get into consulting or coaching, the dentist just wants to come in and be the dentist and leave the difficult business decisions up to an office manager or surprisingly, even front desk people, a lot of people who don’t have a vested interest in the profitability of the business.

 

So if you’re the boss, it doesn’t mean be bossy, it just means that everybody there needs to know that you’re the person in charge.

 

Team building; I would say to understand that your team is your most valuable resource. They will make you or break you. They can build you up or they can come in and go through the motions every day.

 

So the more your team is engaged and involved and in it with you that everybody is pulling in the same direction and that they see you investing in them as a team and treat them like a valuable asset, you’re going to get a lot more out of your team.

 

Money; the time value of money and cash flow are probably the two things that I coach most about or try to get through. Understand the nature of cash flow. That’s the lifeblood of a business. You need a good balance of cash coming in predictably and cash going out.

 

And when that becomes imbalanced and upside down, you again back to leadership, need to be the person in charge, address it immediately, and take actions to get that part of your business right.

 

I know it sounds easy and there are a lot of complications and nuances to it, but fundamentally, your eye needs to be on the flow of money coming in and going out.

 

Metrics: I always coach people to determine the important metric for their practice. So if your growth has been flat for three years and the most important thing for you is new patients, then that’s going to become the metric that you care about therefore, your team cares about.

 

If it’s patient retention, whatever you need to focus on. I typically say pick three. There are 103 but pick the three that are unique to your practice that you’ve decided you’re going to work on over the next year and those are the things that — I’ll put a little marker board back in the lab or the break area for the team and I’ll have the office manager write up every day whatever metric we’re working on.

 

So if we’re trying to grow new patients, I want everybody to see every day how many new patients we have for the month. If our goal is 20, I want somebody to walk in everyday and see a bunch of zeros and either they feel bad and do something about it or they don’t. Both of those are valuable things to know.

 

Systems: again, the same thing as metrics. You decide what’s important to you in terms of systems. Whether it’s clinical systems, marketing systems, finance systems, but everything in your practice the more systematic it is, the less you have to address it every day, the fewer surprises.

 

You decide what you’re going to do, put the system in place and then let it run. Visit it weekly or monthly, make corrections as necessary. But without a system, you’re going to have your staff coming to you for 100 little decisions every day and looking for approvals every day that a system would take care of for you.

 

Kevin: Those are great highlight points. Steve, if the listeners wanted to reach out, they wanted to sign up for your coaching program, they wanted to sign up for Excellence in Dentistry, the seminars, if they wanted to either publish in your magazine or read your magazine, The Profitable Dentist, what’s the best way for our listeners to reach out and get in touch with you and your organization?

 

Steve: There are several ways and one of the things that we do is The Profitable Dentist Magazine is free to any practicing dentist or licensed dentist in the country. You can subscribe to that online free at www.theprofitabledentist.com. Fill out a quick little form and you’ll start receiving it.

 

The next issue we just wrapped it up this morning so it’s on its way out and if you would like that, just give us your name, address and you’ll get the very next one. I can be reached at steve@theprofitabledentist.com. That’s probably the best way to reach me. Or you can call in and one of the young ladies that take care of our reception can help you. That number is 812-949-9043. Any one of those ways.

 

I get a lot of calls every day. I always feel it’s sort of a responsibility to talk to anybody who calls in with a quick question. I probably take two or three calls a day from young dentists who want to start a practice or again, a lot of the calls right now are about groups that want to start groups.

 

I’m more than willing to spend a few minutes on a phone call, even in an evening, and just give a little direction and some ideas, and a lot of times just put two people together.

 

Kevin: What I want to do is I want to give a sincere plug to you. I’ve been a practicing dentist and still a practicing dentist for over 33 years. I have over 150 employees, 14 locations. I have dealt with the business of dentistry, the strengths, the weaknesses, opportunities and threats that have been affecting our profession and I would consider you truly one of the best thought leaders I’ve had the opportunity to come across. And I want to personally take this time to thank you, your company and your organization.

 

A couple of years ago Dr. Woody Oakes called me after receiving my book and he really sat down and talked to me, he gave me a chance to go on your radio show, Driving Dentist or Dentist Behind the Wheel and it was an opportunity for me to share my own personal thoughts and my own personal experiences. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Dr. Woody Oakes for not only helping me, but the thousands of other dentists.

 

And now that I see you in this position, I see you doing the exact same thing and I hope our listeners take the opportunity for this fantastic resource to just reach out, learn more, get involved with The Profitable Dentist and allow them to bring your practice and your personal life to a higher level of success and balance.

 

Steve, in our closing few minutes, is there anything you’d like to add?

 

Steve: First of all, thank you for that. It’s very surprising and appreciated. I would like to add again, dentistry is in a very high state of flux right now, I think. It’s a very evolving business and I think there are a lot of people out there who feel like it’s the end of a thing or end of something. And it very possibly is.

 

There’s an evolution that always takes place in business. I am extremely optimistic about the entire industry of dentistry. I’m extremely optimistic about anybody who is in dental school right now, graduating, looking forward, looking at their future, the opportunities that will present themselves and are now.

 

I can’t say enough how optimistic I am about being a dentist or about anybody being a dentist or being in this business in the next 20 years.

 

Kevin: Mr. Parker, from The Profitable Dentist, Excellence in Dentistry, you’ve been listening to Ascent Radio. I can’t thank you enough for using your valuable time to share your knowledge and expertise with our listeners. A personal thanks to you and your organization and to Dr. Oakes.

 

Thank you so much, Steve, for your time and expertise and I look forward to talking to you in the future.

 

Steve: Thank you, Dr. Coughlin. Likewise.

E13: Podcast: Jennifer Brown on diversity and inclusion

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Hello and welcome to Ascent Dental Radio. A program dedicated to the balance between the clinical aspect of health care and the business of health care. And now here is your host, Dr. Kevin Coughlin.

Kevin: Jennifer, welcome to Ascent Dental Solutions. My name is Dr. Kevin Coughlin and I’ve been providing podcast information for our audience now for some time with the help of Doug Foresta. I understand you’re an expert in inclusion. Can you give me a little bit of background about yourself, please?

Jennifer: Surely. Yes, I am Jennifer Brown and I‘ve run a firm for about a decade in the inclusion and diversity space. Meaning that we do consulting and training for mostly large institutions around developing their workforce and managing their workplace towards being more inclusive and also educating themselves about how to reach diversifying world from a marketplace perspective.

So looking at clients and customers, however those businesses define their external marketplace.

Kevin: Jennifer, what motivated you to go down this pathway? Was there something that happened in your career or something in your background that triggered this area of expertise

Jennifer: Yes, actually. I had a background in leadership development and I found that that topic really resonated with me exploring what leads to human potential being realized in our workplace. This is where we spend so much of our lives.

I have a degree in that, but I was also an opera singer and I have a master’s in voice. So I spent a lot of time on the stage, as you can imagine, and I really loved speaking to people and interacting with audiences about leadership.

But the missing piece, I think, occurred to me — I’m a member of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community. I have a partner of 19 years. I always thought that that kind of had nothing to do with my work as a leadership development expert and trainer.

And as I matured and learned more about how many people that identify as LGBT, and then how many women and others who are historically less represented in some of the companies that I consult to really feel on a day-to-day basis, I really found my voice as an advocate who’d felt marginalized and really troubled by certain things that had happened to me in my professional journey, as I retooled myself and became more of a leadership development professional. And just being aware of that experience that I had had of kind of minimizing my identity and parts of who I am and how many others really experience that on a day-to-day basis.

I just felt very called to focus my work in that space and be both a role model as a woman business owner, as an out LGBT business owner, but also somebody that could shine a light into organizations of all sizes on behalf of talent that really traditionally may feel they don’t have a voice in the equation.

Kevin: If you were to say over the ten years of your experience a common theme that you see in large and medium size and even small companies when they sort of miss the boat on inclusion, is it because of ignorance, is it because of lack of understanding, is it just they don’t even know they’re doing it? Is there something particular that you could tell the audience that you’re seeing with your decade of experience?

Jennifer: Absolutely. I like to say the proactive appreciation of diversity and the building of inclusive workplace cultures, it doesn’t just happen. It’s a very, very rare organization that can take its eye off that ball or be kind of not working on it and then have a workforce that, for example, if you ask them, felt very included on all levels and really that they could bring their full self to work. It’s just one of those things I think that we hunker down and focus on business as usual, we get very, very busy, we think all of this takes time.

We also assume I give everybody opportunity. I’m very equally minded or equality minded or I’m progressive politically. So of course I believe in these things and I think if there’s an assumption there, that good intent is actually going to create workplace environment outcomes. And that is not true, at all.

There have to be certain things said and done and they need to be consistent and they need to be somewhat overt to make sure that you’re communicating a message that states in a positive way what you stand for and what your workplace and your company stands for, for diversity and inclusion and what that really means to you. So I think those are some of the things.

The other thing that is pernicious is the role of unconscious bias. And that shows up — again, it’s unconscious, which is the problem. We raise it to consciousness and we talk about in our trainings everyone has it and we all see the world through our lenses and we filter things, not because we’re bad people, but because we need to make sense out of things and make decisions based on very little information.

That’s the world we live in. Unfortunately, some of those decisions are not always the right ones. And so unconscious bias is especially difficult with diversity, of course, because we don’t see ourselves, for example, hiring in our own image or promoting in our own image or seeking people that are similar to us and having community with them.

Therefore, we’re not being challenged to grow through how we manage difference between ourselves and others and that’s really where the richness lives. And that richness is really so good for companies too.

It creates more innovation, it creates more input, which actually can solve business problems in different ways. But we tend to be creatures of habit and the status quo and change is hard and sometimes threatening for some people.

I think there’s also a little bit of a misassumption that if I extend more opportunity proactively to others that somehow some of my opportunity is going to be lessened, but really DNI, as we call it, is a one plus one equals three scenario so it’s good for your people, it’s good for your business.

And if you are a leader that feels that way, you have to kind of think about it differently and think about what will be unleashed in your company if you were to prioritize it. And I don’t think we can really know that until you try.

Kevin: I’ll share with you a personal story. I’ve been practicing dentistry in western Massachusetts, a very small isolated area of the state and I’ve been doing that for about 35 years.

In the early 80s, I did a quality assessment, quality assessed form to see if patients were getting a positive feedback. And an African American young man named Jeff wrote down his comments, “I love your office but it’s a lollipop white land.” And I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. So I called him up and he goes, “Doc, I just want you to know that everything around here is lollipop white.”

And I said, “I don’t get it.” I went to a high school where there were no African Americans. I went to a college with not a lot of diversity in my opinion so I didn’t even realize what was going on.

The sum and substance of it is I actively sought out in the community African American and Hispanic employees because quite honestly, one of the practices that I had was in the inner city. Now I’m happy to say I have 150 plus employees, I have employees from 20 different countries, I have six different languages in my personal practice.

Although you shouldn’t do it for the monetary value, but quite honestly, there was a whole vast array of individuals that I wasn’t aware of, didn’t associate, didn’t even know they existed in the community because I was living in my own little box. That one gentleman who I consider a personal friend really opened the doors back in the early 80s.

And for some of our listeners, sometimes I think just as you said, you forget your surroundings and those surroundings I think can pay off in numerous ways, not just monetarily, but I feel pretty good. I always say to myself my office is like the United Nations. We have everything that you can imagine and we get along very well. We have our problems like any business, but not because of race or nationality, I’m happy to say.

Jennifer: Congratulations! That’s incredible. We often say in the corporate world, which is where I specialize, you’ve got to see it to be it. And that translates I think to customers in terms of who do they see when they enter your business, however you define that.

Do they feel they see someone that looks like them, that speaks their language either literally or figuratively, maybe it’s their cultural language? People really do make decisions based on that.

In my world, I’m always asking my clients who did you bring to that sales meeting? Who did you put in front of that prospect? And when they get the feedback, they’re shocked, “Oh, we didn’t get that piece of work and one of the reasons was that we sent five white guys from our sales team.”

They didn’t even think about it. Meanwhile, they’re selling to someone who represents a really diverse audience base or a diverse customer base. So more and more when business deals are made, the buyer I’d say, side is actually evaluating the seller in this scenario for even things as simple as who are you putting in front of me to speak to me. Do our values match? Do I want to do business with you? And it’s becoming increasingly important to have that reflection and that mirroring happen.

And you can’t just have one person in the corporate world that’s like there’s one person of color or there’s one LGBT person that’s sort of invited to every single meeting. And that scenario repeats itself and it’s very exhausting for the person who’s being tokenized, if you will.

So I often say too the whole game, like your practice, you’ve grown a critical mass to the point where you have lots of different people, of different communities and you’re not overly relying on one to be a spokesperson for an entire community, which is never accurate, but you’re also no unduly burdening somebody with that.

It’s really exciting to feel that there’s pressure being applied in the business world in that way, other than it is the right thing to do, of course. Diversity, inclusion is, but there is such a tangible market scenario going on that really impacts the bottom line and that tends to really convince people that need convicting on this topic.

Kevin: Let me ask you this, in your business, how do you use measurements or metrics to find out the success or failure of your business? I know you’ve gone into very large Fortune 500 companies. Is this something that you do month to month, every other month, week to week? What would be a typical program that you would suggest?

Jennifer: For sure, metrics are really important. The hard thing with diversity and inclusion, especially inclusion, is that it is a world of soft metrics. It’s a world that can kind of be measured best with qualitative feedback and information. My favorite saying is “culture eats strategy for breakfast” — it’s a Peter Drucker quote — and culture in that case means workplace culture. It’s this lightning in a bottle, it’s an intangible, it’s difficult to pin down, everyone has a different definition of it and so the way we capture the diversity side and the inclusion side is kind of different.

Diversity side is your metrics around representation in your workforce. It is literally looking by ethnicity, race, gender and sexual orientation, although that’s very difficult to measure as is disabilities, very difficult because those are often invisible aspects of diversity and yet they’re very important to be able to capture. Corporate America specifically has a really hard time getting people to disclose and self-identify in their HR systems, especially for sexual orientation and disabilities.

Anyway, so measuring diversity tends to be around workforce demographics mainly and historically. And that’s still important, but I think that demographics are a lagging indicator of what does the culture feel like for people who have been hired into this company and who are endeavoring to stay and build their careers and are deciding do I feel comfortable here. And that’s really on inclusion side and that can be measured through employee engagement surveys that ask very pointed questions about do you feel welcomed and heard in this environment, do you feel your input is considered and honored, do you feel you have access to decision makers, do you feel you have a voice.

You can ask all those questions and if you also ask demographic questions, you can actually cut the data and look at who is answering the same question very differently by diversity dimensions. And to me that’s where it gets really interesting. If you ask women if they feel they have equal opportunity for promotion and career opportunities and you ask men the same question, you are almost always going to see a difference in their answers. But you have leaders meantime who say, “Oh, everybody has equal opportunity here.” So you’ve got this understanding gap.

And it’s interesting, if you ask the men if the women have equal opportunity, the men will say in higher numbers, yes they do have equal opportunity. The women will answer that question differently. So there’s even a perception gap between the genders and there’s an assumption I think that I find mostly among men and also among white people, frankly, that we work in meritocracies and that hard work is rewarded. And that if we just operate under that principle that everything is going to just work out fine. That’s unfortunately not true.

Kevin: Typically, Jennifer, when you go into a company large or small, do you start with the leaders, the CEOs, do you start with the employees or do you start with the HR department? How is that strategy in your company spelled out?

Jennifer: If it’s a larger company, there often is an office of diversity or maybe there’s one brave soul who has that newly added to their title, bless them. They got the blessing to go forward and kind of lead the effort but they need to corral various senior level leaders and also sort of bottoms-up employee voices and they also typically will found a diversity council of some kind. Which means a diversity council is best with more senior people on it who are passionate about driving the process for an organization.

Sometimes in a smaller company that diversity council may be the CEO and the executive team. Sometimes CEOs and executive teams are better kept in kind of an advisory role but not necessarily rolling up their sleeves and doing the work like a diversity council really should be.

In smaller companies or even companies of all size, actually, you have to think about the bottoms-up and the tops-down imperative of the conversation. The bottoms-up is really the voice of the employee and the mobilization and engagement of the bottom half of the organization say in the conversation.

So how we achieve that dialogue is we do focus groups, we might do interviews, we might do a survey and we’ll ask them those questions that we talked about earlier. And at the top of the house, simultaneously, you’re trying to figure out is the CEO onboard, are the executives onboard or not. Is there a lot of resistance to this idea? How might we educate about why this is good for business?

And that’s where your business case is really helpful because you have to speak that language sometimes with executives who just aren’t very familiar with this topic or assume, again, like I said earlier, they’re going to, I don’t know, resist because they have a bad associate with it or stereotypes about the topic. They might think it’s affirmative action, they might think they’re going to be forced to abide by quarters.

There’s a lot of assumptions about this conversation out there when really the bottom line about it is actually that we need diversity in our workforces and we need to lead that diversity in an inclusive manner in order to get the best contribution from people and I don’t know a leader alive that doesn’t want that.

Kevin: Jennifer, if our listeners wanted to get in touch with you, what would be the best way for them to reach out to you and your company?

Jennifer: Yes, I would love to hear from everyone. We’re Twitter, really active on Twitter @jenniferbrown. I’m also on LinkedIn, Jennifer Brown Consulting, which is the name of my company. And we have a new book that you mentioned I think earlier it’s called Inclusion: Diversity, the New Workplace & the Will to Change. If you want to pick up a copy, we’re requesting that people go and buy it on November 22nd, which is the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, because we’d like to get a diversity and inclusion book into the bestseller category. So we’re really pushing everyone towards purchasing on November 22nd.

And then if you have some consulting needs and you need some guidance for your organization, send us an email at info@jenniferbrownconsulting.com and we’d love to hear from you. If you’re interested in me as a keynoter, we actually have set up a personal brand page for me with some videos on it and a speaker kit and that site is www.jenniferbrownspeaks.com. Sorry that was a lot of places to go.

Kevin: I can’t tell you how insightful the interview was. I found it engaging and as always, I always learn much more each time I do one of these interviews. I wish you the very best with your book, Inclusion. And for our listeners, November 22nd is the date to get that book in as a bestseller. Jennifer, thank you so much for taking the time today and congratulations on your outstanding career and keep up the good work.

Jennifer: Wow, thank you so much. Thanks for this opportunity.

Kevin: You’re quite welcome. You’ve been listening to Ascent Dental Solutions where its focus is on knowledge, information, education and training. I want to thank our guest today, Jennifer Brown, and her outstanding information and let’s all try to do a little better. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to talking to you very soon. Thank you.