You love your spouse or partner. But is working with them a good idea? In this episode of Clinical Edge Fridays, Kirk Behrendt brings back Dr. Charlie Ward, visiting faculty member at The Pankey Institute, along with his wife and fellow dentist, Dr. Melody Ward, to share the benefits and challenges of working together and their secrets for making it work. To learn how they’ve done it for over a decade, listen to Episode 915 of The Best Practices Show!
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Main Takeaways:
Quotes:
“We get that question a lot, actually, from other parents at our kids’ school, or neighbors, like, ‘How do you guys work together?’ It works really well. Charlie will analyze and tell you what makes it work well. But I think it works really well because, one, we don't see each other all the time. We're each in our own operatories. We're each doing our own cases and seeing our own patients. So, I hear him a few doors down, talking to his patients, but we're not interacting all day. We see each other maybe passing through the hallway. Like, he's doing a hygiene check, and I'm going to my post-op or whatever it is. We'll see each other in our office, writing notes, or maybe during lunch. It's not all the time we're interacting, so there's that. And I think it works because we do different things. He's restorative and I'm perio, so we have different roles in the practice. I think that helps as well.” (5:24—6:23) -Dr. Melody Ward
“Probably because I love my wife, I love working with Melody. So, I wouldn't want to do it a different way. I trust her more than any specialist, obviously, because I trust her with our children. But she treats patients the way that I would want to be treated and the way that I want my patients to be treated. I think that the best part about having her in the office is that when we have those cases that overlap that need an immediate implant — because I don't do the surgical part of it at all — we can plan those cases together and we can execute them together. We always have four hands and four eyes on the patient, and patients really like that. They're like, ‘Oh my gosh, do I have to pay extra to have both of you here at the same time?’ They like to feel well taken care of, and we have two doctors in the room assessing a situation. They feel special and they actually articulate that. So, to be able to work that closely with my specialist that I work with a lot, to me, that's a benefit. Then, to do it with someone who I trust more than anyone else is not just a benefit for me, it's a benefit for the patient that that planning gets done.” (6:31—7:48) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“It's hard not to take [work] home. We don't want to take it home. We have to be very intentional about not taking it home. Home is for our family, not for teeth.” (8:15—8:27) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“We do talk about work at work. We try to talk about it as much as we can while we're here. Not to say that we don't ever talk about work when we're home or not in the office. That does happen, of course. But one of us usually is the one to say, ‘Okay, we're done. Let's stop here,’ or, ‘I'm tired of talking about work,’ or whatever it is. It doesn't take over our lives because there's so much more going on at home that isn't dentistry related. We’ve got the kids, we’ve got sports, there are after-school things, we each have our own hobbies, or whatever it is that we do. So, there does come a time when one of us will be like, ‘Let's be done.’ We are intentional about it when we do talk about it at home so that we're not getting too deep. Sometimes, when the kids go to bed, we'll talk about a treatment plan real quick, or if something came up at work and we need to talk about this case, or a patient calls, or whatever that may be. Sometimes, that happens. But we try to put a limit.” (8:56—9:59) -Dr. Melody Ward
“We have to be intentional about not bringing [work] home every day because it would very easily spill over . . . I mean, it always spills over. If there's stress at work, that spills over at home. So, I don't want to actively bring home the things that I can leave at the office. Again, we're fortunate that we're together. So, if it's like, ‘Hey, I need 15 minutes so I can finish off this treatment plan because I have to present this tomorrow,’ we can do that after dinner. That's a luxury that we have. But I don't want to be doing treatment plans every night after dinner. That's not fair to my kids. It's not fair to us. That's not how I want to live my life. So, there's an intentionality into how we have to deal with it to say, ‘Work happens at work. Home happens at home.’ Every once in a while, one of those things bleeds over because sometimes my kids have to come to the office too because one of them is sick. So, there's always a little bleed-over. But there has to be intentionality to keep it separate. Otherwise, I think we’d drive ourselves crazy.” (10:02—11:10) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“We have been intentional since we've had children, for sure, that we take a vacation as a family, the four of us. But we also, the two of us, Melody and I, take a vacation together. That may be four days, that may be a week. One time, we went to Thailand. That was amazing, and that was like ten days. We don't normally do that, but for us to get away ourselves without the kids is important because otherwise the relationship becomes just about the kids, and that's not fair to us as a couple. And like you said, I need to come back recharged. I go to CE, and I get recharged for my practice. I go on vacation with my family, and I come home recharged as a group. When I go with my wife, I feel better about our relationship. So, we’ve been very intentional about doing that, and I think that that's been very successful for us.” (16:23—17:20) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“We did have to institute a rule two or three years ago where I'm not allowed to accept an invitation to speak somewhere without discussing that as a family. Because I love doing it so much, I'm like, ‘Yeah, that sounds great. I'll do that. Yeah, that sounds great. I'll do that.’ Suddenly, I look at my calendar, and I'm gone three weekends in a row. I don't like being away that much. I love it when I'm there, but I don't love the travel. I don't want to be away from the boys, or Melody, for that matter. So, it had become difficult from a scheduling standpoint. Melody was like, ‘I've got two kids. One is playing soccer here. One is playing soccer here. If you're not here, and my parents are away, and we don't have someone to help, it can be difficult to manage.’ She was right. She told me five years ago, ‘Hey, I love that you love to do this. This is awesome. You're good at this. I want to support you in doing it,’ and I started saying yes because I was like, ‘Well, she said I can do it. This is great. She wants me to do more of this.’ Then, finally, she was like, ‘Um, we need to renegotiate.’ We renegotiated the contract, which was the right thing to do, because I was feeling overwhelmed, and I know she was feeling overwhelmed.” (18:56—20:16) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“I think we communicate better than most people. There's never any grudge-holding. We don't go to bed angry. If there's an issue, I want to know. I think we both give each other that permission that, ‘Hey, I'm struggling here because you're away every weekend.’ I have to be able to be like, ‘She's struggling because I'm away every weekend. We've got to do something different because I don't want that.’ If we're going to be successful as a couple and as parents, then we have to make a change and we have to listen. So, that's really how that worked.” (20:24—21:01) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“The difficult thing about it when we're thinking about taking CE is that Melody reminds me that, ‘CE is not a vacation. When you go to lecture, that's not a vacation.’ I'm like, ‘Well, we can tie that to it. That's a different strategy.’ But just because I'm away doesn't mean I'm not working. And it feels like work. When I go to speak, or she's teaching a course, that's different than sitting in a class. But neither one of those things is a release. There's no relaxation in those cases. We're engaged in a process. So, we have to be intentional about the time we have off because we're all working really, really hard when we're in the office.” (21:47—22:29) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“You’ve got to have a conversation about what the expectation is around how much you're going to be away . . . I wouldn't consider myself a CE junkie. I love to learn. I read a lot. Like, I want to be out there doing those things . . . But I go and speak, and I'm like, ‘Oh, it's going to be great. I'm going to fly in the night before, and then I'm going to stay, and then I'm going to hang out a couple of hours.’ The second I'm done, I'm like, ‘Can I get home any earlier? I want to go home.’ So, what's the expectation when we’re away from our families? What's the expectation when we’re at work? Having those conversations, especially when you work with your spouse, before there's a problem.” (23:48—24:30) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“Philosophically, how do we manage as a team? That took time to have that conversation. It was difficult at the beginning because we didn't know each other that well. What are our tendencies? What are our personality differences? That's a little bit challenging at the beginning unless you put in the work to figure that out. It's probably why partnerships aren't always successful. Ours has been because, philosophically, we want the same things for our patients, our team, our practice, and we know how each other function under stress.” (26:05—26:44) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“Learning about each other’s personalities, I think working together, has helped us in our relationship and our marriage as well because we understand different facets of each other, see each other under stress or difficult situations, or having to make certain decisions. One of the things that we've done as a team in our office is learning about different personality types. We did the Enneagram a few years ago with our team so that we can understand each other as a team better — and that helped us as a couple. There are certain things that Charlie would do that, to me, before I understood him as an Enneagram person, would annoy me. I was like, ‘Why do you have to be this way?’ But once we did that, I was like, ‘Oh. Now, I know why you do what you do.’ And he understands me better, I think, too. So, I think that's helped us not just at work. What we try to do at work to help our communication as a team helped us at home as well.” (26:46—27:46) -Dr. Melody Ward
“We touched on this earlier, knowing yourself and making an effort to know the other person on a deeper level and asking for permission — just because something was okay at one point, like, it's okay to have conversations, revise, and revisit things because things change. We evolve, our situations evolve, kids come into the picture, or school schedules change, or whatever it is. So, being flexible and rechecking in, I think, is great.” (37:22—37:54) -Dr. Melody Ward
“What people don't always get right is like, ‘Well, this is the way we've always done it. Let's keep doing it this way.’ Sometimes, that doesn't always work. So, being flexible and adapting to the situation, I think, is helpful.” (37:58—38:10) -Dr. Melody Ward
“What are your goals for working together? Why do you want to do it? Is it out of convenience, or is it because you think that you can provide a better service being together? I would think about why. Why do we do it? We're able to provide a service that not a lot of people can provide because we're a multi-specialty group. So, we get referrals from the orthodontist and other specialists to treat cases because we’re able to do it together. So, I would think about that. And it doesn't have to be in the dentist-dentist type of role. If my wife was a hygienist, or my wife was working admin, or something like that, how is that going to positively affect the practice and our relationship?” (38:18—39:02) -Dr. Charlie Ward
“I totally agree with Melody. The more you can know someone on a deeper level and know yourself and your tendencies, whether it’s your spouse or not, is only going to increase that relationship. So, I think the pitfalls in any of it is not preparing, not having those conversations on the front end to say, ‘Hey, this sounds great. We may be able to go to work together, come home together, and do those things. But is that going to be a positive thing for our relationship?’ Because I don't want to end up in a situation where the relationship is worse off because we have to be under constant stress together. That can be difficult for people.” (39:28—40:11) -Dr. Charlie Ward
Snippets:
0:00 Introduction.
2:13 Dr. Charlie Ward’s background.
3:46 Dr. Melody Ward’s background.
5:04 How they make it work.
8:28 Rules for not bringing work home.
11:11 How the idea of working together came about.
15:12 Be intentional about time away.
18:22 Their philosophy on CE.
24:31 Handling team questions and conflict.
28:09 Know yourself, your spouse, and your team.
32:00 Adventuring through food.
36:50 Final thoughts.
Dr. Charlie Ward Bio:
After graduating from the University of Maryland with a Bachelor of Science degree in 2004, Dr. Charlie Ward went straight into the University of Maryland School of Dentistry. He earned his DDS degree in 2008, and since then he has completed the Essentials courses and many others at the esteemed Pankey Institute, where he now serves as visiting faculty. He is currently a member of the Maryland State Dental Association and the Academy of General Dentistry.
When Dr. Ward isn’t spending time with Dr. Melody Ward and their two young boys, Cyrus and Lucas, he can often be found golfing or fishing. He also enjoys playing the guitar. While in dental school, he was actually in an all-dentist band called Incisal Edge! He even has his own guitar collection and has turned his basement into a music room.
Dr. Melody Ward Bio:
Dr. Melody Ward’s college career started at the University of California San Diego, where she graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree. She went on to earn her dental degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and continued at the same institution to obtain a Master of Science and Certificate in Periodontics.
Since then, she has fervently pursued continuing education. She currently runs a Spear Study Club and is taking a continuum of courses at the Pankey Institute. She is also part of a dental implant study club and has received training focused on treating infants with lip and tongue-ties.
Away from work, Dr. Ward enjoys primarily spending time with her family, Dr. Charlie Ward and their two young boys. They all try to spend plenty of time outdoors together, particularly bike riding. She has recently gotten into baking and has also planted a vegetable garden. She likes to incorporate the harvests into family meals whenever she can.