Great Lakes Dental Technologies has been a fixture in the orthodontic and dental lab industry for decades, since long before I joined as President & CEO in 2022. And, I’d venture to say, it has been Evergreen® since its founding in 1967. Our co-founders’ commitment to our industry and their staff led them to sell the company to the employees, creating a 100% Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in 1990. Great Lakes is an industry leader, and a wonderful community in itself; for all these reasons, when the opportunity to join the team was presented to me, I jumped at the chance. It matched my desire to transition away from companies that were building to sell. Some of them were great companies, but something was missing for me without the long-term, Evergreen mindset. However, just because a company is already Evergreen doesn’t mean it’s perfect, or right where it needs to be.

Great Lakes has a simple vision statement: “Delight our customers. Respect and help our co-workers.” I love the simplicity of that, and I never want to change it. It’s so straightforward and effective. The great company culture and long-term decision-making created strong employee loyalty, with some employees staying over 46 years. However, despite being deeply grounded in strong values, the company has seen the development of some poor habits over time. While longevity and culture are strengths, they can also lead to complacency if not paired with ongoing discipline and intentional efforts to continually align values with specific, teachable behaviors.

Coming in as an outside CEO, one advantage I brought with me was the ability to see things with fresh eyes. I could see things that the long tenured team could not. I saw this as an opportunity – find a way to get back to best practices and increase the power and impact of the values and vision that were already ingrained in the company and the people. But I wanted to be careful to do it in a way that didn’t alienate or disempower the amazing team that had been at the company for so long.

To tackle this work, I enlisted the help of an organization called CultureWise. They provided a helpful framework and process for achieving our goal: match our great values with specific behaviors that will allow us to easily and clearly take the values off the walls and put them into action. CultureWise taught us that ritualizing and ingraining a finite number of behaviors in your team is what really reinforces the transfer of the value to a behavior. That made a lot of sense to me, because the values were already in place.

We started by creating a group to work on this that consisted of team members from a variety of departments, in a variety of roles, and with a variety of tenures at Great Lakes. The first exercise we walked through was to have everyone reflect and share the ‘Great, Great Lakers’ who most exemplified the best of our company and its values. Once we had the brainstormed list on the whiteboard, we started talking through why each person had nominated their choices. It got powerfully emotional, actually, with one long-time employee talking about a new HR Director and how profoundly she had changed his life in the laboratory. It was extremely meaningful, and it was completely sincere.

Our next task was to connect these great stories to qualities and values. This took some work, and in the first few versions, some sounded too journalistic, while others sounded too “gotcha.” For each value, we then connected them to a behavior; what would it look like to act on that value? We ultimately identified 27 fundamental behaviors that encapsulated the company’s values. It was so great because at the end of the exercise, I looked at the list and realized that these were the values that had existed since 1967. All we had done was document them.

27 behaviors may seem like a lot, but we wanted to get granular and to be extremely clear in articulating what it looked like, for example, to “embrace all perspectives” or “invest in yourself.” We didn’t want to run the risk of any of it being too abstract and therefore ineffective.

The list is not ranked, but at the heart of the 27 fundamentals are three core behaviors that are essential to Great Lakes’ success: Think and Act Like an Owner, Never Compromise on Quality, and Do What’s Best for the Customer.

Think and Act Like an Owner: This behavior is about instilling a sense of ownership in every employee. We are an ESOP company, we own our building, and we own our land. We have no debt. When we recruit somebody, we make it clear that this is our place. If there’s a snowstorm, we come dig out. This is ours.

This sense of ownership extends beyond physical property to include our reputation and relationships with customers. Employees are encouraged to take initiative and make decisions with an owner’s mentality, reinforcing a culture of accountability and pride.

Never Compromise on Quality: As a medical device company, Great Lakes serves a highly demanding clientele—doctors who expect nothing less than perfection. We like to say that we treat the customer like we would our own child in the chair. This commitment to quality is non-negotiable, and employee-owners understand that their work directly impacts the well-being of patients.

Do What’s Best for the Customer: This behavior encapsulates the company’s customer-first mentality. We refer people to our competitor if they’re better at something than us because we expect to work with these doctors 25 years from now. Our long-term perspective ensures that employees always prioritize the customer’s needs, even if it means foregoing short-term gains.

27 behaviors are far too many to memorize, so you may be wondering how a list of this length can be effective. To ensure that these behaviors are not just words on a wall, we have ritualized them into the daily routines of its employees. After we implemented our fundamental values, for 27 weeks, I wrote a piece every Monday morning, each focused on one of them and shared it with the full team. These pieces were often deeply personal, and each aimed at illustrating the importance of each behavior. Once I had made my way through all 27, the leadership team took over, and now one of them highlights one fundamental behavior each week.

The fundamentals are also incorporated into meetings and performance reviews. I don’t start every meeting with a behavior, but I often do. I also start every board meeting with a story illustrating a behavior. When we have monthly all-company meetings, I get a volunteer to talk about that week’s fundamental behavior.

These rituals serve as constant reminders of what Great Lakes stands for and how employees are expected to behave. They also provide a common language for employees to give and receive feedback, making it easier to address issues and celebrate successes.

One of the most powerful outcomes of this approach has been the empowerment of employees, especially those in leadership positions. We recently promoted seven technicians to supervisory roles. They are now managing their former peers, which can be a challenging transition. However, the fundamentals provided a language and a framework for giving constructive feedback and coaching. They can say, for example, “Hey, how are you being relentless on improvement? Maybe you can be a little more exacting.” This approach has also helped create a more open and honest culture, where employees feel comfortable discussing difficult topics. “Speak courageously” has moved us forward on this front a great deal.

I’m happy to report that this initiative has moved the needle and has brought the values, which were already excellent, back to life in the day to day of each employee-owner at Great Lakes. The sense of ownership is at the heart of what makes this all so effective and powerful. It extends to every aspect of the business, from the quality of the products to the relationships with customers. It’s a model that has stood the test of time and, especially now that we have moved through this exercise, will continue to drive Great Lakes’ success long into the future.