Let’s make a deal? Let’s agree to make 2021 the year of leadership development in your dental practice. My part of this deal is to write a blog each month discussing one thing you and your leaders can do to improve your leadership skills. Your part is to read the monthly blogs and implement the skills in your practice for at least one year before deciding it does or doesn’t work. Wait… are you hedging? Are you wondering why you should spend your precious time on leadership skills? Before you turn down the deal right now, read the rest of this blog. Then we’ll revisit it.

“IT’S JUST NOT FAIR!” How often do we hear this phrase from toddlers and elders, alike? In fact, studies suggest humans are born with an innate sense of justice and fairness! So, when something happens that challenges our primal sense of justice, there’s no telling the consequences. We see such consequences play out every day in areas such as healthcare, income, human rights, and even your dental practice.

You can spot disengaged dental employees a mile away. Research giant Gallup has found that globally, 85% of employees are disengaged in the workplace, and they under perform as a result. The dental industry is not immune! Your practice is not immune!

Scheduling is one of the most important elements of your practice. It is intimately tied to your profits, stress level, and patient satisfaction, yet I see practice after practice allowing their schedule to reduce their income, create work chaos, and drive patients away.

Having organized and participated in Annual Dental Practice Retreats for over 25 years, I have seen first-hand the many benefits of team retreats. But that is just my perspective, what’s really important is: what does the hard-core evidence say?

Dental team accountability is a topic I frequently address with dentists. In a business like dentistry where the boss must spend 95% of his or her working time in the mouth of another person in order to be successful, accountability becomes even more elusive.

There is a serious conundrum in every dentist’s work life: 99% of your training was clinical dentistry when in reality you spend more than 50% of your time focused on interacting with employees and patients. How do you hear those affirmations from your employees?

First coined by the philosopher Aristotle, the phrase “a whole is greater than a sum of its parts” still has a lot of relevance in this day in age. This is the basis behind the idea of teamwork. If the full dental team isn’t working in synergy your practice isn’t going to be as effective, efficient or run as smoothly as it could, or should, be.