10 Dental Leadership Principles for Practices

Owning or managing a dental practice requires much more than simply providing good patient care. You also need to be a good leader and effectively oversee a team of dental professionals working toward a common goal.

Dental leadership is the ability to inspire and manage a team to deliver excellent patient care, maintain a positive work environment, and drive practice growth. The modern dental industry faces immense challenges surrounding patient expectations, regulatory demands, and technology advancements, but effective leadership can help your practice navigate these complexities.

Understanding a few core leadership principles is key to creating a thriving environment for your patients and staff. With Weave’s communication platform and dental software, you can streamline practice operations and devote more time to building your leadership skills.

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The 10 leadership principles practice owners and managers should live by

To be an effective dental leader, prioritize these ten dental leadership principles throughout your practice management.

Principle 1: Align your leadership with a vision and a mission

Defining your core values and vision as a leader can shape every other aspect of your dental leadership. Begin by setting clear mission statements or goals that can help you deliver a consistent message to patients and unify your team toward a common objective.

Your mission might include goals like:

• Meeting the highest dental standards
• Continually improving your processes
• Delivering the best patient care
• Always acting with professionalism
• Providing affordable and accessible services

It may take time to develop a concrete vision that your entire practice can look to as a guiding compass. Once you have this vision in place, communicate it regularly during team meetings to ensure that it is reflected in all of your processes.

Read more: Practical Dental Office Goals Examples

Principle 2: Empower your team

As a manager, your job is to lead your dental office team. That being said, you cannot be responsible for every decision they make, and you are not there to oversee every action within your practice.

Empowering your dental staff to make decisions within their roles can foster a culture of accountability and build confidence. This involves giving them the tools to complete their roles without your constant oversight and allowing them to take responsibility for the decisions they make and the ways they approach patient care.

If you have built a team of skilled dental professionals, you can trust your team to take ownership of their tasks and provide input on practice decisions.

Read more: 5 Secrets to Building a High-Performing Team

Principle 3: Build trust with patients and staff

You are the leader of your dental team, but you are also the leader of your practice and the person patients look to as the authority on their dental care. Fostering trust with both your patient base and your staff is important to maintaining positive relationships with them.

Showing integrity, consistency, and transparency in your leadership style can help you build trust with your staff and patients. But trust also works the opposite way; you can trust your team members to take responsibility for their tasks, building a mutual relationship of accountability.

Be open with your team and patients, follow through on your commitments, and create an atmosphere where anyone can share concerns with you and know they will be addressed. All of these steps can help you build trust as an effective leader.

Read more: Client Relationships: The Most Vital Part of a Successful Business

Principle 4: Manage your emotions

Effective dental leadership requires you to manage your emotions in high-stress situations. Remaining calm and composed despite stressors helps staff feel supported and instills confidence in patients about their care.

If you tend to let emotions get the better of you, consider practicing self-awareness techniques like deep breathing or mindfulness to help ground yourself in stressful situations and focus on the matter at hand. You can also practice taking a moment to compose yourself before responding to difficult situations.

Read more: Building a Comprehensive Stress Management Plan

Principle 5: Prioritize top-quality work

As a leader in dentistry, setting high standards for patient care and clinical excellence is one of your responsibilities. You must stay on top of the latest developments in the dental industry and ensure that your team receives the latest education to continually deliver the best patient care.

Investing in regular training, prioritizing attention to detail throughout patient care, and maintaining state-of-the-art equipment can all set your dental practice apart. These should be top of mind in your leadership role.

Read more: How Patient Engagement in Healthcare Improves Care

Principle 6: Encourage collaboration and communication

Effective communication is integral to your practice’s success, and as a dental leader, you have the power to encourage communication and collaboration among your team. Your practice is a team effort, and collaboration between staff members promotes smoother operations and better patient outcomes.

One way to build communication skills in your practice is through daily huddles, where you discuss concerns, goals, challenges, and updates as a team. You can also implement collaborative tools that streamline communication across different areas of your practice.

Read more: Why Operational Communication is Vital for Efficiency

Principle 7: Create opportunities for ongoing training

Continuing education helps your staff deliver the best patient care and gives them opportunities to grow their professional skills and career aptitude. Offering training opportunities for both clinical and administrative staff, along with paid time off to take advantage of these opportunities, can help your healthcare professionals grow in their practices and build confidence in their patient care.

You could also develop your own structured training plan that includes regular courses, hands-on learning, and skill-sharing sessions among your team. Taking responsibility for your team’s dental education is an important element of dental leadership.

Read more: Dental Team Training: Building a Stronger, Unified Staff

Principle 8: Be a life-long learner

Along with overseeing your team’s training, you’ll want to foster an attitude of being a lifelong learner as a dental leader. Whether you’re learning about new dental technologies, patient care techniques, or leadership strategies, continual growth helps you adapt your practice to industry changes and demonstrate the importance of learning to your team.

Show your commitment to lifelong learning by reading industry publications, attending dental conferences, and encouraging your team to prioritize education as well.

Read more: Free Continuing Education for Dentists (The 10 Most Popular in 2021)

Principle 9: Lead by example

You can tell your dental team anything you want to about how they should approach patient care or collaboration with colleagues. But leading by example is an even more effective way to instill best practices in your dental staff.

The same goes for the types of values you want your team to prioritize. Demonstrating professional behavior, respect, compassion, and growth can create a culture within your practice that embodies these same values.

Read more: Webinar: How to Build and Lead a Strong Team

Principle 10: Embrace data-driven decision making

It can be exhausting to be responsible for all the major decisions within your dental practice. Basing your decisions on data can help you make informed choices that reliably improve your practice’s efficiency and patient satisfaction rates.

You can use data analytics tools to analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) like patient flow, cancellations, and treatment acceptance rates, then make adjustments to your workflow and processes based on this data.

Read more: Dental Practice Analytics: How to Get Actionable Insights

From principle to practice: Implementing these leadership skills

Understanding the dental leadership principles that should guide your practice is only half the battle. You also need to put these principles into practice. This can feel overwhelming if you are already burdened by busy schedules or staffing shortages, but it is an important step in helping your practice thrive and setting it up for long-term sustainability.

With these five steps, you can implement the leadership competencies that will best support your practice.

Step 1: Assess your current leadership practices

Start by evaluating your current approach to leadership in dentistry. This can help you identify any weak areas and shape your new approach around those areas of concern.

You can ask your team to provide feedback about your leadership style to identify areas of improvement. This may involve sending out surveys to everyone on your staff and conducting one-on-one check-ins where team members can voice their concerns openly. These check-ins are a great opportunity to discuss your practice culture and gain ideas for what you can do differently.

You can also review your practice’s performance metrics to look for potential areas of concern, such as patient retention or no-shows. Adapting your leadership style may help you inadvertently address these problems as well.

Step 2: Set clear, measurable goals

Next, you can set clear, measurable goals based on the feedback and performance metrics from step one. Your leadership goals should be realistic so that you have the opportunity to actually attain them. They should also be measurable so that you can properly evaluate your achievement of them.

You might set goals like:

• Scheduling at least one one-on-one session with a staff member each week
• Attending at least two conferences each year.
• Reviewing your mission and value statement at least once quarterly and assessing how your team has furthered your mission that quarter.

You can also break these goals into smaller, actionable tasks to avoid feeling overwhelmed. For example, to attend two conferences each year, you might set smaller goals like:

1. Researching conferences in the dental profession
2. Registering for two conferences
3. Blocking off your calendar for those dates
4. Making travel arrangements
5. Booking accommodations

You should also get into the habit of regularly tracking your progress toward broader goals. This can help you stay motivated to continue reaching toward your leadership objectives.

Step 3: Incorporate technology to support leadership practices

Integrating technology into your leadership approach can help you save time and improve your efforts. The right tools can enhance communication with staff and patients, streamline scheduling, automate reminders, and track data to help you make informed decisions.

Consider a patient engagement platform like Weave. Weave can help you automate scheduling, patient reminders, and communication, allowing you to focus more time and energy on growing your leadership skills.

Step 4: Foster a culture of continuous improvement

Your dental practice should maintain a growth mindset that aims to continually improve your processes and patient care. Fostering a culture of continuous improvement can encourage everyone on your dental team to work together to improve your practice.

This culture starts with inspiring team members to continually better their professional processes, own up to mistakes, and view them as opportunities for growth and change. You can further this culture by providing formal training to help your dental team grow in their skills or even setting up informal peer-to-peer learning to allow staff to learn from each other.

Celebrating small wins and recognizing the efforts from individual team members can also help you promote a positive, growth-focused environment in your practice.

Step 5: Review, refine, and celebrate successes

Implementing the leadership principles above is not a one-and-done process. It requires ongoing adjustments and evaluations to ensure that you are continually maintaining that growth mindset and meeting your personal and professional goals.

Get into the habit of celebrating milestones together with your team to keep yourself and your staff motivated and reinforce your practice’s mission and vision. Share success stories with your team and highlight how these principles have positively affected your practice’s growth.

Transform your dental practice with Weave

Adopting these dental leadership principles can help improve your practice efficiency and profitability, but it also keeps your team motivated, aligned, and operating at the highest level.

You can take the first step by identifying one of these principles to implement in your practice today and considering how you can adapt your processes to prioritize that leadership quality. Let Weave help you streamline patient engagement and staff communication so that you can spend more time on leadership growth.

Weave is an essential partner for dentists and dental practice managers. Request a demo today to learn how Weave can transform your practice.