5 Leadership Tips for the Dental Practice Manager
Being an office manager is not an easy task. It’s a big responsibility requiring the ability to wear many different hats.
The title “office manager” can be misleading and give the perception that we are only leading the front office. I prefer to refer to this role as the Practice Manager. We don’t just manage the front office but the entire practice.
As Practice Managers, we are responsible for the whole office’s operations, ensuring things run smoothly from the patients to the team and, in many cases, even making decisions that can affect the practice’s financial health.
To be an effective practice manager, you must go beyond the basics of the everyday and mundane. You must continue to learn, find ways to improve the practice, increase productivity, and make things more efficient.
Your leadership is the most crucial part of being effective in all of this. It’s not enough to lead, but how you lead that matters.
How to Be a Great Leader
In my 27-year tenure in the dental field, I have seen leadership styles that range from admirable to atrocious. That old saying, “People don’t leave bad jobs; they leave bad managers,” is true.
So, how do we avoid the atrocious and excel at the admirable?
Strong leaders make hard decisions, create and implement a vision and change, and inspire their team to work hard and have fun. You don’t have to be a hard-nosed, uncompromising person to be an effective leader, and believe it or not, you don’t always have to be right.
Here are five tips for being a strong and effective leader of your team:
- Lead with humility
- Practice empathy
- Admit if you made a mistake or were wrong
- Have a sense of humor
- Lead by example
1. Leading with Humility
Lead with humility and empathy. You can be a strong leader with humility and empathy without being a pushover. Merriam-Webster says humility is freedom from pride or arrogance: the quality or state of humility. Humility is the absence of feelings of being better than others.
2. Practicing Empathy
Your team lives outside the office walls. We all have something going on that has nothing to do with our jobs. When a team member is missing work, maybe not as productive or attentive to detail as you would normally see out of them, are you assuming they don’t care, or are you being empathetic and acknowledging that they may have something going on outside of work that they have their mind on?
Ask them, see if it is work-related or home-related, and see if there is anything you can do to help. Maybe offering them an adjusted schedule for a short period or just a listening ear may be all they need.
3. Admitting Your Mistakes
Admit if you have made a mistake or aren’t knowledgeable on a particular subject. This also goes back to the humble part of leading a team. It is okay not to know everything and to make mistakes. We are only human.
However, a good leader can admit it if they don’t know something. A good leader can admit if they have made a mistake and not blame it on something or someone.
Just own it and fix it. You would want your team to do the same if they were the ones who made the mistake.
I love that my team thinks I have all the answers. They call me the problem solver. I always remind them that I may not have the answer, but I will do my best to get it for them. They know that about me and trust I will come through for them.
I am not above admitting that I don’t know something, that I have made a mistake, and that sometimes someone else’s idea is better than mine. I want to learn from those around me continually. I am not the most intelligent person in the room, but I am smart enough to surround myself with other intelligent people.
A good leader will be open to taking advice and ideas from others. If someone on your team comes up with an idea, figure out if and how it can be implemented.
4. Having a Sense of Humor
Have a sense of humor. Even the most organized and efficient practice will have days where something goes wrong. The lead assistant calls in, the compressor goes out, the computers are updated overnight, and a setting that your PMS doesn’t like changed, and now you can’t get into the schedule.
Sometimes you have to laugh.
You can’t panic and crumble. You have to keep it together and correct it, but you also need to find a way to laugh about it to brighten the cloud looming overhead.
5. Leading by Example
And last but certainly not least, lead by example. Take ownership of your practice and the successes and failures it endures. Don’t expect more from your team than you are willing to give yourself.
If I have asked someone to clean the toilet, you better believe they have seen me clean it at some point, too. If I ask them to come in early or stay late, they have seen me do that as well.
Be on time and follow your rules and those set by the doctor/owner. Keep empathy, humility, and cooperation at the forefront. A practice manager who leads and supports their team contributes to their personal and professional growth and the practice’s success.
About the Author
Debbie Meadows, CDA, MAADOM
Debbie has been in the dental field since 1997 and is a Practice Manager and Director of Operations at a busy practice in Kentucky. She is a certified dental assistant with additional radiography and coronal polishing certifications, which she received from the University of Kentucky.
Debbie graduated from Western Kentucky University with a degree in Business and is a Lifetime member and Master of the American Association of Dental Office Managers. She co-founded the Kentucky DPLN Study Club of Dental Office Managers.
