A dental practice’s long-term success is driven by the quality of its team and the leadership behind them; not simply by having great systems in place.

In many practices, the owner sets the ceiling for what the team is capable of achieving. When the team isn’t performing at its potential, the solution often starts with the owner taking an honest look at their own leadership and being willing to change their behavior.

Two key tools can help raise that ceiling:

Everything DiSC helps team members understand their own behavioral styles and learn how to communicate more effectively with one another.

The Five Behaviors framework focuses on five building blocks of a high-performing team: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Each builds on the one before it to create stronger teamwork and better performance.

These concepts need to become part of the practice’s daily operations. We recommend:

• Daily: A short, focused team huddle to align priorities and address immediate needs.
• Weekly: A leadership meeting focused on communication, challenges, and accountability.
• Monthly: A 90-minute paid team meeting focused on one shared practice scorecard and the behaviors that drive results.
• Quarterly: A strategic reset to evaluate performance, identify opportunities, and establish priorities for the next quarter.
• Ongoing: Clear roles, clear expectations, and a culture where team members hold one another accountable, not just the owner or manager.

Start With 90 Days

The process doesn’t have to be complicated. Begin with a focused 90-day plan:

1. The owner completes the DiSC assessment and gains a better understanding of their leadership and communication style.
2. Identify one personal behavior to change and openly share that commitment with the team.
3. Rebuild the daily huddle so it becomes a meaningful communication and accountability tool.
4. Create an environment of trust and vulnerability where team members can have honest, productive conversations.
5. Establish one shared scoreboard so everyone can clearly see how the practice is performing and understand their role in the results.

When culture is turned into specific, teachable, and measurable behaviors, it becomes something a practice can intentionally improve.

The result is a stronger, more accountable team, less turnover, greater productivity, and a practice that can continue to perform well even when the owner steps away from the day-to-day operations.

Looking to try and implement these strategies in your own practice? Let's talk!

Visit: klasdentalcoaching.com -or- klashealthcarecoaching.com to learn more!

#DentalCoaching #HealthcareCoaching #PracticeTransitions #DentalEducation #KLASSolutions

You can have the best scheduling system, the best case acceptance, the best hygiene program in the world, and it will fall apart in a week if your team cannot run it.

Every single thing we have talked about this season is executed by people, which means the biggest lever in your practice is not a system.

It's a team that is running the systems and the leader standing in front of them.

And here's the uncomfortable part.

In most practices, the ceiling on the team is the owner.

So today I'm going to give you the two tools we use at class to raise that ceiling.

The first tells you why the people in your building behave the way they do, including the second tells you the five things that have to be true in order before a group of employees becomes a team.

So let's go.

This is the Dental Business podcast brought to you by Class Solutions.

One team, five divisions aligned around your practice.

And I'm Phil Cole.

I was going to have Ryan Hill, our director of coaching, but he had to be out for this week due to a big coaching project, so it's just going to be me.

And that's going to work for this topic.

Ryan is our certified facilitator of every disc and the five behaviors, and he runs those programs inside dental practices every week, as is the reason why he's not here.

What I'm going to give you today is what I've learned from the seat that you're sitting in, which is a seat of the person who signs the checks and cannot get the building to run without them.

Now, we save team for near the end of this season on purpose.

I can install a perfect system in your practice on Monday, and if the team doesn't own it, well, it's gone by Friday.

Systems do not run practices.

People run practices and people are led or they are not.

This episode is brought to you by Clas Coaching.

Every system runs on your team, and your team rises to your leadership.

A class coach works on both and everything.

Disc and the five behaviors is what we use as our tools for that.

Check us [email protected] so let me start with the line that stings the most.

Because it is true and because it is fixable, your team will not hold a standard higher than the one that you hold.

So if you are chronically late, if you tolerate a broken process, if you avoid the hard conversations, your team learns exactly what is actually required in your building.

And it is always less than what you ask for.

Culture is not what you say in a staff meeting.

It's what you Tolerate on an ordinary Tuesday when you're behind and you're tired.

Two ways this shows up well see if you recognize your practice.

The first is the exception that becomes the rule.

You have one team member who does not do the thing everyone else does.

You let it go because she has been there, let's say 11 years, because she is good with patience, because the conversation would be unpleasant and you already have a full day.

Every other person on that team is watching and they're all doing the same math.

The standard is not real.

It is negotiable if you last long enough or if the doctor likes you enough.

The second is the correction you make once and never again.

You have the conversation and it goes fine.

The behavior changes for nine days and then it drifts right back and you say nothing the second time because you already said it once.

Accountability is not an event if the follow up never comes.

What you taught the team is that your corrections have a nine day or nine and a half day lifespan.

None of that makes you a bad leader, but it does make you a clinician who was never trained to lead.

Which describes nearly every practice owner that we've worked with.

You went to dental school and you've heard me say this.

There's no course on this.

So the fix starts with you seeing yourself clearly.

That's the part that owners skip.

You can tell me your margins and your case acceptance.

What you probably cannot tell me is how your own behavior lands in the room.

You do not know what the you let out at 8:40 in the morning sets the tone for the next nine hours.

You can't lead a team past a blind spot that you don't know you even have.

This is why every class coaching engagement starts with everything disc.

Before we touch those systems, let me tell you what disc is and just as important what it is not Everything DISC is an assessment from Wally that maps behavioral preferences.

It's not an IQ test, it's A and it doesn't measure the skill or worth it.

It's not a label that you hang on somebody so they have an excuse.

And it is not a hiring screen.

You do not want a candidate through desk and hire the profile that you like.

That's a misuse of the tool.

And Wiley will tell and Ryan will tell you the same thing.

What it does is tell you how a person prefers to work, prefers to communicate and how they behave under pressure, which is most of the time in a dental practice.

So as we know there's four styles.

D is dominance, which is direct, fast, driven, by results, I is influenced, outgoing, enthusiastic, driven by people.

S is steadiness, patient, dependable, driven by support and stability.

And C is conscientiousness, precise, analytical, driven by accuracy.

It is a circle, not four boxes.

Most people sit between two styles.

And when two people on your team clash, nine times out of 10, it is not the character problem.

It is two different priorities colliding over the same decision.

And no, there is not a leader style.

Somebody always asks this.

I've seen exceptional practice owners from all four corners of that circle, and I've seen all four run a practice into the ground.

So what separates them is awareness.

So let me put each style in the owner's chair and you tell me which one sounds like your Tuesday.

Let's take the D owner.

Fast, decisive, allergic to slow, excellent in a crisis, because you'll make the call while everyone else is still gathering information.

The ceiling is that people stop bringing you problems.

The last three times somebody brought you one, they got interrupted or run over and they decided the cost was too high.

So you are making sharp decisions on incomplete data and you call your team disengaged.

When your team is just protecting itself under pressure, you get blunt and your team reads that as anger.

Even when you're not even angry.

The fix is mechanical.

Ask, then wait.

Count to seven before you fill the silence.

Because the S and the C styles in the room need those seconds and you have never given it to them.

And when somebody brings you a problem, the first words out of your mouth are thank you for telling me every time.

Now let's look at the eye owner.

Warm, funny, magnetic.

Patients love you, and the energy is the build in the building on a good day is genuinely great.

The ceiling is accountability.

The hard conversations cost you something emotionally that it does not cost the other three styles.

So the underperformer keeps their job for two extra years while your strongest people carry them and watch you decline to act on it.

The people who leave that practice are almost never the problem employees.

They are the good ones, because good people will not stay where performance does not matter.

Under pressure, you talk more and the talking replaces deciding.

The fix is to separate warmth from the standard.

The sentence to practice out loud is I care about you and this is not meeting the standard.

And both of those are true at once.

And write your decision down, because if you did not write it down after a good meeting, it did not happen.

So now let's look at the S owner.

Loyal, steady, patient.

You've had the same assistant for 15 years, and that is worth Something most practices cannot buy.

The ceiling is conflict avoidance and slow change.

Because fixing it means one on one uncomfortable conversation you have decided not to have.

Under pressure, you just go along and then you resent.

You absorb far more than you should for far longer than you should.

And then one day you make a sudden decision that shocks everybody.

The fix is to schedule the discomfort instead of waiting for the courage to show up.

Put the conversation on the calendar with a date and stop treating one person's temporary unhappiness as a failure of leadership.

It's the price.

Running practice and paying it early is always cheaper than paying it late.

The sea owner.

Precise, thorough, holding a standard nobody can argue with.

Your clinical quality is excellent and your systems, when you build them, are great.

The ceiling is that the standard lives in your head and nobody else can meet it.

So you take the work back and you do it yourself.

Then you wonder why the team will not step up.

Your team is not lazy.

Your team is afraid of being wrong in front of you.

And they have learned that if they they do not.

If they do it and it is not 90% right, you'll have it redo.

Have them redo it anyway.

So the rational move is just wait.

Under pressure, you withdraw and you get more critical about detail.

And the team fills that silence with the worst available story.

So the fix is to define what good enough looks like out loud and in advance and let people hit that mark without correction.

Delegate the outcome, not the method.

If it comes back at 90% and the missing 10% does not touch patient care or compliance, well, leave it alone.

That 10% is what team ownership costs and it is the cheapest thing you will buy all year.

Here's what happens when a doctor reads their own profile for the first time, it gets real quiet.

There's a section on how that style behaves under pressure.

And doctors read it.

They look up and ask, who told you that?

Nobody told us anything.

You filled out your assessment.

Then the real shift happens.

You stop seeing your team as the problem and you start your team as as a mirror.

The front desk person who goes silent in every meeting is not checked out.

She's an S style working for a D style doctor who has never once paused long enough for her to even be able to answer.

That is fixable.

Disengagement, the way owners usually describe it is not because it is not a diagnosis, it's a complaint.

Now flip it around to your team because you cannot run an assessment on somebody at 8 in the morning.

Then you need to talk to them.

Right now there's a fast read using two questions.

Question 1 Is this person fast paced or measured?

Do they make the call quickly and adjust later or do they want to think it through first?

Fast puts you in the D an I and an I I should say of half the circle measured put you in the S and the c hat.

Question 2 Do they lead with the task or the people when something goes wrong?

Is it is the first sentence out of their mouths about the problem or about who is upset?

Tasks put you in the D in the C half people put you in the I and S half fast and task is D fast in people is I measured in people is S and measured in task is C. You just read your office manager in 11 seconds.

Now what each one needs from you because this is where the money is.

Your D team member needs autonomy and the bottom line.

Give them the outcome and the deadline and get out of the way when they push back.

That is not insubordination, that is the style engaging.

Give them something to own and they'll get bored and they'll just leave.

Your I team member needs recognition and interaction, not a plaque specific public named acknowledgement.

More often than you think, put them in front of people.

Your S team member needs stability and advanced notice.

If you're changing something, tell them before the meeting, not in it because they need to process privately before they can respond publicly.

And their silence is not agreement, it is politeness.

You have to ask them by name and their and their read on the team morale is usually the most accurate one in the building.

Your C team member needs data, time and a clear standard.

Send the number the head when you correct them.

Be specific about the instance because general criticism sends them into a spiral about everything they have ever done.

This tool is not classifying people is for adapting.

The entire value is in the eight seconds before you open your mouth.

Same message, different delivery so it can actually be received and the standard never moves.

Awareness is not softness.

The best practice cultures I have seen are are warm and demanding at the same time.

People feel cared for and they are held to a higher bar.

Those two things are not intentioned, they are the whole recipe.

The owners who got free from their practice built the team to run it.

That work is coachable and it starts with knowing who is actually in your room.

So start@classdental coaching.com learn more about our everything disc and our five behaviors.

Okay, let's look at the five behaviors.

Now, disc gets everybody understanding themselves and each other.

But understanding is not performance.

Plenty of teams understand each other perfectly well and still miss goals every month.

That is where the second tool comes in.

The five behaviors team program built on Patrick Lencion's model.

It's a pyramid with five levels.

Trust at the bottom, then conflict, then commitment, then accountability, and then results at the top.

The order is the entire is the entire point because each level holds up the one above it.

When an owner tells me their team will not hold each other accountable, I already know the break is two floors lower.

A team cannot commit to a decision it was never allowed to argue about.

And it cannot argue honestly without trust.

So level one, let's look at trust.

Every owner would tell me they trust their team.

You mean predictive trust.

She shows up on time.

She does not steal.

I can count on her.

I mean, that's fine.

And it's not what this model measures.

The trust at the bottom of this pyramid comes from vulnerability.

It means a person on your team can say, I don't know how to do this, or I I made a mistake, or I am underwater in my column or in my position without calculating what it will cost them to say that here in the dental version.

Here is the dental version, I should say of the low trust perio numbers get charted soft because nobody wants to explain why the practice missed the diagnosis for three years or collections slip for two months.

And your front desk manager sits on it hoping it corrects itself because the last time she brought you bad news, your face changed.

And the big one, which is almost in every practice, two people have a problem with each other.

And instead of talking to each other, they both come talk to you.

That has a name.

It is triangulation.

And it is the most reliable sign that trust is low in your building.

When every interpersonal problem routes through the owner, you do not have a team.

You have hub and spoke and you are the hub.

And hub cannot leave for a week without everything just.

Just degrade.

None of those people are dishonest.

They work in an environment where being wrong out loud is expensive.

And the practice will never improve because the owner is is the last person in building to learn anything.

True.

It fixes by going first.

And it has to be real.

In a session, we have the doctor only specific mistake they made that year.

They make it out loud and in front of the whole team.

It's not a humble brat not work too hard.

An actual error with the consequences attached.

The temperature in the room changes in about 90 seconds because the team has been waiting years for permission to be human at work.

Then move to level two, which is conflict.

This is the one that makes owners nervous because you think your job is keeping the peace in the building with 14 people on it.

That instinct is exactly what is capping you.

Picture a line.

On one end is artificial harmony, where nothing real gets said, and then on the other end is personal attack, where it has stopped being about the word.

In the middle is the productive zone, where people argue about ideas and go to lunch together afterward.

Almost every practice I walk into is buried on the artificial harmony end.

Everyone nods in the meeting and the real meeting happens in the parking lot or in the sterilization area.

You are so far from fighting, from the fighting end, that your team has never challenged a decision out loud.

And then the decision fails and 11 people already knew it would conflict.

Here means arguing about ideas, never about people.

The schedule template, the recall protocol.

How we handle the patient who is always 20 minutes late.

If two smart people care about your practice and look at the same problem, they should disagree sometimes.

If they never do, one of them is not saying what they think.

Put disc on top of it and the room makes sense.

Your D style engages immediately you.

Your I style softens a real objection into a joke that lets everyone off the hook.

Your S style agrees in the room and carries the disagreement home because harmony is what they protect.

Your C style will not speak until they have all the data.

And if you rush the meeting, you will never hear the best thinking in your practice.

So when a doctor tells me my team has no opinions, well, what I'm saying is, is the room where two of the four styles were never given the conditions to be able to speak.

Four things to do at your next team meeting.

Put one real decision in front of them and ask specifically for the case against it.

And then go around the whole room by name because the people you most need to hear will never volunteer.

Send the numbers a day early so your C styles arrive ready instead of ambush and say this out loud and honor it.

Silence is not agreement in this practice.

If you do not say it in the room, you do not get to say it in the parking lot.

Then level three is commitment.

Commitment breaks in two places.

Clarity and buy in.

Clarity means everything walked out with the same understanding of what was decided.

Ask four people about your next meeting was decided and count the answers.

I do this with teams and the record is four different answers from four people who sat at the same table for an hour.

But it does not Mean everybody agrees consensus is not the goal.

And consensus is a practice usually in a practice usually produces a decision watered down until it accomplishes nothing.

The standard is simpler.

Everybody was heard, the owner decided and now everybody rose weigh in to buy in.

That is why conflict comes first.

A team member who genuinely got to argue their case will support the opposite decision.

One who was never asked, applied for two weeks and then drifts back to her own way of doing things.

And you will call that system problem.

It was never a system problem.

Level four is accountability.

Specifically accountability between peers.

Most owners who have never seen it work.

Because every correction in the building routes through the doctor.

An assistant notices an operatory was not turned over correctly and instead of handling it while she goes and tells you now you are the enforcement arm for 14 people while producing dentistry.

That is a bottleneck with a handpiece in it.

And it is why you cannot take a week off without coming back to a mess.

On a team that works, the peer handled it directly and respectfully in the moment.

And you never hear about it.

Three things have to change.

You name it as the new standard and it's out loud in a meeting.

Because nobody does this by accident.

You stop taking the reports.

So when nobody.

When somebody does bring you a peer issue, you answer.

Your answer becomes have you talked to that person?

And you teach them how.

Because most of your team has never been shown how to correct a colleague without it becoming a thing.

The shape is simple.

What you saw specifically why it matters to a patient or the team.

What are you asking for next time?

20 Seconds of those quick things and it will still be uncomfortable for the first 10 times.

This is where disc earns its keep a second time.

Delivering that correction to a C style and an I style are two different conversations.

The C style wants the instance and the standard.

The ISILE needs to hear the relationship fine before they can hear the words of correction.

And then finally level 5 is results.

The top of the pyramid means the team is focused on the collective scoreboard instead of individual status.

In a practice status looks like hygiene.

And the front office keeps keeping a private list of who is failing.

Hygiene says the front desk does not schedule the treat.

The front desk says hygiene doesn't present it.

Both can be right and the practice still loses.

The fix is one scorecard.

Practice numbers, not department numbers.

Visible to everyone, reviewed together on a rhythm.

Production, collections, new patients, case acceptance, hygiene, reappointment.

And talk about them in the same tone, whether the number is good or bad.

Because if the only time you raise the Scoreboard is when you are unhappy.

Your team will learn to hate that scoreboard.

Now all of this lives or dies on your meeting rhythm.

Four meetings and that's all you need.

The daily huddle, 10 to 15 minutes, whole team before the first patient.

Where is the production?

Where's the openings?

Which patients have treatment to capture?

Where does the day get tight?

A practice that huddles well, walks into the day with a plan.

Practice that does not, walks into a reaction of all day.

Same team, wildly different results, and the only difference is 15 minutes.

A huddle that is just reading the schedule out loud.

Well, it's a waste of everybody's morning.

A real huddle is a game plan.

And notice who you lose in the first 60 seconds.

If it's all numbers, your I styles are gone.

If it's all energy and no specifics, your C styles quietly stop believing you.

And a good huddle hits all four styles in the same 15 minutes.

Where you already are spending the time.

The weekly leadership meeting.

You and whoever leads the team, typically your office manager.

45 Minutes, same time every week, and it does not get moved.

The monthly team meeting, 90 minutes, whole team paid.

Not at the end of the clinical day, when everybody is finished.

This is where the scorecard gets reviewed with everyone, where the real conversations happen because there is time to do it.

And where you teach.

Protected on the calendar for the whole year, starting in January or starting today, the quarterly reset.

It's a half a day, twice a year at minimum.

Where the practice is going, who owns what, anything structural.

It's also the natural place to rerun the team assessment and see whether trust and accountability actually moved.

And the other half of this is role clarity.

It's struggling practices.

Everybody sort does everything, which means nobody truly owns anything and that which means things fall through the cracks and then nobody is accountable because it was never clearly theirs.

You cannot hold someone accountable for something that never was clearly given to them.

Some owners hear culture and think soft stuff, the fun stuff, not the money stuff.

Culture is a production strategy, full stop.

And I can show you where it lands on any P and L. Turnover is one of the most expensive line items in your practice and most owners have never priced it.

When a good clinical team member leaves and you lose the person, you lose the knowledge and patient relationships, which is the part nobody counts.

Then you pay to recruit and you pay a wage to somebody who's not productive for months while your existing team covers the gap and burns out doing it, which is how 1 departure becomes 2 and then 3 practice with high turnover cannot build a single system with have talked about all season because the team is always starting over.

A strong structure and strong culture keeps good people.

Good people who stay get better every year.

They own the systems instead of tolerating them.

They carry the standard, which means you are no longer enforcing every detail.

Personally, that is the mechanism that lets you, an owner step back and now have the practice keep performing.

Most owners have been trying to build culture with pizza or while I do my Christmas party.

Then they are confused when the practice still runs on gossip.

Well, pizza isn't culture.

These two tools turn culture into behaviors you can name, teach, measure and correct with shared language without it being personal.

That is a system, not a feeling.

And it shows up when you can look at it in your numbers, in your dashboards, in your P Ls.

We watch production per team member.

You got to watch overhead as a percentage production and turnover because the healthy teams show up as more production carried by the same or leaner payroll.

The teamwork itself also gets scored with a baseline in all five levels and a reassessment so that you watch process and accountability move as those numbers instead of just divide.

When leadership improves, the financial numbers follow with a couple of quarters.

And owners finally see that the soft stuff was driving the hard numbers the whole time.

The path to working less in your practice runs straight through your team.

And I cannot emphasize this enough on transition side, coaching side and all the divisions of our business, of your business.

The owners who are trapped never built the team to run it.

The ones who got free built leaders under them.

Let me make this concrete because you have a practice to run tomorrow.

Weeks one and two start with you.

Take the assessment yourself.

Before you put your team through anything, just give us a call and we can set you up.

Read the section on how you behave under pressure twice.

Then pick one behavior to change exactly one and tell your team you are working on this.

The team seeing you name your own gap first is worth more than the next 10 things on this list.

Weeks three and four fix the huddle every day.

15 Minutes all four styles serve.

This is the highest return 15 minutes in your practice.

Month two trust and conflict.

Own one mistake out loud each week.

Put one real decision in front of the team and ask for the case against it.

Set the parking lot rule and protect the first person who takes you up on it.

Stop taking peer reports and start asking have you talked to them?

Month three Clarity and the scoreboard.

Write down what each person owns and what's winning looks like in their role one page per person and review it with them individually.

Put the practice scorecard where the whole team sees it and reviews it together monthly in the same tone regardless of numbers.

Do those four things and you will not have a Perfect team in 90 days, but you will have practice moving in the right direction and a team that notices.

Notice you changed first, which is the only thing that ever makes the rest of it possible.

Here's what I want you to do with all of this.

You have two choices.

You can go back to the practice, try to install it and try to own it and hope it sticks.

Or you could reach out to us at Class Solutions and have our certified team and leadership coach Ryan, who once again is certified in both Everything disc and the five Behaviors and both are built into how our coaches work with you and your team.

If you're not ready for monthly coaching relationships, you know you can start off with just a practice health assessment with us where we'll look at what needs to be fixed, where things are leaking and what is cramping the practice.

And if you want to put the whole team through this work together we facilitate Everything desk in five behavior sessions from practices directly Ryan runs them One day with your team changes how they talk to each other for years.

So once again ask for it.

Or you can go to classdentalcoaching.com just to book a discovery call and talk with Ryan on what takes place.

That's the show.

If this helped share with any of your friends or owners who need it.

Don't forget to check us out.

Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts.

Also please note that we of our YouTube channel take a look at that where we have practice power tips that we're continually putting and putting more and more videos to help educate and push you.

Until next week.

Thank you and have a great weekend.