Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
5 Keys to High-Performance Meetings
Great dental practices share one essential quality: exceptional team communication. Yet many offices struggle with ineffective meetings that drain energy rather than build momentum. Drawing from 13 years of practice management experience, I reveal how my team transformed frustrating, head-spinning meetings into productive sessions that actually strengthen our culture.
Remember when your practice was small and communication seemed effortless? Those casual, unstructured catch-ups worked beautifully until your team grew beyond 7-8 people. Suddenly, meetings became chaotic—discussions wandered aimlessly, people disengaged, and you left feeling more confused than when you started. Sound familiar?
Through years of trial and error, we've discovered five game-changing elements that revolutionized our team meetings. These strategies have transformed our meetings from dreaded obligations into powerful tools for team alignment and practice improvement. The results speak for themselves: team members leave feeling connected and energized rather than drained and frustrated. You'll discover practical ways to implement these changes regardless of your practice size or current meeting structure.
The quality of your team meetings directly reflects the health of your practice culture. If your meetings aren't currently building that culture, it's time for a meeting makeover. Try these proven strategies and experience the difference a well-structured meeting can make in your practice's communication, collaboration, and overall performance.
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Check out www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com if you want to get the same great marketing results as Dr. Etch. Mention DPH and get your first month FREE!
Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
I help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Join the DPH Hero Collective and get the tools, training, and support you need to transform your practice:
- Team and Doctor Training for every aspect of Practice Management
- Comprehensive Training: Boost profit, efficiency, and team engagement.
- Live Q&A Sessions: Get personalized help when you need it most.
- Supportive Community: Connect with practice owners on the same journey.
- Editable Systems & Protocols: Standardize your operations effortlessly.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
When I think of the best running practices, a common theme that often appears is good communication between the team. The practice absolutely must give the employees the format, the opportunity and the avenues to communicate with each other and work together if they want to collaborate and they want to become better and become a high-performing office. And it really might surprise you, but a lot of offices don't even have team meetings and a lot of offices that do. They're missing a lot of elements that make these meetings really effective, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. It is time to up your game in the meeting department. You are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we help you create and manage a team-driven practice with systems so that you can stress less, work less and make more.
Speaker 1:I am your host, dr Paul Edgison. I'm the author of two books on dental practice management, a dental coach and owner of a large group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago. I want to show you how to run a better practice and have a better life. So you may have noticed that I released this episode just a little late. Usually I release at midnight on Sunday night, but I didn't get a chance to this week because I was out of town and I didn't get home until midnight on Sunday night and, dude, I didn't really feel like doing it when I got home. So my kids had spring break and we me and my wife and some other couples we went for a four day weekend in Vegas. And that was tons of fun Stayed at Aria, did some shows, did a lot of gambling. I lost my ass bad at the casinos, like I always do, and every time I go there I say I'm not going to do it. And I do it every single time and it's always like I lose a ton of money in like a two hour span when I get really drunk on, like the third night. It's so predictable I don't know why I do it. But then we came home from that and then we went to Turks and Caicos, which I've never been before. It was just as gorgeous as everybody says. The white sand beaches, the water is like teal blue.
Speaker 1:And something else I noticed about Turks and Caicos is that when you tell people you went to Turks and Caicos, or if you tell somebody you're at Turks and Caicos or you're going to Turks and Caicos, or if you tell somebody you're at Turks and Caicos or you're going to Turks and Caicos. They often say, oh, cool must be nice. Do you ever get that from people? Must be nice, it must be nice to take a vacation at Turks and Caicos. Must be nice that you get to do these fancy things. And I just started to notice that a lot of people said that about Turks and Caicos to the point where I started like thinking I don't want to tell people I went to Turks and Caicos. I mean it didn't feel like that bougie and like fancy when I was there. I mean it was more expensive than going to, like, mexico but I didn't feel like I was like some stuck up prick or anything like that.
Speaker 1:But everyone says must be nice. And in typical like high anxiety, paul Edgerton, let's overthink everything and overanalyze it. I started to overanalyze that. What does must be nice mean? Is that like a backhanded, passive, aggressive, like you know you're bragging, you know I'm gonna let you know you're bragging? Or you're kind of a snob Like what does that mean, you know? So it's the point now that I'm going to work tomorrow and part of me doesn't even want to tell my team I went to Turks and Caicos because there's something that everybody thinks about Turks and Caicos. That I'm not understanding. But I'm almost to the point where, when people say must be nice, I want to respond like it is nice. You know what's really nice about it. You don't have to have your vacation with a ton of poor people. Everyone there has money. You know what I mean? Like that's what it feels like. I feel like they're telling me I'm being a snob, so I don't know if you ever had that experience. Oh well, okay, let's get to the meat of the episode. We're talking about meetings today.
Speaker 1:Now, when I opened up my startup practice in 2012, we had meetings all the time, and the reason we had them all the time is because, if you have a startup practice, there's a lot of time at the beginning that you don't have a single patient in the practice, which is like fun and scary. But it's fun because you get to communicate and kind of grow your systems and build your culture and you're kind of figuring out how to take the training wheels off. Essentially, you're like running a practice like, hmm, what do we do here? You figure it out. It's fun. But as your practice grows, you eventually get to a point where your schedules are pretty busy and you can't just have these impromptu meetings and you have to start scheduling them.
Speaker 1:And this is what we did. We would have them like once every other week and we would go out to dinner somewhere after work. You know, this is like on a day. It was like our Thursday. We closed at 3 pm that day. I think it was like our last day of the week, I can't remember exactly what it was but we would go out to like a late lunch dinner and we would all just talk and we just would talk about what's going on at the practice. There was no format, there was no kind of agenda. It was just let's just talk about what's going on, what's going well and what's not. And that worked really well.
Speaker 1:Like a lot of things do at your practice, when you have a smaller team I'm talking about like less than seven, eight people. Once you start to get pushed past that, that's when you have to start relying on systems, because your team reaches this critical size that it no longer works just like flying by the seat of your pants. You have to create protocols and systems and what we realized is that as we got bigger, we brought on an associate. We might've been about 12 to 15 people at this point, we would start having these meetings and they would just I mean you would leave the meeting, your head would hurt the amount of discussion and the questions and what people were saying and the arguments and you're just like, oh my gosh, my head's spinning Like that was the worst meeting ever, and the meeting shouldn't feel like that. When you have a meeting with your team, you should always walk away feeling like, wow, that was really beneficial, that was. I feel like we communicated, I feel like we really. I feel like we really hash some things out. I feel connected to these people. And we started to have these meetings where we just didn't feel that anymore.
Speaker 1:So we brainstormed as a team, as we often do, because it is a collaboration running a dental practice with a team, it is a collaboration, it's not just you at the top and we decided to change a few things and change the way we did our meetings and change our format. We did this over many years. I mean, we're coming up on 13 years into this practice and we've changed a lot of things in our meetings. But what I want to share with you today is five things that I think have worked exceptionally well with our meeting structure, because I think you can incorporate these into your meeting structure and just try maybe one or a few, or try them all and see if it works. Try this shoe on and see if it fits. So, like I said, our freestyle team meetings. They weren't working. We were going off on tangents, people weren't really engaged, some people were bored, boring discussions, and the other thing that really bothered me is that as our team grew, some people weren't brave enough just to stand up and talk, so we needed to change some things. So here are five important elements I think every meeting should have.
Speaker 1:All right, the first one begin every meeting with an icebreaker, a game and some recognition. Okay, so like what do I mean by that? Icebreakers? We used to do these when we had a small team. We would go around and everybody would say something like hey, I wanna appreciate this person. I noticed they did this and it's just some recognition. We used to do some icebreakers where people would talk about it'd be a funny question and everybody would go around and say their answer it's just getting to know people better know little things about everybody. We've done things where each person has written down two things that nobody knows about them. And then we pick one out of a hat and everyone tries to guess who it is.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a million things you can do, but you want to start off on a positive foot, so start with an icebreaker. You can do these fun games Like they're all over TikTok. I don't plan this stuff. My team does it. So as far as like beer pong, to like races on the chairs down the hallway, the team loves them. Sometimes I'm just like I don't even want to be part of this. This is uncomfortable for me. I don't want to do these fun party games. I don't know, maybe I'm just lame, or maybe I'm just too anxious, but who knows, started off on a fun, positive note and this is always an opportunity at the beginning of the meeting for you to give some recognition, for you as the leader to stand up and say this is what the practice is doing right now and you know last month we had a great month. You know, I really want to focus on this this month. And talking about who you are, you know, I really feel like we are the best practice in our community. I feel like we're the best practice in the whole entire United States and I want the patients to continue to feel that I love when we get five-star reviews like this one. Read some five-star reviews. So, starting off on a positive note, that is the first part.
Speaker 1:And if your team gets too big, where this part of the meeting takes too long, now you might be wondering how long are my meetings? They're actually an hour and a half, but we have to block out two hours in the middle of our day Because we're split shifted. We go from 7 am to 8 pm. The only time we can do it is the middle of the day, so we block out two hours, but typically they end up being an hour and a half. So if you find that your meetings, these beginning parts, are going too long because people are spending too much time in these icebreakers, you can do like where you only ask a few people. We've done where we had that little gator where you open them up and you press the teeth down, and gator where you open him up and you press the teeth down and if you press that one tooth down he bites you. Then you have to say the icebreaker. So it's kind of another fun way of doing it. I've got 35, 40 people, we can't go around the room and everybody says one thing It'd just take forever.
Speaker 1:So make sure you use that first part in the meeting for positive stuff icebreakers, games and giving recognition to your team because that's what they do it for they want to be publicly recognized. And you've got to start off on a positive note, because meetings tend to get really negative and sometimes we spend so much time we'll spend 90% of the time being negative and we'll forget that only like 2% of the time that we're at the practice. Negative things even happen. You know, most of the time it's pretty positive All right, number two breakouts go before the team part. Positive All right, number two breakouts go before the team part. So you will reach a certain size in your practice and I think as soon as you get to three people per department like three assistants, three hygienists and three people working on your front end is you want to start having breakouts where you spend the majority of your meeting just meeting as different departments and not together. And the reason you want to do this is because so much of meetings and when you do it as a group, so much of it doesn't apply to everybody and it just causes people to doze off and not be engaged and it makes it this boring process that nobody even wants to show up to and now has a bad attitude going into it which affects the quality of your meeting. So you want to do these breakouts at some point in your meeting.
Speaker 1:Now, we used to do this. We used to do the whole team part together. This would take like 20 minutes. I talked to the whole team, my office manager would talk to the whole team, we'd have some discussions and then we would break out into departments and then we would come back together. What we found the introduction, like I talked about the ice break, the games and the recognition we do that together, but then we do our breakouts and then we come back together for the whole team part and what we found is that during our breakouts we can often address a lot of the things that we would have brought up to the whole team but really didn't need to be part of the whole team. So if you're going to do breakouts which I think you should be, if you have the team size for it, if you have at least three people in a position, do it before you bring everybody together to talk to everyone as a collective team. All right.
Speaker 1:Number three make sure that somebody is taking notes on the meeting, that they will post some meeting notes on, maybe, your Slack channel or whatever you're using to communicate with your team. And then make sure at the next meeting, at some point you've got to review the notes from the previous meeting. You've got to review the action items to say, hey, how did we do this? Man, we went two or three years at one point not noticing that. Hey, you know, I feel like we talked about this like two months ago. I feel like we talked about this last month and it was like, why do we keep talking about the same things? It was because we would talk about it and then we'd kind of forget about it and then it'll come up again in the next meeting. We'd be like, dude, we didn't do anything about this. So now me, make sure that we review the previous meetings action items to say, how did this go? Do we need to change anything? Do we need to pivot anything? Do we need to bring this back up and discuss some more? Because that's how you move forward. All right.
Speaker 1:Number four your meeting needs to have rules, and where do. You need rules around, you need rules for getting in the weeds. That's when people will get into tangents and you're just like, oh my God, what in the world are we talking about? You need rules for having constructive conversation and you need rules for coachability. So let's talk about those three Rules for the weeds. This is when you someone goes on a tangent, says, oh, what about this? And you start talking well, I think this or this and this, and they're like well, what about this? And then, before you know it, you're like dude, what did we even start talking about? You know, so everyone has to know that sometimes you will get in the weeds and it's your job as a leader to call out when we are in the weeds and we will return back to the original discussion and that's just the way it's going to go. I Just the way it's going to go. I have a gavel. It was gifted to me by my team as a joke, but we use it and when we get in the weeds, we click, clack, clack, clack that thing and we, hey, we're in the weeds. Let's rein it back in. What were we talking about?
Speaker 1:You can lose so much discussion and I think often, as leaders. We're too timid, we want to be nice, we want everyone to contribute and we don't want to stifle anyone's contributions. But sometimes, if we let our team get in the weeds, it's not a fun meeting and it's not productive. And again same thing happens. People don't want to come to these things. People don't bring a good attitude because they're boring. They're like oh my God, this hurts my brain. All right, constructive conversation. You need to have rules around the way that we will talk about things. Okay, we don't point fingers at people, we don't point blame at people. We talk about the issue, we talk about what happened and we talk about solutions. We want to be a team that can be honest with each other and can be candid, but sometimes people's feelings get hurt and that's just going to happen. So sometimes we have to say, hey, hold on, let's say this a different way. Hold on, put pause, let's take a deep breath here, because sometimes these conversations get a little heated and so it's not about blaming people. So you want to set these ground rules. This is what you expect from your team. I don't expect anyone to be blaming anyone. I want to talk about the problems. I want to talk about the problems. I want to talk about solutions. I don't want to blame people.
Speaker 1:Okay, coachability, we need to talk about that. This is going to be we're going to talk about negative things. We're going to be talking about things that aren't going so well. That doesn't mean we're doing a bad job. It just means we're coachable. It means we're getting better. We've never reached the apex of how good we can be at our craft. We will always be growing and always be improving. That is what it means to be coachable. So people cannot get defensive. Now are people going to get defensive? Yeah, they are Absolutely. They always do. But we need to say, hey, we're being coachable, we're a coachable team. These are the ground rules. This is how you have a meeting. You don't have to talk about these every time, but you need to set them at some point.
Speaker 1:All right, number five you need to put a period on every single discussion. I have noticed in my career that tons of times we get a lot of times we get in the weeds. We will get to a point where we never come to a clear solution because there isn't a clear solution to a lot of issues. So sometimes you got to say, hey, you know what we spent a lot of time talking on this, let. Sometimes you got to say, hey, you know what, we spent a lot of time talking on this. Let's take a vote. Or you say you know what, we spent a lot of time talking about this. This is how I want to try it this month. We're going to revisit this next month. Is everyone cool with that Period? Don't leave things. Well, I don't know, we'll think about that and we'll maybe talk about that next time. No, take the lead as the leader and say, hey, this is how we're doing it. Put a period on it. We're going to talk about it next month. And everybody on your team needs to know whether they think that's the way to do it or not, the best way they need to commit to doing it, because the only way that we can know if it worked or not is if everybody commits. This is how we're doing it this month. Let's revisit this next month and see how it goes.
Speaker 1:So those five things beginning every meeting with icebreakers, games and recognition. The breakouts go before the team part. You want to review the last meeting action items. You want to have rules for the weeds, the constructive conversation and the coachability of your team and five. You need to put a period on every single discussion.
Speaker 1:If you incorporate these things into your meetings, you will have much better meetings and, like I said, you should be able to feel the quality of your meeting after the meeting. It should feel good, like you connected, like you feel like you are part of a team that is doing something and moving somewhere. If you don't feel that, ask your team if they felt that as well and find out why Meetings should be good for your culture. They shouldn't hurt your culture. So try those things out and see how it goes. Hey, if you have good experience with this, shoot me an email dentalpracticeheroes at gmailcom. Let me know how it worked for you. Thank you so much for listening. I very much appreciate you listening to the podcast and, if you like this, I would so very much appreciate if you left a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts. It really means a lot to me and helps more people find
