Why Your Team Just Doesn't "Get It"

Your team probably isn’t “full of problems.” More often, your standards are invisible. When we expect people to “act like adults” but never define what that means in a dental office, we get frustration, gossip, and the same performance issues on repeat. I’m Dr. Paul Etchison, and I’m sharing one of the most effective leadership exercises I’ve used to create immediate clarity and shift our dental practice culture fast.

We start with a simple idea: culture is like a garden. If all you do is pull weeds like negativity, laziness, rudeness, and defensiveness, you’ll stay stuck reacting forever. Instead, we intentionally plant the traits we want like reliability, accountability, helpfulness, positivity, and fun. I break down exactly how we ran this as a team exercise using live input, how we grouped the answers, and why the “everyone agrees” moment is where momentum starts. Once expectations are spoken, the drama fades because feedback becomes principle-based, not personal.

Then we dig into the culture divider that changes everything: accountable versus defensive. I explain how defensiveness turns simple coaching into exhausting debates, why that drains leaders, and how a shared language makes it easier to call behaviors out without shaming anyone. If you care about dental practice management, team accountability, and building a practice that runs without you as the bottleneck, this is a practical, repeatable way to get there.

Subscribe for more dental leadership strategies, share this with a practice owner who needs it, and leave a review so more teams can find it. What’s one trait you want your culture to be known for?

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Transcript

Team Frustrations And Expectations

Paul Etchison 0:01

Have you ever found yourself complaining about your team? You're frustrated about the attitudes, you're frustrated about their negativity, you're frustrated by the lack of accountability. And you start thinking to yourself, why can't they just act like adults? Let me ask you something harder. Have you ever clearly defined what good looks like? Have you ever clearly defined what an adult should act like? Because most culture problems, they're not personality problems. They're clarity problems. And that's what we're talking about today. Now, you're listening to the Dental Practice Heroes Podcast, the podcast for practice owners who want to work fewer clinical days, increase profits, and build a team-driven practice that runs without them being the bottleneck. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edgeson. I'm a dentist, a coach, and author of two books on dental practice management. I'm also the owner of a large multi-doctor practice in the south suburbs of Chicago. And today, we're going to be talking about one of the most powerful leadership exercises I've ever done with my team. I'm going to teach you how to do it so you can do it with your team. And that exercise, it will immediately shift your culture. Now, most of us as owners, we spend our time what I call pulling weeds. We complain about that negative team member, the lazy assistant, the person that has that bad attitude, the defensive hygienist. Take your pick. We complain about it. And we're constantly reacting to what we don't want. But imagine if you were a gardener, okay, who only focused on pulling weeds. You're just pulling weeds. You never intentionally plant any roses or anything you want. All you do is constantly pull weeds. You don't choose the colors you want, you don't choose the type of fragrances you want your garden to have, you never decide the kind of garden that you're really trying to grow. Now, that gardener is not going to get a beautiful result. Culture works the same way. If you don't intentionally define what you want your team to look like, you'll just keep pulling weeds forever. So here is the exercise that I did with my team recently at an all-day meeting, and it went fantastically. Now, here's how we did it. I love giving presentations to my team. So often at these all-day meetings, I will have a slide deck. I will talk for usually about 45 minutes to an hour about whatever it is I want to train them on. And we use this software called Slido. Now I don't get anything from Slido. I don't even know. I think it's like$120 a month. I'm sure there's a million like it, but here's what it is. In your presentation is a QR code. Everybody scans it while you're talking. And now they're connected to your presentation. You can ask them questions, you can take polls, you can do all sorts of things, and it posts in real time the answers as your team sends them in. So here's what we did: I printed out a trait list that we created for dental practice heroes, and I gave it to my team. They all had it. So it gives lists all these adjectives of traits of people, good and bad. And I said, let's define what a good employee looks like. What is a good team member at this office? I told them all to send in five things. So we had maybe 32 people at this meeting. Everybody sent five things, over 150 answers. But here's the ones that kept coming up: reliable, motivated, helpful, accountable, fun, positive. And then I asked them, what does a bad team member look like? What is bad? Like, what do we not want to work with? What do we not want in our team? And the most common ones for that were negative, lazy, rude, disrespectful, defensive. And here's what really hit me about that. Everybody agreed. There was like full agreement. There was no debate. There was nobody that like put their hand up and they said, Well, I like working with lazy people. Be nice to the lazy people. I love them. Or nobody said, I think defensive is a great trait to have on our team. I think we should all be more defensive. Nobody, everybody agrees. See, we all want the same garden. We want the teamwork. We want camaraderie, respect, fairness. The problem isn't disagreement. The problem is that we rarely bring those ideas out into the open. So here's the first point is that unspoken expectations, those are the things that create drama. When expectations are not explicit, people will fill in the blanks. They create the stories. They'll say things like, she doesn't respect me, he doesn't care, they're everybody's targeting me. But when you define what good really looks like, it's no longer personal, it's principle-based, right? Now it's like this behavior aligns or this behavior does not align. So the clarity has the ability to kill those stories. And this is essentially what we're doing with our coaching clients when we work with them is we're teaching them how to create clarity and consistency in their offices. If you're looking for some help in doing that, please set up a strategy call with me at dentalpracticeheroes.com slash strategy call. Happy to talk it over with you. All right, point number two accountable versus defensive. That will change everything at your practice. Nothing is more powerful to a culture than having a full team of accountable team members. That was one of the most interesting things to me that came up under good employee was like reliable and accountable. I mean, it surprised me. Another powerful one that came up for bad employee was defensive. Now, if you asked me as a practice owner, I would say, I mean, those are two of the ones I would say really fast. But what's cool is that my team noticed it too. So we started unpacking those in a discussion and it changed the whole conversation. Our conversation was what is accountable, what is defensive? What do they do in our practice? And those two create completely different cultures. Let me give you a kind of an interesting example from my own life. I've got two daughters, right? Now, my youngest, she knows like when she does something wrong and we call her out on it, she'll just say, I'm so sorry, I won't do it again. I'm sorry, I got worked up, I won't do it again. And the conversation is over immediately. But my oldest, no. My oldest wants to wants to have a 45-minute debate whether or not she technically hit or tapped her sister. And we're arguing semantics. So it was it a hit, was it a tap? Did it really count? Was it intentional? Did it really hurt that bad? That's defensive. And that turns into a 45-minute debate to get her to just take the accountability and say, you know what? I hit my sister because she pissed me off and she deserved it. I'm sorry I did it, but it happened. I won't do it again. I see that it's wrong. I won't do it. That's all it takes. But you see this in your team all the time. When someone is accountable, the conversation is productive and it's short. When someone is defensive, the conversation is exhausting. And any future coaching conversations for that employee, they become something that you avoid doing. You don't want to have the conversation. You hope the problems will go away, and you never approach the person until it gets so bad that you have to say something and you're dreading it because you know that defensiveness is coming. And you know that when you go into this conversation, you're gonna have to bring a bunch of evidence and you're gonna have to present your case when it could just really be an easy, peasy lemon, squeezy thing. So, what was so cool for me is that my team sees that. It is obvious. It is obvious that it's better to be accountable versus defensive. And now that we've talked about it as a team, when somebody is showing that defensiveness, I can call that out and say, hey, like remember we talked about defensiveness and accountability? It helps you. You've defined the culture, you've created clarity. Now, the exercise that we did, it wasn't really about me telling the team how to behave. That wasn't the goal. But I want culture to be a shared standard at our office. I don't want it to be a policing system. I don't want to be the referee. It was really about us as a team agreeing on the garden that we want to grow. And when everybody agrees on the traits, the feedback that we give, it becomes way easier. The accountability feels fair. Standards are now shared with the whole entire team. And if someone you know slips into negativity or they get defensive, it's not you're a bad person. It's just that this doesn't match what we said we value. And that's a completely different conversation and completely different tone. So here's the powerful part: most teams they want the same things. They want respect, fairness, teamwork, positivity, fun, reliability, but it gets complicated by the feelings and the stories. The clarity you create by drawing these conversations out into the open, that is what will cut through that noise. So here's the ultimate leadership lesson from this episode is that if you don't define what you want, you will constantly be reacting to what you don't want. Stop pulling the weeds, start planting roses, be intentional about the culture that you're designing. Ask your team, what does great look like here? And then ask them for examples like how does reliable show up? What does defensiveness sound like? What does accountability look like in action? And when you do that, you'll realize something powerful. Everybody is on the same page. You just needed to say it out loud. So, in closing, most culture problems are not about hiring better people. They're about defining the better standards that you want in your practice. If you want to improve morale, teamwork, accountability, don't start and lead with discipline. Start with clarity. Define your garden, grow it intentionally. And if you're looking for help on how to create clarity and consistency in your office to make it more profitable for you so you can take more time off and be more present with your family, please reach out to us, dentalpracticeheroes.comslash strategy. Set up a free strategy call with me. I'll get on the phone with you. No pressure, just clarity. We'll just have a conversation. I look forward to talking to you. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.