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
Have you Ever Asked, "Why Am I the Only One Who Cares?"
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If you’ve ever looked around your dental office and thought, “Why am I the only one who cares?”, you’re not alone and you’re not crazy. We’ve felt that same disconnect between the emotional weight of practice ownership and a team that seems able to clock out and leave it all behind. That gap can turn into resentment fast, and it’s one of the quiet drivers of dentist burnout, poor practice culture, and constant frustration with accountability.
We dig into a hard truth in dental practice management: your team will never care the same way you do, because they don’t carry the same risk, debt, payroll pressure, and reputation stakes. But “they don’t care like an owner” doesn’t mean they can’t care deeply. The real issue is often the environment we create, especially when every decision funnels through us or through a single fixer on the team. That pattern trains dependence, kills autonomy, and leaves the owner carrying every problem, even on weekends.
From there we get practical about dental leadership. We talk about building connection outside of corrective conversations, making small relational deposits that help people feel seen, and creating psychological safety so reasonable mistakes become learning instead of fear. We also share why teams support what they help build, plus a simple framework to invite staff into solutions so they truly own results without needing equity. If you want more engagement, better communication, and a lighter emotional load as an owner, this gives you a clear starting point.
If you need help building an engaged team and a healthier dental office culture, reach out for a strategy call, and if this helps you, subscribe, share the episode with another practice owner, and leave a five-star review so more dentists can find it.
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Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
Why You Feel Alone At Work
Have you ever looked around your office and thought to yourself, why am I the only one who cares? Your team, they just walk around, they're just gallivanting all over the place. They're enjoying themselves. They're talking about their weekends. And then at five o'clock, they get the clock out and go home. Meanwhile, you're stressing about production and schedules and cancellations and the culture and the patient experience and why the browser history at the front desk has indeed haunted every day. And you look at your team and you say, wow, that must be nice, just to go home and not have a care in the world. I miss that. And you feel this slight disconnect from your team. And honestly, that disconnect can really start to feel frustrating. You start wondering, why doesn't anybody take ownership except for me? Why am I the only one thinking it all? And why does this feel so heavy sometimes? And over time, something dangerous can really start to happen. You stop feeling connected to your team. You start feeling separate from them, almost like you are carrying the emotional weight of the practice all by yourself and it is wearing you out. And the hard part is most dentists think they've got the wrong team. They think they've got a bad team, but that's usually not true. Most of the time, your team isn't disconnected because they don't care. It's just not true. They do care, but they're disconnected because nobody has ever shown them how to feel ownership inside the business. And sometimes, just sometimes, you unintentionally build a practice where they physically can't. So today we're going to talk about why you feel disconnected from your team, why your employees may feel emotionally disconnected from the practice, and the subtle leadership patterns that quietly create that divide. Because when your team truly feels bought in, everything changes. The energy at the practice, the level of accountability that everybody has, the culture, the vibe, everything feels good. They start taking initiative, they communicate better with each other. And honestly, gosh, when all those things are clicking and everything is happening, your enjoyment of your job and practice ownership itself becomes something just truly amazing. So that is what we're dissecting today. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we show dentists how to build a practice that supports their life instead of consuming it. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edgeson. I'm a dentist. I'm the author of two books on dental practice management. I'm a dental coach, and I'm also the owner of a large multi-doctor practice in the south suburbs of Chicago. All right, let's dive in. Now we have to admit this. We know it's true, and on some level, we just got to come to grips with it. Your team is never going to care the same way that you do. You really, really, really need to stop expecting that. You just can't expect your employees to emotionally experience ownership the same way as you. They don't have the same amount of skin in the game as you. I mean, you're the one carrying the payroll. You carry the debt. You are the one carrying all the risk, all the stress, all of the overhead, the lawsuits. Guess whose ass is on the line for those? It's you. The taxes, the reputation. Yeah, the reputation of the office. I mean, let's think about this. If your office gets a bad reputation, and I mean, obviously your team doesn't want to work for
The Truth About Team Buy In
somewhere with a bad reputation. If their friends start telling them that they had a bad experience in their office and that, you know, their office sucks and it's unorganized and all this stuff. I mean, the employee can just be like, yeah, everything really changed. That's why I got out of there. That place does suck and they just move on with their life. You don't get to do that. You're kind of stuck with it. That reputation will stick with you forever. So, of course, you think about the business differently than your team. They just do not experience the emotional weight of the ownership. They never will. And honestly, I mean, they really shouldn't. So, when you have that expectation, when you truly internalize that expectation, you have that of your team, that is going to build some resentment no matter what you do with it. So, that is the first thing, the nip in the bud right there is stop having that expectation because you don't want that unnecessary resentment. Your team is not going to care the same way as you do. That doesn't mean that they don't care and they can't care. It just means the same way as you, that is unrealistic. Stop doing that. Your team does not need to think like an owner, but they do need to feel connected to something meaningful. And I think that is something realistic that we can do with our team. So let's face it, I mean, most teams, they're never ever given ownership. They're never even given the chance to even feel like there might be some ownership. And I'm saying ownership not in the sense of equity. I'm saying ownership in the sense of like accountability, like I own the results here, like I am part of this. This is part of me. Because most teams, they're just taught like compliance, not ownership. You train your employees to behave like the employees
Stop Expecting Owner Level Caring
they've always behaved as, is the employee that you probably behaved as when you had a boss, is you train your employees to wait for instructions, to avoid mistakes, to ask permission for things, like don't ever do anything on your own. You got to get permission. You're not in charge here. You teach them to stay in their lane, to do only things that they're comfortable with. And essentially what that does is it makes them avoid the responsibility of any of the results. So then the owner gets all pissed off when you know nobody's taking that initiative. No one's ever sticking their neck out there, making a decision and owning the results. Because when they do that, it requires that the practice
How Compliance Training Kills Ownership
has some level of trust, that we've championed some autonomy and we've made it okay to make mistakes. You guys hear me talk about this often is that if we don't make it okay to make mistakes, nobody wants to stick their neck out there. So it's because it's so much easier just to ask somebody. But here's the problem if every decision still funnels through you, your team learns that dependence. And sometimes it's not funneling through you. It can, this can happen with your team members too. I remember working with this coaching client on the West Coast, and she had this front desk team member that literally all day just got barraged with questions. And it was like, why is this person the only person that knows what the hell is going on here? And that wasn't the case at all. But that person had always been the problem solver, always been the fixer of the practice. So the team knew they could always go to this person and get a quick solution, a quick answer. And you know what else too? They knew is that if something went wrong, it didn't work out, they said, Hey, well, I asked her, like I asked, I got permission. It's not my ass, it's not my bad decision, it's her. They never had to own the results. And nobody wants to be part of that culture. You do not want to be part of that culture. I remember when my oldest was like 11 years old and she had this dance recital. It was this like beautiful summer day. It was like in an outdoor area. It was a really cool, it was like one of those first warm days of summer, like the late spring where you're like, dude, summer is here. Let's party. I'm ready to go. And I'm sitting there in the chair in the audience next to my wife and next to my other daughter, just like loving this family moment. And this was a time in my practice where truly, I think I had like 35 employees at this time. And I was getting like one or two texts a week from like each of them. So, like I was fielding maybe 50 to 70 problems each week. And it was just draining the hell out of me. And I remember my high genus texted me, this is a Friday afternoon, and she said, Hey, I need to talk to you about something on Monday, which is like the worst text you can get on a Friday. Like part of me wanted to reach through the phone and just like choke slam her. Because seriously, why do you need to tell me that on Friday? Like, that can wait till Monday. What am I gonna do with that all weekend now? I mean, it literally
The Dance Recital Text Story
ruined the experience of this dance recital. I was feeling good. And then all of a sudden, I'm going through and trying to think of the million things she could want to talk to me about. What is she upset about? What did I say? What did I do? What are we gonna talk about on Monday? Is she putting in her two weeks' notice? And it's just not a good way to live. So, you know, this is what happens when you create that culture where you become the answer person. You start to funnel every little decision through you, and nobody's owning the decisions because you always save the day. So, this contributes to the fact that your team now doesn't take any ownership in the practice and it frustrates you, but you are creating this environment. So be aware of that. Don't do that. I'm gonna tell you what to do with that in just a moment. So we got to get rid of that expectation that our team's gonna care as much as we do, and we need to see how we play into this culture of being the answer person and not giving our team the autonomy so that they stick their neck out there and take some ownership of their decisions. But also, we need to look at the way that we speak to our team when we are kind of coaching, managing them, you know, providing corrections. So we got to be honest here. I want you to ask yourself when you are talking to your team, is there a lot of relationship building? Is there a lot of encouragement? Is there a lot of appreciation and gratitude? Or is a lot of these conversations you addressing problems and discussing mistakes and maybe talking about numbers and how they're not meeting the expectations or correcting systems and stuff like that, discussing the issues? Because here's the thing if all of your conversations are like that, you're never having any positive conversations, you're never having any just relational conversations, like how is your weekend? How's the kids doing? What do you guys got going on this summer? Things like that. Emotionally, this dynamic between employer to employee can start to feel very transactional. And people stop feeling seen by you. They just start to feel like they're just a number that's producing results and you pay them a certain amount of money for trading their time. And it's just
Build Connection Outside Corrections
a transactional. So we need to have some level of connection with our teams. So you might say, well, that's a waste of time. I'm too busy. I don't have time to shoot the, you know what, with my team, I've got to get to these things. I've been there, I've done that. But I've also experienced that when I get that way with my team and I feel disconnected from them, it also becomes very difficult to coach them. Because when I do coach them, it feels transactional because there was never any connection built in the other moments. And those connections, we want that with our team. And it's built in the small moments. It's not just in those leadership meetings, it's not in the office meetings, it's built in between patients. It's at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day. We need to spend time treating our team like people, like humans that have lives outside of work. So we got to ask questions. We got to notice when they've improved on something. We got to acknowledge their effort. I mean, think about something. When you ask somebody a question, I mean, you're getting curious, but you're also saying to that person, you matter to me. You're important. Like I care about you more than just the capital and the results you produce here at work. So it's very important that we do these things. We have to put some deposits into the ATM. We can't just withdraw all the time. So make sure you are spending the time that you're treating your people like people that you care about. And hopefully, hopefully that's easy for you to do because you truly do care about your people. That helps a lot too. If you don't care about your people, I don't know how to help you. Like maybe you should just like uh maybe you need to go on some medicine or something. I don't know. All right, let's talk about the next point is that our team will always support what they help build. If the team is bought into what you're creating, the solutions that you create, the systems that you build, they will be bought into seeing them through, making them work, troubleshooting them when they're not working. And that's what we want from our team. We want somebody else to make some decisions and own some of the results and take care of coming up with solutions on their own without us guiding them or providing any sort of guidance whatsoever. They know what the culture of the practice is, they know what we stand for. So make a decision, get it done. And if something's not working, come up with a solution and change it. But when you dictate everything, when you just dictate the workflows, this is the way we're going to do it. You're scripting everything. It's so easy for them to try to not make that work. Now, let me ask you this: have you ever been talking about a system that you wanted to do in your practice? And then all of a sudden, somebody raises their hand and they say, Well, what about Mr. Smith? And it's like the biggest outlier ever. It's like this thing that happened with Mr. Smith had
People Support What They Help Build
literally happened like once in 10 years. But like your system you just created, it's not going to cover that one time Mr. Smith did this really weird thing because he's just a big weird dude. And all of a sudden, like, what is that even about? I mean, that always drove me crazy. But what I eventually realized is that when my team is doing that, what they're trying to do is poke holes into this system that I'm dictating and ramming down their throat that this is the way you will do it. Versus if I would approach it like, hey, this is the issue, this is the problem that I see, this is the goal, this is the, this is what we're trying to work for. What are some ideas that you have for solutions? And this plays into like one of the strongest things that I teach to my coaching clients from a leadership perspective is our CVI method. You know, we teach all of our coaching clients this when we teach them the leadership portion and the leadership module of our omnipractice program is that CVI, curiosity, validation, and invitation, we want to invite people into the solutions. So we've got to get curious about what's going on, we've got to validate their perspective and we got to invite them into the solutions because when we do invite them in the solutions, that is when they will start taking ownership over the results. And if the system that they come up with, that they help come up with, if it doesn't work, instead of them just saying it didn't work, they're just gonna poke holes in and say, it didn't work, your idea was stupid, it didn't work. Instead of them doing that, they'll come up with a different solution. They'll pivot, they'll adjust, they'll discuss among themselves what we can do differently. Because now they own that system. They want to see it through, they want to see it work. Just like when you create a system, you want to see it through and see if that it works. When they play a part in creating it, they want to see it work as well. So it's a completely different level of ownership. But what do we do as dental owners? We so often just dictate what we want, what we need. We don't include everybody because I think some level deep down, we might not think they're smart enough to handle it. I don't know if that's true for you. I know it's true for a lot of dentists I've seen. So hopefully that's not the case, but it could be. So if that is, you want to change that mindset. Make sure you're involving your team in the solutions. And speaking of mindset, a big mindset thing that we have to change is what we think the goal of leadership is. I mean, the goal of leadership is not perfect obedience, it is not control. So often we're thinking that we're trying to control people, control what they do. And I get that. I know where that comes from. I get that that to some extent that is true. But I think a better way of framing it is that we're not trying to create control. We're trying to create engagement. There's a difference. When we're talking about control, we're talking about getting people to do exactly what we want them to do because we said so. But when we're talking about engagement, that's more about people doing what we want them to do because they are enrolled, they are engaged, they are part of it, they're owning the solution, they're engaged, they want the result. It speaks to their autonomy, not to us having power over them. So if we can get that team engaged, I mean, that's a good thing. I mean, what does a highly engaged team do? I mean, they just work together better. It's a part of a great culture. It solves problems, they communicate with each other
Trade Control For Real Engagement
better, they notice the issues and they address them. I mean, these are things that you have to encourage and you have to notice and you have to champion them at your practice because this is the culture that you're trying to build. You're trying to build engagement. And I can tell you from working with so many practices in the past eight years, is when we build a culture like this intentionally, these are the ones for the owner that feel the lightest emotionally because the owner stopped carrying that emotional burden of all the decisions and all of the results by themselves. They stopped carrying it by themselves. The team started to carry it through engagement. So if we can get them engaged, we win, right? All right, so let's talk about our tactical takeaways from today's episode. If you remember nothing else from today, I want you to remember your team's never going to emotionally experience ownership exactly the same way as you. Get rid of that expectation. It's only gonna make you angry. It's only gonna make you have some resentment for them. And if you want initiative from your team, you want them to take things on and just do them without you saying so. One, you've got to express that expectation. But two, you've got to create autonomy. You've got to give that to them. And that comes from having a safe place. You need to make sure that you're building the relationships with your team as well. It can't always be corrective. So often, dental owners, the only conversations they have with their team members are corrective. It's about problems, it's about mistakes, it's about addressing issues. We need to have interactions that are positive, that treat them like people that have lives outside of work, people that we care about. It can't always be corrective. And we need to include our team in creation of the protocols and the processes that we do. This is one of those things that's awesome about our omnipractice program is that
Tactical Takeaways And Next Steps
in phase two, we start building the leadership team so that your team is part of the solutions so that you don't have to do everything. But then, two, it starts to trickle down this autonomy, this initiative, this level of control that you're giving your team and saying that I want you guys to come up with solutions. We're on, we are a team. This is not a dictatorship. We are a team who works together and comes up with solutions together. So when you can get your team to come up with the solutions, that's when the buy-in really increases because they help build those systems and the solutions. So they want to see them through, they own them and they make sure that things work. And if they're not, they come up with solutions. And lastly, a connected culture where everybody is engaged. It is intentional. If you listen to this podcast for any level of time, you know that I feel like that. It is so intentional. We got to be intentional about our culture. We got to be intentional about the things that we create and the things we're going to allow, what we will tolerate, and what are the things that we're really going to encourage on our team. So we can get intentional about the culture. It happens intentionally, not accidentally. So this week, I want you to take a hard look at how much autonomy, how much initiative, how much is your team contributing? And do you feel frustrated that your team doesn't own more of the practice emotionally? Because if that is the case, start looking in the mirror. Look at what you're doing to create this environment and see if there's some behaviors that we talked about today that you might be doing that's helping to contribute to this divide, to this expectation that they're not meeting. Because I assure you, if you can intentionally create the culture you want and you know what you want, you want a team that's engaged, you want them to make decisions on their own, you want them to own the results. If you want that, it's there's a way to build it. And if you need help building that, please reach out to us. Go to dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy, set up a strategy call with me. I'm happy to talk you through what we can provide and what kind of practice you can expect to have. The results we can deliver for you. I know we can help you. So if you just want to have a no pressure conversation about it, reach out, set up a strategy call with me. Happy to talk. And if you like what you heard today and you like this podcast, I would so appreciate it if you would just take the time to leave a five star review. It means the world to me and it helps more people find this podcast. Thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with me. Have a great week at work this week. And I hope you have a great day at the office today. We'll talk to you next time.
