Your Dental Team Is Learning What You Tolerate: How the Small Things You Allow, Ignore, Reward, and Repeat Quietly Become Your Practice Culture

By Sarah Beth Herman, MBA, Founder & CEO, Dentistry Support®

There is a sentence I hear in leadership conversations that almost always makes me curious:

“That’s just how they are.”

They’re always late, they never finish their notes, they’re terrible about following up, they’re negative, but patients love them, they don’t follow the process, but they’ve been here forever, they’re difficult, but they’re really good at their job, they don’t communicate well, but everybody knows that, they’ve always done it that way.

Read those again.

Because every time a leader says one of those sentences without doing anything afterward, the team learns something, not necessarily about the employee. They learn something about the standard.

And that is what I want to talk about in this week’s Dentistry Support® FREE TRAINING.

Not your mission statement, not the core values hanging on the wall, not what you said during your last team meeting.

I want to talk about the culture your dental team is learning from what actually happens inside your practice every day. Because whether you realize it or not, your team is constantly learning what really matters by watching what leadership allows.

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Your Real Culture Is Usually More Visible Than You Think

Most dental practices have expectations, be on time, take care of patients, complete documentation, answer the phone, follow up on treatment, verify insurance, communicate, help your teammates, follow the systems, protect patient information, be professional.

Great. Now forget the employee handbook for a minute.

What actually happens when somebody doesn’t do those things? That answer tells me much more about your culture than the written expectation does.

If one employee is consistently fifteen minutes late and nothing happens, the standard is no longer, “Be on time.”

The standard becomes:

“Be on time unless you’re someone leadership is willing to make an exception for.”

If one person continually fails to complete their responsibilities and another employee quietly finishes the work, your team learns something else.

The standard becomes:

“The most responsible person will eventually be responsible for everyone.”

If someone behaves disrespectfully but produces great numbers, your team learns that performance can purchase permission.

If leadership talks about communication but avoids difficult conversations, your team learns that communication is important only when it is comfortable.

None of those lessons had to be announced. They were demonstrated.

That is how culture is built.

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FREE TRAINING: WATCH WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE RULE IS BROKEN

Here is an exercise I want every dentist, practice owner and office manager reading this to do. Choose three standards you believe are important in your practice.

Maybe: Arrive on time. Complete your assigned work. Treat teammates respectfully.

Now ask yourself: What actually happens when someone doesn't? Not what should happen. What happened the last time?

That distinction matters.

Research on organizational culture has long emphasized the role leaders play in shaping culture through what they consistently pay attention to, reward, reinforce, and respond to (Schein & Schein, 2017).

Your employees don't need to study organizational psychology to understand this. They watch. And people are incredibly good at identifying the difference between an organization's stated rules and its operational rules.

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The Exception Eventually Becomes Information

There will always be exceptions, there should be. Human beings have emergencies, people get sick, children get sick, cars break down, life happens. Good leadership requires judgment.

But there is a difference between grace for an exception and normalizing a pattern. One late arrival because someone had a flat tire is an event, chronic lateness is a pattern. One missed task during an unusually difficult day is an event, regularly relying on another employee to finish your responsibilities is a pattern. One frustrated response during a stressful situation is human, repeated disrespect toward coworkers is a pattern.

Strong leaders learn to distinguish between the two, because if you treat every event like a pattern, your team experiences you as rigid. But if you continually treat patterns like isolated events, your team eventually experiences you as inconsistent. Neither creates a healthy culture.

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Your Strongest Employees Are Usually Watching First

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is assuming the employee creating the problem is the only person affected by it. They're not. Your strongest employees are watching, and frequently, they're compensating.

The hygienist who always helps, the assistant who stays late, the front office employee who notices something wasn't completed and quietly handles it, the billing coordinator who catches the mistake before it becomes expensive, the office manager who has learned which employee needs to be reminded three times.

These people can make a dysfunctional system look functional for a very long time. That's dangerous.

Because leadership may see the final result and think: “Everything got done.” The high performer sees: “Everything got done because I did my job and part of someone else's.” Those are very different experiences of the same day.

This connects directly to something I said recently on No Silver Spoons: “Consequences don't disappear just because a leader removes them. Most of the time, they transfer to somebody else.”

When leadership repeatedly protects someone from the consequences of poor performance, the consequence doesn't vanish. Someone absorbs it. Sometimes that's the owner. Sometimes it's the manager. And far too often, it's your best employee.

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Don't Accidentally Teach Your Best People to Care Less

This is where leaders need to be careful. High performers generally don't need someone standing over them reminding them to work, they already care.

But if they repeatedly watch lower standards tolerated while their reliability earns them additional work, eventually they may start asking a reasonable question: Why am I trying this hard?

That doesn't necessarily mean they'll suddenly become poor employees. Sometimes the first change is much quieter. They stop volunteering, they stop fixing things before anyone notices, they stop bringing ideas, they stop staying late, they stop protecting the system from itself.

And sometimes, eventually, they leave.

That is one reason fairness matters so much in leadership. Organizational justice research has repeatedly connected employees' perceptions of fairness with important workplace attitudes and behaviors (Colquitt et al., 2001).

Fair does not mean identical. Your employees have different circumstances, abilities, roles and needs. But people are paying attention to whether standards appear to have meaning.

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FREE TRAINING: FIND YOUR “BUT”

I want you to listen to yourself this week. Specifically, listen for the word but when you're talking about employees.

“She is constantly negative, but she's been with us forever.”

“He doesn't follow the process, but he's really good with patients.”

“She misses deadlines, but she has a lot going on.”

“He creates problems with the team, but his production is incredible.”

“She doesn't communicate, but that's just her personality.”

Sometimes everything after the “but” is legitimate context. Context matters.

But sometimes everything after the “but” is the explanation leadership has been using to avoid addressing everything before it.

Write down your “buts.” You may discover where your standards have quietly become negotiable.

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The Standard You Walk Past Becomes Harder to Enforce Later

Problems become more difficult to address when they've been tolerated for months. Imagine an employee has been arriving late for eight months. Leadership has noticed, everyone has noticed, nobody says anything.

Then one Tuesday, the office manager finally becomes frustrated and says: “This is unacceptable. You need to start arriving on time.”

The employee may reasonably wonder: Why is this suddenly unacceptable today?

That's the problem with delayed accountability. The longer leadership tolerates something, the more normal it becomes.

Then when you finally enforce the original expectation, it can feel to the employee like the standard changed.

It didn't. Leadership's response changed.

That is why clear expectations and timely feedback matter. Accountability works much better when it is predictable than when it arrives after six months of accumulated frustration.

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You Are Always Training Your Team

Training doesn't only happen in a conference room. You train your team every time something happens and they watch your response.

Someone makes an honest mistake and immediately tells you. How do you respond? Training.

Someone hides a mistake. What happens? Training.

Your best employee brings you a concern about another team member. Do you investigate it or dismiss it? Training.

Someone admits they don't know how to do something. Do you help them learn or make them feel stupid for asking? Training.

A high producer behaves terribly toward coworkers. Do the numbers protect them? Training.

Someone takes ownership without being asked. Do you notice? Training.

Someone tells you something you don't want to hear. What does your face do before your mouth says, “Thank you for telling me”? Training.

Your team is learning you all the time.

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This Doesn't Mean Becoming a Perfect Leader

Please don't read this training and decide you need to scrutinize every interaction you have. That's not the point.

You will be inconsistent sometimes, you will miss something, you will discover a problem later than you wish you had, you will give someone another chance and occasionally regret it. You will probably be too strict in one situation and too lenient in another.

Welcome to leading human beings while also being one.

The goal isn't perfection. The goal is becoming more aware of what your repeated responses are teaching.

And when you realize you've been teaching something you don't want your culture to learn, change the lesson.

You are allowed to say: “We've allowed this to continue longer than we should have, and that's on leadership. Going forward, here's the expectation.”

That's leadership too.

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FREE TRAINING: THE SEVEN-DAY CULTURE AUDIT

For the next seven days, don't evaluate your culture based on what people tell you in a meeting. Watch it.

Pay attention to what gets rewarded, notice what gets ignored, watch who gets interrupted, watch who speaks, notice who doesn't.

Pay attention to who fixes problems they didn't create. Notice which employees everybody goes to when something needs to get done. Watch what happens when somebody makes a mistake. Pay attention to the problems your team has learned not to bring you anymore.

Notice what happens when you're not physically in the room and especially pay attention to the things that make you say: “That's just how they are.”

At the end of the week, ask yourself: If a brand-new employee joined my practice and learned our culture entirely by watching what happened this week, what would they believe our standards actually are?

That answer is worth knowing.

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Before Monday's Episode

There's a reason I wanted this to be our FREE TRAINING this week. We're approaching the end of something I've really enjoyed creating.

All summer on No Silver Spoons, we've been working through The Human Side of Leadership™ Summer Series.

We've talked about the stories leaders tell themselves, why people stay stuck, why employees don't usually leave overnight, authenticity, respect, integrity, accountability, rescuing people and, most recently, the uncomfortable possibility that sometimes the leader may be contributing to the problem.

Monday is Episode 140. And it is the final episode of The Human Side of Leadership™ Summer Series and the Season 5 finale of No Silver Spoons.

I'm not going to give you that episode here. I want you to listen to it.

But I will give you the question we're ending this entire season with:

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What Will People Remember About the Way You Led Them?

This week's Free Training has asked you to look at what your team is learning from you right now. Monday, we're going to zoom much farther out. Because eventually the meetings end, people move on, teams change, careers change, and someone who once worked for you may someday tell another person what it was like to be led by you. You probably won't be there when they tell the story.

That's Monday's conversation. And there is one thought I want you carrying into it: There is a human being on the other side of your leadership.

Before Monday, complete the seven-day culture audit. Then come listen to Episode 140. Because I don't want us to finish this series thinking only about becoming more effective leaders. I want us thinking about what our leadership is leaving behind in people.

References

Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425–445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

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Disclaimer:

To learn more about Sarah Beth Herman, the author of all free training content you can read her bio here. These materials are intended to provide helpful information to dentists and dental team members. They are in no way a substitute for actual professional advice based on your unique facts and circumstances. This content is not intended or offered, nor should it be taken, as legal or other professional advice. You should always consult with your own professional advisors (e.g. attorney, accountant, or insurance carrier). To the extent, Dentistry Support ®has included links to any third-party website (s), Dentistry Support ® intends no endorsement of their content and implies no affiliation with the organizations that provide their content. Further, Dentistry Support ® makes no representations or warranties about the information provided on those sites. You can view our privacy policy and terms and conditions by clicking those pages in the footer of our website