Your Dental Team Is Reading the Room: The Leadership Skill No One Taught You in Dental School

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

There’s something that happens in dental offices every day, and I don’t think most of us give it much thought. The doctor walks into morning huddle after looking at yesterday’s numbers. The office manager comes back from a difficult conversation. Someone gets off the phone with an upset patient. A leader walks into the practice already thinking about payroll, staffing, the schedule, a personal problem, or the twelve other things that happened before 8:00 a.m. Nobody has said anything yet, but the team can tell something is different.

If you’ve worked in dentistry for any length of time, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Someone’s tone changes. Their answers get shorter. They’re quieter than usual. They walk into the room, and suddenly everyone else gets a little quieter too. Then people start trying to figure out what’s wrong.

Did something happen? Is the doctor upset? Did I do something? Is production down? Did somebody complain? Are we about to have a meeting?

Sometimes absolutely nothing is wrong with the team. The leader is simply having a bad morning. But the people around that leader don’t know that, so they start filling in the blanks themselves.

I want to spend this free training talking about that because I think there’s an entire part of leadership in dentistry that we tend to skip over. We talk about systems. We talk about case acceptance, production, collections, hiring, retention, schedules, KPIs and accountability. All of those things matter. But the person responsible for leading those systems matters too.

You bring something into the practice every day. So do I. The question is whether we know what it is.

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Dentistry Is Already a High-Pressure Environment

Think about everything that can happen inside a dental practice before lunch. Your hygienist is running behind. The lab case you need isn’t there. A patient wants to know why insurance didn’t pay what they expected. Someone called out. An emergency needs to be added to a schedule that already doesn’t have room for an emergency. The doctor is trying to move between operatories while somebody is waiting outside the door because they need an answer right now.

Meanwhile, the patient in the chair doesn’t care that any of this is happening. They’re nervous about the crown. That is dentistry.

There are a lot of emotions packed into a relatively small physical space, and we are expected to manage all of them while providing excellent care and running a profitable business. This is one reason I think leadership development in dentistry deserves far more attention than it gets.

Research examining leadership in primary-care dental practices has described leadership as relational and connected to emotional intelligence, clinician well-being, practice operations, and patient care (Making the Implicit Explicit, 2026). That makes sense to me because leadership in a dental practice doesn’t happen somewhere separate from patient care. It is happening right alongside it.

The interesting part is that most dentists weren’t trained for this. You went to school to become a dentist. Then maybe you bought a practice. Congratulations. You are now also responsible for HR, culture, conflict, performance, strategy, finances, hiring, firing, communication and the emotional dynamics of a group of human beings.

There wasn’t another degree handed to you at closing.

The same thing happens with office managers. Someone is exceptional at the front desk. They understand insurance. They know every patient. They can solve just about anything. Eventually, someone says, “You should manage the office.” Now they’re leading people. Those are two completely different jobs.

Research in dental practices has found relationships between leadership behaviors and team communication and has also identified inadequate leadership and communication training as potential contributors to staff stress and turnover (Mertens et al., 2020). That’s why I don’t consider emotional intelligence a nice extra. In a dental practice, it affects how the place runs.

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Pay Attention to What Happens When You Walk Into the Room

Here’s something I want you to try. For one week, pay attention to what happens when you enter different areas of your practice. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just watch.

What happens when you walk into sterilization? What happens when you approach the front desk? What happens when you join morning huddle? Does everyone continue talking normally, or does the conversation suddenly stop? When you ask a question, does someone immediately start explaining or defending themselves? Can people bring you a problem without first trying to determine what mood you’re in?

Those little reactions tell us something. Not necessarily something bad, either. I don’t want you walking around your practice analyzing every facial expression and deciding you’re a terrible leader. That misses the point.

I want you to become curious.

There have absolutely been times when I thought I was simply focused, and someone else experienced me as frustrated. There have been moments when I was moving quickly because I had ten things going on, and someone could have interpreted my short response as irritation.

Those things happen.

There’s a difference, though, between what we intend and what other people experience. You can say, “That isn’t what I meant,” and be completely correct. It still doesn’t change what the other person experienced. That’s an important distinction for a leader to understand.

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Your Team Does Not Need You to Be in a Good Mood All the Time

I want to be very clear about this because I think leadership advice can get ridiculous here. You do not need to walk into your dental practice smiling every morning and pretending life is wonderful.

I run businesses. There are stressful days. There are numbers I don’t like. There are conversations I don’t want to have. There are situations that frustrate me. There are days when I expect more from people. Sometimes someone on my team needs direct feedback, and sometimes a decision has to be made that people aren’t going to love.

That’s business.

Emotional intelligence does not mean becoming emotionless. It means recognizing what you’re feeling before everybody around you has to figure it out for you.

Blum (2025) discusses emotional intelligence within healthcare and dentistry as something relevant to leadership and something that can be assessed and developed.

I like the idea of it being developed because I am not the same leader I was 10 years ago. I’m certainly not the same leader I was in my twenties or early thirties. I would hope not.

You learn. You get things wrong. You realize certain approaches don’t work. You recognize patterns in yourself that you couldn’t see before. You get better at understanding when you’re frustrated, when you’re reacting instead of responding, and when something completely unrelated to your team is beginning to affect the way you’re talking to them.

That’s part of becoming a better leader.

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Try This at the End of the Day

Instead of giving you some complicated leadership exercise, I want you to do something that takes about five minutes.

At the end of your workday, ask yourself three questions:

What emotion did I bring into the practice most often today?

Where did I communicate differently because I was under pressure?

What did my team have to guess about me today?

That last one is important. When people don’t have information, they create explanations.

The doctor disappears into the office after looking at production. People wonder why. The office manager has a closed-door conversation and comes out quiet. People notice. Leadership suddenly schedules a meeting. Everyone starts wondering who is getting fired.

Half the time, the story happening in everybody’s head is far worse than whatever is actually happening.

You don’t need to tell your team everything. In fact, you shouldn’t. Sometimes a simple sentence is enough.

“I’m a little distracted today. It has nothing to do with anyone here.”

Done.

You didn’t dump your personal problems onto your employees. You didn’t overshare. You didn’t turn morning huddle into therapy. You simply gave people enough information that they didn’t have to spend the next four hours wondering whether you were angry with them.

That matters.

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Your Patients Are Watching This Too

This isn’t only about employees. Patients can feel the dynamics of an office remarkably quickly.

They know when the front and back office aren’t communicating well. They notice when an assistant seems uncomfortable asking the doctor a question. They can tell when everybody seems rushed. They notice tension even when they don’t understand where it’s coming from.

Research examining emotional intelligence in dentist-patient relationships has suggested connections among emotional intelligence, trust, communication, ethical decision-making, and the patient experience (Influence of Emotional Intelligence, 2025).

Another study examining leadership and patient-safety culture in a dental hospital found a statistically significant positive relationship between overall leadership and patient-safety scores (Interplay Between Leadership and Patient Safety in Dentistry, 2024).

That doesn’t mean a dentist having a bad Tuesday suddenly creates unsafe care. Research shouldn’t be stretched that far. It does remind us, though, that leadership, communication, team dynamics, and patient care don’t live in separate boxes.

Everything eventually touches something else.

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Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Question

I hear leaders ask some version of this all the time: “How do I motivate my team?”

I understand why we ask it. But I think there’s a better question.

What is it like to work with me?

Sit with that one for a minute.

What is it like to disagree with you? What is it like to tell you something went wrong? What happens when someone makes a mistake? Can your assistant tell you something doesn’t look right? Can your office manager disagree with an idea? Can somebody say, “I don't understand what you want me to do”? Can someone bring you bad news before they have figured out how to fix it?

Or has your team learned that they need to read your mood first?

Those answers tell me much more about the strength of a practice than whether everyone participates enthusiastically in morning huddle.

Leadership research in dentistry has described leadership as contextual and relational rather than simply a collection of traits possessed by one individual (Mertens et al., 2020). I think we sometimes make leadership more complicated than it needs to be.

Your team doesn’t need another motivational speech. They need to know what version of you they're getting when something goes wrong at 2:17 on a Wednesday afternoon.

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Ten Seconds

Here’s what I want you to practice this week. Pick one transition in your workday.

Maybe it’s right before morning huddle. Maybe it’s when you leave your office and walk onto the clinical floor. Maybe it’s before a one-on-one. Maybe it’s before you answer the phone when you already know the conversation is going to be difficult.

Give yourself ten seconds.

Ask yourself:

What am I carrying right now?

Then ask:

Does it belong in this conversation?

That’s it.

You don’t need to talk yourself out of being frustrated. You don’t need to manufacture some positive attitude. You’re simply noticing what is happening before you walk into another interaction.

Sometimes ten seconds is enough to realize that the person you're about to speak with had absolutely nothing to do with whatever happened five minutes ago. That realization can change the conversation.

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Monday, I Want to Take This Somewhere Else

This Monday on No Silver Spoons, I'm continuing The Human Side of Leadership series with Episode 137, “What Are You Carrying Into the Room?”

But the podcast conversation goes somewhere I deliberately haven't taken this training.

There’s a story from my early thirties that I have thought about many times over the years. It happened during an annual performance review while I was overseeing more than 30 dental practices.

At the time, I thought the story was about compensation. I don't anymore.

There were things happening inside that organization that everybody seemed to know and nobody was supposed to discuss. There was a leader sitting across from me who I had once experienced very differently. And before that person really said anything, I knew the conversation wasn't going to go the way I had hoped.

Years later, after owning and leading my own company for more than a decade, I understand that room very differently.

There are two lines from Monday's episode I'll give you now:

“Having an emotion is not the same thing as handing your emotion to everybody else.”

And:

“Access is not permission.”

The second one opens up an entirely different part of this conversation about integrity, confidentiality, information, and what happens when leadership gives us access to things other people don't know.

I want to save that conversation for Monday because it deserves its own space.

For now, here's where I want you to start.

Tomorrow, walk into your dental practice and notice what happens when you enter the room. Don't perform. Don't fix. Don't ask everyone if you're a good leader. Just pay attention.

And before your next meeting, give yourself those ten seconds.

What am I carrying?

And does it belong here?

We'll continue the conversation Monday on Episode 137 of No Silver Spoons.

References

Blum, I. R. (2025). Emotional intelligence and leadership in healthcare and dentistry. Primary Dental Journal, 14(3), 76–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/20501684251399517

Carr, E. O. (2025). Effectively managing difficult conversations with patients and dental teams. Primary Dental Journal. https://doi.org/10.1177/20501684251385741

Mertens, S., et al. (2020). Leadership in dental practice: A three stage systematic review and narrative synthesis. Journal of Dentistry, 102, 103480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdent.2020.103480

Shrivastava, S., Martinez, J., Coletti, D. J., & Fornari, A. (2022). Interprofessional leadership development: Role of emotional intelligence and communication skills training. MedEdPORTAL, 18, 11247.

Influence of emotional intelligence on patient-dentist relationships: A questionnaire development, validation and pilot study. (2025).

Interplay between leadership and patient safety in dentistry: A dental hospital-based cross-sectional study. (2024).

Making the implicit explicit: Leadership in primary care dental practice. (2026). Journal of Dentistry, 165, 106283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdent.2025.106283

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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