If you’ve got a DDS or a DMD after your name, you had to be “right” a lot to get it. You had to be right on written tests. You had to be right on multiple choice tests. You had to be right on clinical evaluations. You had to be right on oral exams.
Dentists are penalized for being wrong.
It’s hard to find a dentist that can say, “I was wrong” without throwing up a little in the back of their mouth. But that’s because for nearly a decade of formal education, being wrong was perceived as a threat to our success. What it took to get into dental school (and stay in) had very little room for error. Beyond the educational component, the career itself doesn’t exactly lend itself to a high error rate either. Admission, graduation, diagnosis and treatment is all on you.
The need to run a practice like a business is becoming more pressing than it once was. And although most dentists can compensate for practice expenses that escalate simply by working harder and billing more, the burden of carrying the weight of everything from patient care to payroll, marketing to ordering, while carrying a seven figure loan takes a toll.
It does not come naturally for a dentist to leverage other people in a way that most other businesses do to delegate and achieve a higher level of freedom from the businesses that they own. That’s never been taught and it’s never been rewarded. So naturally, I believe that burnout amongst dentists is built in the systematic way they work. Dr. Christine Sinksy, a retired internist and current vice president of professional satisfaction at the AMA said in 2022, “Burnout is not the result of a deficiency in resiliency among physicians, rather it is due to the systems in which physicians work.” Having worked for dentists since 2018, I believe this is also true for dentistry. It is rarely doing too much dentistry that burns the clinician out; It’s everything else.
The golden years of dentistry are gone. Gone are the days where we hang up a “shingle” and the patients flood the office. Or where job applications from people looking to build a three decade career working in your office are landing on your desk unsolicited. Regulatory requirements, employment legislation, targeted marketing, the patient experience, communication, clinical skills, and technology upkeep require intention and focus to maintain and grow a practice. The dentists graduating today will have a very different path forward than those who are approaching hanging up the handpiece. And if the younger generation tries to do it the way the previous generations have, their practices simply won’t survive, or they won’t have the career longevity their professional ancestors did.
Getting advice from experts requires a certain vulnerability, collaboration, and desire to accept advice and leverage that for your benefit. But again, this is not something most dentists do naturally. When it comes to knowledge and capability with clinical skills, not having the answer is perceived as a weakness. It’s a lower mark, it’s a compromised clinical result. I would argue that in business the opposite is true. If you have to know everything and do everything, you’ve created a job not a business. You’ve created a system that will deplete your resiliency rather than augment it. There are far more spokes in the wheel to run a practice now than ever before, and the preparation you got in school did not teach you how to leverage people and experts. They taught you how to fix the patient which you’re undoubtedly exceptional at.
Silo’s stand alone. Lions leverage their community. Becoming a dentist is achieved by being a silo. Owning a business that contributes to your freedom and sustainability requires you to think more like a lion. Build your network of solid people in order to build resiliency. As Dan Sullivan wrote in his book of the same title, it’s “Who Not How.”
Who do you need to create more freedom in the career and business you have built?
