Dentistry has remained a resilient field through several negative global and national events, and two dental leaders say the playbook for the next round of uncertainty is simple: stay calm and communicate, even when you don’t have all the answers.
Two dental leaders joined Becker’s Future of Dentistry Roundtable Sept. 14-15 to discuss best practices for organizational leadership.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What does effective leadership look like during periods of uncertainty, particularly around labor costs, recruitment, regulation and macroeconomic challenges?
Carrie Mauterer, DDS. Chief Wellbeing and Quality Officer at Peak Dental Services (Colorado Springs, Colo.): The only thing that’s certain in dentistry is uncertainty. I started in 1996. I’ve seen us go through all of it — the Y2K dot-com bust, 2008 was an interesting year — and I had to laugh a little bit at regulation because you think in your mind regulation is just always going to be there. It’s the most certain of the certains. But we all saw what Covid did to regulation. When Covid hit, I was serving as the president of the Colorado Dental Association, so it was my job to interpret what the governor’s executive orders were saying. It was wild. I had no idea regulation could come into my office and tell me how to practice dentistry. I think we had about 500 employees at that time navigating a full shutdown across multiple states, informing our employees what the plan was, what we were going to do to get them back to work safely and making sure they knew that we felt their safety was the number one priority. It was complicated. The only way to get through uncertainty is to just stay calm because dentistry has seen worse and we have made it through every time. It’s a very, very resilient industry. I would just say, when you’re up against uncertainty, just remember, stay calm, come up with a plan and execute.
Alix Laurain. CEO of Viridian Dental Partners (Nashville, Tenn.): I became CEO in an interim capacity about eight weeks before COVID happened. I’d been COO. The biggest thing I learned was that what people want in that moment is somebody coming and being like, “We don’t know all the answers, but we’re going to figure them out. I’m going to tell you things, we’re going to communicate.” Because nobody knew what was going on at that point, so me pretending like I knew exactly what was going on and how every decision was going to unfold and what the results were going to be would have been lying to them. That’s one of the number one ways to lose your employees’ trust is to act like you know what’s going on and you really don’t, and then things don’t go well. You don’t have to tell them everything, but you are telling them what they need to know, and you need to communicate proactively. In periods of uncertainty, don’t make somebody come to you and ask the questions that everybody has at that moment. If somebody does seem particularly concerned, make a point to follow up with them. Don’t lose the human touch. There’s not really a science to that aside from communicating with your people and being sure that they understand as much as you can. Tell them what’s going on and be proactive with it.
