…lead me. And that pretty much sums up the leader that our teams want us to be. No amount of fanciful presentations, offsite meetings and buzz words on pieces of paper will ever be as powerful as doing better things and doing them well.

Thankfully and in many ways, plenty of dental practice owners have been busy playing catch up, when compared to some leadership circles ‘outside’ of dentistry. This means that they will now have some great sounding words and ideas, sat beneath the popular headings of ‘purpose’ and ‘values’.  As this new style of leadership increasingly finds its way into dental practices, it will naturally get spread increasingly thinly. Time strapped dental practice owners who have just about survived the current crisis will of course look for something to bind their teams together. The problem is that their efforts may be flawed.

As I discovered the other day asking a dental practice owner about the values of the leadership team, it’s likely to be flawed when it is referred to as job to be ticked off the to do list for example.  “Yeah we’ve done that, we’ve told the team what our values are…”

Now read that again if you have to and let it sink in. And herein lies the problem. Leadership is not a single thing, an event or a moment in time because it has to evolve and it has to be time honoured, with some evidence and proof.

As one leadership commentator quoted recently…”Don’t tell me you’re  funny, make me laugh!”