The Complete Dentist

Positive Leadership and Communication Skills for Success

Barry Polansky

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119250821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Dentistry

The Complete Dentist: Positive Leadership and Communication Skills for Success is a one-of-a-kind guide to starting and running an effective and successful dental practice.

• Presents tried-and-true ideas and methods for effective communication, blending positive psychology with leadership in dentistry
• Describes the five elements of success and happiness, offering pathways to a flourishing dental practice
• Considers the reasons why communication and leadership skills are important for dentists

Part I
The Problem

“How we see the problem is the problem.”

Stephen Covey

“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”

Colin Powell

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

We live storybook lives. Just like in the movies, there is a pattern – a formula, if you will – that can determine whether we will succeed or fail. Many of us see our graduation from dental school as an ending when, in reality, it is just another scene change. In all likelihood, it is just the end of Act I, and now the real adventure begins. Act II, as in the movies, is where most of us get to fight the dragons that will determine whether we get to the places of our dreams. It is in Act II where we get to apply everything we learned up to that point. Every era has its own set of issues that must be confronted, or not. Are you prepared for this journey?

For me, Act II was a series of trials and revelations. There was a time when I denied that I had a problem. I lived in the world of “shoulds.” You know that world. It is what some call the just‐world fallacy, as proposed by Melvin Lerner [1]. That theory is a cognitive bias that a person’s actions are inherently inclined to bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person. In other words, the just‐world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to – or expect consequences as the result of – a universal force that restores moral balance. For many dentists, the just‐world hypothesis can be interpreted as becoming the very best technical dentist one can become, and everything will take care of itself. This idea can be illustrated by the commonly used belief of “you build it and they will come.”

For the early part of my career, I believed that to be true. As a matter of fact, I was told that from my parents and teachers, growing up to my very favorite mentors in dental school and beyond. It was only through my own experiences that I realized I would have to work out the solutions to the problems that seemed to have no answers, or only very vague answers. When I brought my problems to those closest to me, I only received advice that fell back to the “shoulds.” It was frustrating. Not solving these problems began to create pain. The pain showed up in various forms. I still hear dentists, young and old, speaking about the pain. Throughout this book, I will interview dentists at certain points along their journey; some have achieved success, while others are still in pain. When you hear their voices, as I do, you will share many of their feelings. Their pain, as was mine, flows from not clearly defining the cause or the problem.

Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.” Navigating a career in dentistry is like solving a giant complex problem. This Part of the book is about seeing the problem from all sides – figuring out where to start the solution, and where the solution will take us. As the three wise men I have quoted above tell us, leadership is first deciding what the problem is. How we clearly and simply define the problem is how we attack it. The problems we define today may not be the same as I faced, while some of the problems will be exactly the same – certainly, the pain is the same. In Part I, I will discuss some of the problems that effect us all at an individual, organizational and even an industry‐wide level.

Reference

1. 1 Lerner, M.J. and Montada, L. (1998). An Overview: Advances in Belief in a Just World Theory and Methods. In: Leo Montada and M.J. Lerner (eds). Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World (1–7). Plenum Press: New York.

1
The Many Faces of Dentistry – A Fragmented Field

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Fellowship of the Ring

“Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.”

Leo Tolstoy, from War and Peace

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Aristotle

What is Dentistry?

If you ask the above question to any number of people, from general dentists, to patients, to dental educators, dental technicians, and specialists, you will get different answers. There is an old Indian story which has spread through many cultures over the ages. In the story, six blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each man is told to feel a different part of the elephant, but only one part, such as the leg or the tusk. Predictably, each man offers a vastly different assessment. One says an elephant is like a rope (tail), while another says it’s like a pillar (leg), or a fan (ear). They argue. Each man is convinced that his experience is the correct one.

All of the men are correct. Each part is described in explicit detail. The problem arises when each individual point of view is mistaken as describing the whole truth. By taking too narrow a focus, we can miss the forest through the trees. The problem comes when people become attached to their very narrow points of view.

This parable is a great example of one of dentistry’s biggest problems … fragmentation. Dentistry is not unique in this regard. Many industries are compartmentalized and reduced to their individual components. How we define something determines how we treat it. As they say, in order to tame it, you must name it. Since this is a book about leadership in dentistry, I will explain how fragmenting this profession can be a source of major problems for a dentist.

Most dentists know that patients truly don’t understand dentistry. Most, when asked, will tell you it is the science of teeth and gums. The language that patients use is enough to know that even the most astute patient doesn’t have a firm grasp of dentistry. Their dental IQ is generally insufficient to understand the entire scope of dentistry.

Dental offices regularly take calls from patients asking for a cleaning when they need much more involved treatment. Barbara R. called the other day, reporting to my front desk person that she had a cavity. We asked her how she knew she had a cavity, and she reported that she was having some pain. When Barbara came in for her appointment, we determined that she had a abscess under an existing crown. Barbara, like many patients, does not understand dentistry or its language. What they do understand is what concerns them. They understand what dentistry means to them: cosmetics, comfort, health, cost, fear, time. Those are the general benefits of dentistry and the main objections to dentistry. Patients depend on us for our leadership to guide them toward better health, hygiene and cosmetics. Yet dentists who lack leadership and communication skills get caught up in more confusing scenarios.

There are others parties whose points of view affect the way dentistry is practiced. Insurance companies and dental service organizations claim that their view of dentistry always puts the patient first. Veteran dentists who have worked with third parties and have had disputes about treatment know that fees and covered services are what drive the third parties. Their view of dentistry is driven by the business side of dentistry, but dentistry, as you will see, has a human side as well. When any business only looks at the financial side, rather than the human side, something must suffer – especially when it comes to health care.

Then there is the government. They, too, have an agenda. The government’s role is to help all people have access to health care. Obviously, this has not worked very well, considering all of the bickering that has been going on in Washington. Dental educators want their students to graduate on time with the skills necessary to do a good job. With all of these varying points of view, it’s no wonder that dentists truly don’t understand what dentistry is all about.

Take the National Football League as an example of an organization that falls under the heading of professional sports. Once again, there are many points of view about football. Fans, like patients, have their own selfish way of looking at football. Players have their points of view, and the way some football players conduct themselves these days, it’s a good thing that there are higher powers. Those higher powers would be the owners and the NFL Commissioner. Hopefully, these leaders are there to protect the integrity of the game, for the future of the game. In other words, leaders are mostly concerned with integrity and long‐term values.

The Latin root of the word integrate is integrare, which means “to make whole.” One of the themes of this book is that dentistry is a complex field. Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi [1] tells us that evolution has always favored complexity. By complexity, he means highly differentiated and integrated at the same time. If the components are not highly differentiated and integrated, then the result is too simple and not destined to hold up over time. If the components are not integrated, or do not properly communicate with one another, then the result breaks down due to being overly complicated. If dentistry is to survive as a dignified and noble profession, it can only do so with integrity – organizational integrity, as well as individual integrity. I will discuss how to deal with this issue throughout this book. The very best leaders think in terms of sustaining values through integrity.

Wholism vs. Reductionism

In the Prologue, I mentioned that my entire world changed when I was exposed to the Pankey Philosophy. The question to ask is, what made my world change? Was it that I was understood dentistry a deeper level? That I understood the role of occlusion and that, for the first time, I could treat disorders that I could not even diagnose before? Or was is that I now took a more comprehensive approach to dentistry? Maybe it was all of those things, or maybe it was that I now had a model to look at that I could copy. The model or paradigm that I was exposed to was the first model of dentistry that I had ever been exposed to, and it made me feel comfortable. It put an order to what I was doing where none had existed before. Things made more sense to me. That’s what paradigms do.

One of the most influential books ever written on leadership is Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Coincidentally, this book was published just as I was going through my deepest issues in my life and dentistry. Covey questioned the way we think, or our lens of perception [2].

Some of the greatest thinkers of our time were systems thinkers. Einstein, Leonardo and the great Greek philosophers like Plato, Socrates and Aristotle were big picture thinkers, who started with mental models that clarified their thought processes. These models, perceptions, or frames of references are known as paradigms – the way we see the world, as Covey says, “not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting.” [3] For me, this is a starting point. My whole career up until that point was compartmentalized into subjects like form and fu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I: The Problem
• Part II: The Solution
• Part III: Leadership Ethos
• Part IV: Pathos – Other People Matter
• Part V: Logos – Where the Rubber Meets the Road
• Part VI: Epilogue
• Index
• End User License Agreement