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Improving Team Communication in Dental Practices: 7 Essential Strategies

By Jamie MorleyMarch 13, 2025

Have you ever walked into your dental practice or any other dental practice and sensed tension in the air? Often, this is due to communication issues. Effective communication is the secret to relieving this tension and having a smooth-running clinic. Discover seven essential strategies for improving team communication to transform your dental practice into a well-oiled machine.

Recognise difference in communication styles

Impact

This principle is crucial for enhancing communication. If we don’t recognise that we are all different, with unique backgrounds, personality traits, and approaches, it may seem like individuals communicate in ways that we take personally. The vast majority of the time, it is not personal; it stems from their personality, experiences, and even what is happening for them at that moment. It also involves acknowledging that these differences will lead to better decision-making in various situations, ultimately paving the way for success in your practice.

How to do it

One way to do this is to have team members complete a personality profile to understand their own profile and how it differs notably from other people on the team. There are many different types of personality profiles, all of which are useful. I am a partner for Everything DiSC, which is a great tool for understanding different personalities and for keeping them alive within the team with Everything DiSC Catalyst.

Another way to do this is to have people share something with the rest of the team. The more people start to share information about their values and beliefs, the more you start to understand each other. This can be effectively done in a team session if appropriately facilitated.

You can also do a simple exercise by pairing people up and having them take turns explaining how they like to be communicated with.

Understanding our differences can really help us understand the different views we may all have and diffuse the feeling that it is personal.

Take the Dental Team Dynamics Assessment to determine how well your team communicates and receive a FREE copy of my book, Lead Your Dental Practice!

Create a psychologically safe environment within your dental practice team

Impact

For those of you who read my other blogs you will know that I come back to this point fairly regularly..To improve the communication within your dental practice you have to create a psychologically safe environment; otherwise, there won’t be any communication or little cliques will develop where they will communicate only to each other. This will mean that people will not collaborate, and there will be no growth and development in how things are done. Things will not be called out when there are problems.

In his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni discusses a type of trust where team members know they can address difficult topics, be open about mistakes, admit weaknesses, celebrate successes, seek assistance, challenge one another, and generally be vulnerable. They do not fear negative interpersonal repercussions for doing so. Essentially, they feel safe engaging in these actions. The term ‘psychological safety’ refers to an environment devoid of inter personal consequences. In her book The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson elaborates extensively on the significance and effects of this type of environment.

How to do it

To create an environment of psychological safety in your dental practice:

• be genuinely open and curious about what your team are saying to you

• really listen and understand what people are saying

• ensure the team is also behaving in the same way with each other

• notice and be aware of feelings and emotions that arise in you and in others

• when mistakes happen, don’t sweep them under the carpet, call them out

• probably most important is that when somebody shows vulnerability they are not laughed at, ridiculed, dismissed or made to feel embarrassed or ashamed

Take the Dental Team Dynamics Assessment to determine how well your team communicates and receive a FREE copy of my book, Lead Your Dental Practice!

Develop structure and be disciplined in sticking to it

In order to improve communication it is important to develop structure for that communication to take place.

There is communication that takes place on an ad hoc basis as you are going along. This tends to be about the immediate events happening within a dental practice. A new patient comes in with a particular request and you respond appropriately. A dentist is looking for something for a patient, and one of the team members responds appropriately. These are ad hoc bits of communication.

At the same time it is also important to create time and space for communication between team members that is not just about something in the immediate term. If you don’t create this time it will not happen. You must create an ongoing structure to allow for these meetings to take place and you must then be disciplined in sticking to these meetings.

Because these meetings are not seen as ‘urgent’ or something else will appear to be more urgent, it is often tempting to cancel them, thinking that it won’t matter. Yet, it will matter. You must come back to why you are having the meetings, which is to improve communication, and the impact that better communication will have on the practice. If you don’t, more things will be coming up day to day to deal with due to poor communication and then you are more tempted to skip the meetings you have put in place. It becomes a vicious negative cycle.

On the other hand, if you have proactive structured meetings, less urgent meetings will come up and this will give you more time to work proactively. It becomes a positive cycle.

Take the Dental Team Dynamics Assessment to determine how well your team communicates and receive a FREE copy of my book, Lead Your Dental Practice!

Clarify roles and responsibilities within your dental practice

The impact

A way to improve communication is for everybody to understand who is responsible for what. For each individual to have real clarity about their areas of responsibility and to know who is responsible for other areas of the practice.

This means they know who to go to when they need to collaborate on something. It avoids duplication of work and effort. It avoids things not being done as everybody thought somebody else was doing something, which can lead to conflict amongst the team. Or it can lead to somebody doing something that somebody else is doing, leading to conflict and extra communication. It leads to additional communication, which is wasting time.

In short, without clarity of roles and responsibilities communication becomes extremely inefficient. When there is clarity, communication is efficient.

How to do it

Take a good look at the every role to make sure that it is clear who is responsible for what. This is not just about specific tasks but what is a person's overall responsibility. Make sure somebody has responsibility for all the different areas of the dental practice. Share these with the whole team. Give clarity for everybody. Don’t just keep them in a file hidden in the darkest depths of your hard drive!

Take the Dental Team Dynamics Assessment to determine how well your team communicates and receive a FREE copy of my book, Lead Your Dental Practice!

Have regular team meetings

The impact

Regular team meetings provide a forum where everybody can communicate with each other. It is an opportunity for everybody to communicate and be aligned about the same topic. It is also an opportunity for everybody to have a voice and input into different topics. This is critical for getting buy in and commitment to specific topics or strategies. It can also be an opportunity to discuss how you operate as a team. To raise any ‘issues’ there may be.

How to do it

This is where it can all go horribly wrong. It is very difficult to get people together in a dental practice. People are working at different times as well as having different contractual relationships with the practice. Therefore when the meetings take place you have to think very carefully about what is best to do with that time. It is a very valuable use of time if you do it properly. If you don’t it is a big waste of time and then the practice principal will go, well that was waste of time and not do it again.

There are also different types of team meetings that may take place. You can have a team huddle for 10 minutes before a specific clinic. Or you can have a meeting for everybody in the practice for an hour every month. Or you can have an offsite meeting for the whole team once a year. All these need to take place, but they all have a different purpose.

Be very clear about the purpose of that meeting and what you are looking to achieve. This brings me back to the structure and discipline principle stated earlier. Don’t just have a meeting and rock up without a clear idea of what the purpose of it is.

If you are getting everybody together for a team meeting, then make sure it is not going through things and telling them what to do. You can do this via many other forms of communication.

What you want is the discussion and input from the team where everybody is present to hear different perspectives and come to an agreement as to how to move forward best.

Take the Dental Team Dynamics Assessment to determine how well your team communicates and receive a FREE copy of my book, Lead Your Dental Practice!

Have 1:1 meetings

The impact

Whilst group meetings are extremely valuable, it is also important to have 1:1 meetings as well. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, there is a well-known cognitive bias of group think, which essentially means that people are heavily influenced by the thinking of the group around them. This can therefore sometimes make it difficult to get the real perspectives from everybody on a specific topic. This is particularly true if this person is on their own in terms of their thinking versus the rest of the group. Yet, it is this perspective that can sometimes be crucial.

Secondly, some people are more reluctant to speak up in a group setting. Especially those who are more introverted are much less likely to speak up in that setting.

Thirdly, you are less likely to hear from somebody about how they are feeling in general and even on a specific topic in a group setting. Yet, these emotions are crucial to understand in order to communicate effectively.

How to do it

If you are a practice principal you may well be thinking well I don’t have time for that. How am I going to find time to do that? You don’t necessarily have to do it. You may chose to do it just with your key people. For example your Practice Manager, who in turn will take time to have 1:1s with team members. Your Lead Nurse could do it with each nurse. You can decide how you organise this, but create a regular structure of 1:1s where everybody has that 1:1 time.

How are you 1:1s versus practice stuff 1:1s? This may sound strange, but when people do 1:1s, we often get into specific things that need to be discussed and resolved in terms of the practice. For example with a TCO you want to discuss how to change the method for dealing with patient enquiries. This is totally reasonable and according to the individuals involved will be very valuable. What I want to highlight is the need to also have 1:1s to purely connect with the other person and to see how they are. To see how they are feeling in their world. It is about them. If they feel heard they are much more likely to be open and to communicate about where they are at and how that relates to the practice.

Take the Dental Team Dynamics Assessment to determine how well your team communicates and receive a FREE copy of my book, Lead Your Dental Practice!

Agree expectations

The impact

Agreeing expectations in terms of communication will help prevent disagreements and will prevent time being wasted on how communication has happened or hasn’t happened.

How to do it

Bring the team together in a facilitated session that enables everybody to discuss and agree some clear expectations about how you communicate with each other. Consider the following questions:

• What do people expect in how they communicate with each other?
• What is ok?
• What is not ok?

Conclusion

Effective communication is central to everything within a dental practice and has a wide-ranging impact. Improving your communication will improve your performance as a dental practice on many fronts. Patient care, patient experience, conversion rates, employee engagement, team morale. The list goes on…

Consider these 7 strategies to achieve this:

• Recognise difference - It is not personal
• Create a psychologically safe environment
• Develop structure and be disciplined in sticking to it
• Clarify roles and responsibilities
• Have group meetings
• Have 1:1 meetings
• Agree expectations

 

Take the Dental Team Dynamics Assessment to determine how well your team communicates and receive a FREE copy of my book, Lead Your Dental Practice!