Unlocking Leadership Excellence: How Reflective Leadership Transforms a Dental Practice

By Jamie MorleyOctober 17, 2024

In today's fast-paced dental industry, where technology and patient expectations are constantly evolving, leadership can make or break your practice. But it's not just about making decisions and giving orders. True leadership excellence comes from within, through the practice of reflection and self-awareness. By turning the mirror on ourselves as leaders, we can catalyze profound changes that ripple through every aspect of our dental practices.

In this blog post, I'll explore how reflective leadership can be the game-changer your dental practice needs.

In the UK the GDC advocates reflective practice as written in this article and there are many articles out there in dentistry and broader healthcare about the importance of reflective practice for clinicians focusing on clinical practice. It is also essential for effective leadership. Reflective leadership will enable you to improve your leadership and consequently have a significant impact on the people you are leading.

Defining Reflective Leadership

Reflective leadership of a dental practice involves intentional and regular self-examination of one's leadership style, decisions, and actions to gain insights, learn from experiences, and continuously improve as a leader. 

Reflective leaders in dental practices actively engage in:

• Self-awareness: Developing a deep understanding of their own strengths, weaknesses, values, and biases that influence their leadership.

• Critical analysis: Carefully examining past experiences, decisions, and outcomes to extract meaningful lessons.

• Continuous learning: Using insights gained from reflection to adapt and enhance their leadership skills and practice management.

• Proactive improvement: Implementing changes based on reflective insights to enhance patient care, team performance, and practice success.

• Encouraging team reflection: Fostering a culture where all team members engage in reflective practices to drive collective growth and improvement1.

• Decision-making: Regularly reflecting on the decisions we make in terms of leading our practice.

What is the impact of reflective leadership a dental practice?

As human beings our brain works in either System 1 or System 2 mode according to Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast & Slow. System 1 is fast & automatic. It is unconscious. Whilst we need this to make the amount of decisions that we make in any one day if we over use it we go into this automatic decision making. This will lead to you carrying on with doing things that may be highly ineffective. If on the other hand you regularly take time to reflect on your leadership you will understand:

• What you have done and the impact of those actions both good and bad

• How you can develop your own leadership skills and behaviours

• How your leadership behaviours are engaging and developing the team around you to contribute to the success of the practice

• How you can encourage your team members to do their own reflection so as to develop their own behaviours and decision making

• How you are motivating, inspiring and facilitating team members to contribute to the success of your practice 

By consistently engaging in reflective leadership practices, dental practice leaders can foster a culture of continuous improvement, enhanced decision-making processes, and ultimately provide better care for their patients while supporting the growth and well-being of their team members and the practice.

How do you implement reflective leadership?

When I speak to people about implementing reflective leadership practices and ask them what reflective structures do you have in place many will not really understand the question and often they will answer that they reflect on specific situations as and when they occur. Usually this is focused on things that have gone wrong.

This is useful and yet it is also somewhat limited. Firstly it only happens when something goes wrong that you are aware of. There are of course many things that go well. Do you take time to reflect on those and to take on the learnings from things that have gone well? It is also limited because we are then only looking at a specific situation rather than looking over different periods of time which will give us a different perspective.

The other challenge is that as a dental practice leader you are pulled in many different directions. You may be leading the practice as well as doing the hands on clinical work. Typically time is a real challenge. So how do you overcome this?

Create Structures of Reflection

I think it is essential to create structured time for reflection and then stick to it with real discipline. When dentists put time in their diary that is outside of clinic time it often seems not to be as important to stick to the time that is scheduled in the diary. Treat it like a clinic. You wouldn’t just kind of ignore it when it flips up on your calendar. Put it in your calendar and make sure you stick to it.

When we reflect on different time periods it gives us a different picture. It is like looking through the lens of a camera. Different lenses give you a very different view. As an example you could take time to reflect on a specific patient who has made a complaint. This will give you one perspective. On the other hand you could look at the % number of complaints over the last month, quarter or year. They would all give you different perspectives looking back and also a different perspective looking forward in terms of what actions you might want to take as a result.

Reflect with other people

Set up time to reflect with other people. If you are a Practice Principal this could be with your practice manager or your partner. Take turns to look at your business. This helps give you different view points and helps ensure that you actually do take time to reflect.

You could also set up time with a coach who is impartial and yet challenges you on what you are doing, always looking to help you and your practice grow and develop. Again a good coach can help you gain different perspectives, can challenge you and hold you accountable to firstly making the time and then to implementing the actions you want to make as a result.

Encourage time to reflect as a team

Take time to reflect as a team on how you are performing. Put in place time to reflect as a team. A quarterly team meeting to look at how you are performing. Structure these in and stick to them. Again a skilled team coach can ensure there is an equal share of voice from around the group and can help the team move forward with real commitment and accountability.

Use a model of reflection

Use a model of reflection to help you ask yourself questions. There are various models out there. See this article on different models of reflection from Cambridge University. The model below by Gibbs is one that you can be good to use when starting our on reflective practice.

Reflect on these questions over the time period stated.

Write! Writing down helps us to process things and commit to them.

Action!

Make sure you are clear on the learnings and the actions in terms of anything that you may want to change as a result. Write it down. Really challenge it. Is this something that I actually want to commit to? What will the impact be of changing this? Is it worth it? If it is, then write down when you will do it and where. Fully commit to it. If you’re not sure then don’t do it and take it off the list. If it is not the time now to do it then create a place where you can write these actions down that are to be done at a later stage.

You will also find a useful article here by the GDC on implementing reflective practice.

Overcoming Challenges in Reflective Leadership

There are 3 key challenges in implementing reflective leadership.

Time constraints and prioritisation

You will most likely be somewhat time poor. You don’t have much ‘spare’ time. This will mean you will constantly be thinking that I need to do, do, do. This is really the point. You may be doing the wrong things if you don’t put in structured time to reflect. Block that time out and be disciplined about it. Involving others means it is much more likely to happen. Remind yourself of the impact.

Resistance to Change

It is highly likely that you and people in your team will feel resistance to such a change. Especially if you are a fast paced and results oriented person it will likely feel very uncomfortable as you will be wanting to get things done. Recognise this is uncomfortable for you or your team members. Come back to why it is important.

Maintaining Consistency

Create those structures involving other people, which will mean it is much more likely to happen. As an example set up monthly reflection time with another person on the performance of the practice and get the dates in early for the year. That way these are in the diary and other things cannot get in the way. Talk to the other person about how important this is. This sets up a barrier to you cancelling this because at a bare minimum you would have to let the other person know making it more difficult to cancel or simply not do it. You cannot just add in something in that time slot. Or rather you must not add in something in that time slot! Be disciplined

It is very important  to maintain consistency and discipline in the learnings and action that you take from the reflections. Be clear on the actions and take a record of them. There are lots of tools and software out there such as Trello where you can track these actions, note who is responsible for actioning them and seta date for when they need to be done. When you do this and see the action that is being taken and the impact of the actions you will start to recognise the benefit of undertaking consistent reflective practice.

Measuring the Success of Reflective Leadership

This actually brings us back to reflection! In order to measure the success of reflection you have to take time to reflect on its impact. There are 4 areas you can look at:

Impact of the actions

If you have a record of all the actions you have taken as a result of the reflective practice you can then look at the impact of those actions on the business. Relate it to some key performance indicators for the practice. Have 5 key performance indicators for the practice that you regularly track in terms of its overall performance.

Key performance indicators for the practice

Have a small number of key performance indicators for your practice that you consistently measure and reflect on. Track these to see the impact of the reflective practice overall. Are these moving in the right direction? Pick the right indicators to measure that are in line with your key strategies

Measure the effectiveness of your leadership

There are many ways in which you can measure the impact of your leadership

• Take the Fitting Leadership Scorecard at regular intervals, such as every 6 months, to honestly reflect on your on leadership. Track the process you have made.

• Undergo a 360 process every year or maybe every 2 years, such as the one we provide at Fitting Leadership, to get feedback from your team on you and your leadership.

• Undergo an employee engagement survey to see the impact of your leadership.

Growth & sustainability of your practice

For many practices you ultimately want the reflective leadership to grow your practice in a sustainable way.

Conclusion

Reflective leadership of a dental practice involves intentional and regular self-examination of one's leadership style, decisions, and actions to gain insights, learn from experiences, and continuously improve as a leader.

It requires putting in place structured time to consistently reflect on your leadership and the impact of your leadership.

Be disciplined in protecting that time. Involve others such as an outside coach to help keep you accountable to this.

Take the Leadership Scorecard to gain insights into your leadership. Take this again 6 months later to reflect on your progress as a leader.