How Office Managers Can Unintentionally Keep Your Practice Stuck—and How to Break Free

In today’s dental practices, many office managers are promoted from other positions within the team, whether it’s from hygiene, assisting, or the front desk. Often, these individuals have been loyal to the practice and are trusted by the dentist. As practice owners, dentists wear many hats — from patient care to making decisions that affect the practice as a whole. When selecting an office manager, what dentists are truly looking for is someone they can trust which is why they look to their own team. 

While trust is certainly needed in your office manager, we need to be sure we are not blindly trusting the people who are in such a vital role in our practices. No matter how skilled or dedicated a dentist is, it’s simply impossible for one person to know every detail of the practice. How the phones are answered, the status of accounts, the intricacies of the insurance billing cycle, or the overall patient experience can all differ greatly from what the dentist is told. The truth is, when you’re not in the room, what actually happens in your practice may not always match what you’re being told.

Office managers hold significant responsibility and are often under immense pressure from themselves or the dentist alike to perform. Whether they’ve been promoted internally because of their loyalty and trustworthiness or hired based on past experience and have promised to grow the practice, our hope is most office managers genuinely start out wanting to help the practice thrive-that they are committed to doing their best and improving the practice for the dentist and the team.

Most start out with that enthusiasm to better the practice but oftentimes they lack the specific training or skills required to perform their role effectively. It is easy for an office manager to then find themselves in over their head, surrounded by chaos very quickly. But in a natural attempt to keep the trust the dentist has instilled in them and to perform in their new role it's common for office managers to mislead the dentist into thinking everything is running smoothly or that certain things just can’t be changed. 

A classic example that we hear is when an office manager tells the dentist that it’s not possible to take a panoramic X-ray and bitewings during a new patient’s first visit because it can’t be billed to insurance. The dentist, trusting their office manager, accepts this explanation as fact — when, in reality, this statement is not true. This example, and many more are prominent in practices everywhere. 

These statements are taken as fact by the dentist, and become entrenched in the practice culture. New team members are often told the same thing, and it becomes a widely accepted belief within the practice. However, limiting beliefs like these are the unnecessary barriers that keep our practices stuck, stagnant, and unable to grow. 

Statements like "patients won’t schedule this" or "patients won’t accept that" are often our own doing and stem from the verbiage we are using with patients. The same is true with insurance issues-it’s often our workflow that generates denials and can be as simple as the way we are filling out claim forms. 

Through our experience consulting with numerous dental practices, we’ve come to realize that these limiting beliefs are very common, they are not truths- but dentists, office managers, and teams have accepted them as fact. 

Understand that even when your office manager is well intentioned, these thoughts may have been passed down by their predecessors, or an old truth that is no longer true. We are all limited by the knowledge and practices we’ve learned over time. But in dentistry, it’s crucial to approach challenges with an open mind and a willingness to break free from unknown limiting beliefs. Breaking free means being open to realizing you have created a limitation-that there are other ways to do things. Without this mindset, practices will continue to be stuck in a cycle of stagnation.

If you’re asking why a certain procedure is or operation in the practice is done a certain way and it is stated "that’s how it’s always been done." That is not an answer. That is a sign you need to continue to ask, “but why” until you get to the answer. If you’re a dentist asking this question to your office manager and are faced with defensiveness, then you need to ask “why”. If you're an office manager, you need to be willing to ask yourself if the way you have always done things has room for improvement.

If your practice is experiencing stagnant results or if you’re far from achieving the goals you once dreamed of, it’s time to re-evaluate and get back to your original vision. It all starts with breaking free from limiting beliefs and embracing a new way of thinking. Whether it’s being open to new perspectives, changing old habits, or simply asking if there’s a better way to achieve your goals, it’s possible to take achieve a more profitable practice with ease- if you are willing to question things with an open mind and a willingness to break free from limiting beliefs

If you're stuck in the same cycle, unwilling to make progress in a certain area, or within the practice as a whole, reach out to us at [email protected]. We are here to let you know the vision you have for your practice is possible.