The short answer
A practice needs you for clinical work and direction. It depends on you when routine decisions stall until you answer. The test is simple: list every question you were asked this week and mark which ones someone else should have been allowed to decide.
There is a difference between a practice that needs your judgement on a handful of genuinely owner-level decisions, and a practice that has been trained to wait for you on almost everything. The second one feels like loyalty. It is actually a design fault, and you built it.
How it gets taught
Every time a good owner answers a question faster and better than the team could, the team learns the fastest route to a correct answer is to ask the owner. Repeat that a few hundred times and you have a practice with excellent service standards and no independent decision-making.
Four honest questions
- If you were uncontactable for three weeks, what would stall — and would it be decisions or tasks?
- Who is allowed to spend money without asking you, and up to what limit?
- When someone underperforms, who has the conversation?
- What do people wait to ask you at the end of the day?
The fix is authority, not absence
Owners usually try to fix dependence by disappearing. That just creates a queue. Transfer decision rights first, name the standard, then reduce your days. In that order it holds; in the reverse order it collapses and everybody concludes stepping back does not work.
Where this gets solved
Score your practice in two minutes →Written by
Rhea Jain, founder of Swift Transformations Pty Ltd and owner-operator of a multimillion-dollar Australian dental practice, with a BSc in Psychology and a Master of Human Resource Management.
Last reviewed .