The short answer
Most practice managers do not lack capability; they lack authority that is real. Give them a defined scope, a number they own, permission to decide inside it, and a weekly conversation with you about outcomes rather than tasks. If you keep overturning their decisions in front of the team, they will stop making them.
Before concluding you hired the wrong person, check whether the role was ever built. Many dental practice managers were promoted from reception or dental assisting because they were reliable and organised, and were then given a title, more tasks and no authority. That produces a very good administrator and a leader nobody follows — which is a design outcome, not a personality one.
Give them decisions the team can see them make
Leadership is conferred by observation. If the team watches every meaningful call route around the manager to you, no amount of title will make them a leader. Name the decisions that are now theirs, tell the team, and then hold the line when someone tries to go over their head — including when they come to you at the end of a long day.
Coach the conversation they're avoiding
Ask which conversation they've been putting off. There will be one, usually with a long-serving team member. Prepare it with them, rehearse it, let them have it, then debrief. Nothing else builds managerial confidence as quickly as surviving the conversation they were dreading.
Give them numbers, not just tasks
A manager who owns three numbers behaves commercially. A manager who owns a task list behaves like a task list. Pick the three that matter in your practice — commonly acceptance rate, unfilled clinical hours and wages as a percentage of revenue — and make them the manager's, reviewed weekly.
Protect their time
Managers who still work chairside or on reception most of the week cannot lead; they're absorbed. Ring-fence non-clinical hours and treat them as untouchable rather than as the first thing sacrificed when someone calls in sick.
Give it a genuine ninety days with authority, a standard, coaching and protected time before you decide it's a hiring problem. Sometimes it is — and if you've done those four things, you'll know quickly and be able to act without doubt.
Where this gets solved
Team & leadership work →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 .