📍 Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I am Sarah Beth Herman, CEO of Dentistry support, and this is the podcast where I talk about leadership, business, and growth, and what it really looks like to build something meaningful without having everything handed to you. Today I wanna talk about something that sits right at the center of how I lead.

How I run five individual companies, how I process really hard things, and honestly how I think people become trustworthy leaders in the first place. In my opinion, leaders go first. They go first. When something exciting happens, they go first. When something hard happens, they go first. When there's uncertainty, they go first.

When there's criticism, they go first, when there's a mistake. They go first when there's a win. And I know that sounds really simple and maybe a little too scripted, but is not simple when you actually live it it sounds inspiring until going first means saying something vulnerable.

Out loud. Sounds noble. Until going first means taking the hit for a bad review, a client disappointment, a changeover, a turnover, a misstep, a season that didn't go how you wanted it to go, a friendship you never saw ending, but it had to.  client you never thought would leave, and then they did. That is when you find out whether somebody actually wants leadership or whether they just want the image of leadership.

And I wanna start this episode with something people say to me sometimes they ask SarahBeth, why would you tell a story like that? Aren't you embarrassed? Or Why would you say that publicly? Or does it bother you when you get a bad review? Or, I saw you had a bad review. Or when I get on a phone with a prospective client and they say.

I heard about this, about your company. Does that embarrass you? How do you respond to that? Or maybe as of late I've heard, doesn't it make you sad when something doesn't work out with a client? The most recent one was, why would you share the messy parts if people could judge you for them, the answer is.

Of course, all of those things actually affect me. Of course, I care. Of course, I don't enjoy disappointing anybody. Of course, I do not want a client relationship to end badly. Of course, I do not want to see a review come through that tells me somebody had a frustrating experience with my company. I'm not numb, I'm not above it, and I'm not pretending Those things feel good in any way, shape, or form.

But I also know this. If you're going to lead, you cannot build your whole identity around avoiding discomfort. You cannot say you want to lead, but only when it's flattering. You cannot say you want to influence, but only when everybody agrees with you. You cannot say you wanna build something meaningful, but only if nobody ever misreads your intentions.

 Honey, that is not leadership. That is image management. And I think a lot of people are stuck there. They want this title, this credibility, this respect audience, this business growth, this team, this impact. So they create and they create and they create, and they work so hard on this image. But I think the real truth is, is that they don't want exposure.

The truth is leadership is exposure. Leadership means your decisions affect people. Leadership means your words carry weight. It means that when something goes wrong, people look to you before they look anywhere else. Leadership means if the room gets tense, you set the tone. Leadership means if somebody is scared to admit a mistake, your response teaches them whether honesty is safe.

Or honesty is dangerous. This is why leaders go first, and I do not mean first in some performative way. I do not mean making a big scene of your vulnerability. I mean, first in responsibility, first in honesty, first in accountability, first in emotional steadiness, first in saying, we're going to tell the truth here and we're going to learn from it.

I've talked to hundreds of leaders, I've presented in front of thousands of leaders. Sometimes I hear leaders say to me, well, Sarah Beth, I just washed my hands of it, not my circus, not my monkeys. They made their bed. They can lie in it so many times. And if you've said that, I'm gonna gently tell you to retract that.

Remove it from your vocabulary and never say it again because it doesn't matter what rank and leadership you are. You are a leader and your sole responsibility as a leader is to make it your responsibility. All of it you see, all of this matters. It matters in families, teams, dental offices, small businesses, large businesses, any business.

And it absolutely matters if you're trying to build a culture that people can trust. If you listened to episode one 17, the last one just before this one, you already know that I do not believe business is about perfection. I believe it is about getting better all the time. Sometimes that growth is really dramatic.

A lot of the time it's marginal. It's one better conversation, one stronger system, one cleaner response. One less defensive moment, one earlier admission that something is off. One faster correction, one more honest review of what happened and what needs to change. This has been my philosophy in leadership for a very long time.

So do I have any bad reviews? Yeah, I do. But when a bad review comes in, I don't celebrate it. But I also don't panic over it either. I don't immediately spiral into this means we're in trouble. . This means I won't get new business. This means my business is tarnished.

I also do not dismiss it. Like it doesn't matter. I try to hold the middle. I try to say there is probably something here for us. Maybe it's a systems issue, maybe it's a communication issue. Maybe expectations were off. Maybe we could have handled something better. Maybe we're right on principle, but poor in delivery.

Maybe the review is unfair in some ways and useful in other ways. ' cause that's what leadership is. I've had a several conversations recently with members and employees of the Better Business Bureau. My largest brand dentistry support actually won the Torch Award for ethics for 2025 in all of the Pacific Southwest, and we are so honored to take stage and win that award.

But part of that comes with learning and conversations and our ethics committee and the judges and the clients and the employees and the third party companies that actually recommended we get this award and. I'll never forget some of these conversations that I've had lately just over the last six months.

Some of them have been around reviews., Some of them have been around how you handle hard conversations. But the ones around reviews are so interesting because the Better Business Bureau believes that people should have a mixture of good and bad reviews. And even if you have bad reviews and you pay for a membership or pay for accreditation.

Those reviews still exist because they have a duty to the public, a duty to make sure that everyone transparently can see or understand what's going on with their business or how other people have worked with them. And it's not the duty of a third party company that handles reviews to determine who was right or who was wrong.

If something violates their policy, then of course it won't exist, but. The reality is, is there's going to be many experiences customers and clients have over the course of dealing with your business. Every review is not a perfect description of what has happened with you, good or bad. Sometimes there's a lot of good things that are left out most of the time.

There's a lot of good things that are left out, but I wanna challenge you to look at it as just a different way of seeing things, find a way to understand someone else's perspective. Maybe they really were dishonest. Maybe they really didn't tell the truth. Maybe it really wasn't how they said it, but you could always learn just one thing.

Maybe it's even how not to panic over something like that. You see, when you allow the review to exist, when you allow a healthy conversation to happen, you're teaching your own nervous system something different., You're changing your own perspective. You're allowing other leaders to see how to handle things moving forward.

Do we want pure chaos? Absolutely not. Leadership is not pretending every criticism is valid. It's also not pretending every criticism is nonsense. It's having the maturity to ask what is true here? What is teachable here? What can make us better here?

Psychological safety research is really useful in this scenario because Amy Edmondson's work has consistently shown that better teams are not the teams with no mistakes. They are the teams where people can speak up, admit mistakes, and learn without this fear shutting down the conversation. She's also been very clear that psychological safety is not about being nice all the time.

It's about candor, accountability, even learning that's such an important distinction. A lot of people hear safe culture and they think it means soft culture. It does not, A healthy leadership culture is not built on pretending everything is okay. It's built on making it normal to say, this didn't go well without the room collapsing into shame, blame or denial and honestly,  it starts at the top.

If your team never sees you own something, they will learn to hide. If your team only hears polished success stories, they'll think struggle is unacceptable. If your team thinks the goal is to look right, instead of get better, they'll protect themselves instead of improving. And that's why leaders always go first.

They model what it looks like to be honest and still steady. They model what it looks like to take feedback without becoming fragile. They model what it looks like to say That didn't go how I wanted and we're gonna have to learn from it. I think this is one of the reasons Satya NA's language around being a learn it all instead of a know.

It all resonates so much with me. Microsoft has actually repeatedly used that phrase to describe the kind of culture that grows. And the point is simple curiosity scales better than ego. That is true in a giant company. It is true also in a startup. It is true in a dental office. It is true in your own leadership.

A learn it all. Culture is resilient. A learn it all. Culture studies mistakes because mistakes reveal where the next improvement is. That's the kind of leadership I always wanna emulate, and honestly, it's the kind of leadership team I think every business owner should build. People willing to go first with you. And sometimes that means no, you're not always the person that has every single hard conversation, but that you have a really great team around you where everyone's willing to have hard conversations so that we can all be strengthened and united together.

On every single mission. It's not just one person that has every bad and difficult decision, right, or every bad and difficult challenge, or every bad and difficult conversation. don't just want talented people. We don't just want agreeable people. We don't just want smart people. We want people who will go first, people who will raise their hand early, people who will tell the truth before it becomes expensive. People who do not need to be dragged into accountability because they already value it.

People who understand that protecting the mission matters more than protecting their ego. That's the leadership bench that you want, because if everybody on your leadership team is trying to look polished, nobody's actually leading. And I wanna say something else that I think is important, especially for people who lead publicly or own businesses where your customers are vocal.

If somebody tells you that they've never made anybody upset in business, they've never gotten a bad review, or never had a client relationship end, never made a wrong call, or never disappointed anybody, I would be very careful about treating that as wisdom. That's not leadership that is either selective memory.

Lack of self-awareness or simply put dishonesty. If you are in business long enough, you will disappoint someone. If you're in business long enough, something will not work out. If you are in business long enough, you'll realize that even your best intentions do not guarantee a perfect outcome that does not excuse carelessness, that does not excuse poor service.

That does not excuse avoiding accountability. It just means reality is more complicated than social media makes it look. Business is human leadership is human service is human, which means sometimes things break, sometimes expectations diverge. Sometimes timing is just off. Communication lands wrong.

A specific customer was not a right fit. Sometimes you did your best and still would do part of it differently. Now that's just real life  and that's why I share every hard story or bad and uncomfortable situation, not because I enjoy the exposure, not because I think pain itself is the point.

But because I believe one of the most generous things a leader can do is remove the illusion that everything and everybody else is building it perfectly. I think leaders often go first in a story too. They tell the truth about the trial, the delay, the regret, the recovery about the thing they wish they would've handled earlier, cleaner or better.

Because when leaders do that, it gives other people a more honest map. And maps matter. A lot of people are not stuck because they're lazy. They're stuck because they think struggle means they are uniquely unqualified. They think the resistance means they're doing it wrong, that the criticism means they're not built for leadership.

That's why Brene Brown's work lands with so many leaders. She spent years studying courage and vulnerability, and one of her clearest messages is that courage and vulnerability are not opposites.

Real courage, requires vulnerability. Leadership is not the absence of emotional exposure. Leadership is the willingness to be emotionally exposed for the sake of something that matters.  And before anybody hears that the wrong way. I'm not saying leaders need to overshare all the time.

I'm not saying every private thing belongs in public. Wisdom still matters. Timing still matters. Boundaries still matter. I'm saying if you never let people see anything costly, your leadership will eventually feel hollow because people can sense when somebody is all polished and no process, all messaging and no scar tissue.

All certainty and no reflection, all titles and no real stuff. I don't want that kind of leadership in my life. I don't want to be that kind of leader for people who trust me. As we near the end of this episode, I wanna talk about the psychology piece for just a minute, because I think this helps explain why criticism can feel so loud even with.

So much going on. That might be right. Human beings have what psychologists call a negativity bias in plain language, negative information tend to stick harder and way more heavily in how we interpret what's happening. One bad review can feel louder than 50 quiet wins, because it's more important, because our minds are built to register threat fast and deeply.

That matters. If you do not understand that about yourself, you will let a painful memory rewrite the whole story. You'll say, we're failing when what's true is something failed here. You'll think, I'm not cut out for this when what's true is that hit a nerve with me and you might say everything's wrong when what's actually true is this deserves attention.

Strong leaders learn how to slow that down. Not by becoming cold, but by becoming accurate, by saying, this matters. I care. I'm listening, and I'm not gonna let one negative data point become my whole identity. There is also a neuroscience piece here that I think is fascinating and helpful. Research on error monitoring shows that the brain detects mistakes incredibly quickly.

Signals associated with error awareness, including activity tied to the anterior cingulate cortex, and what researchers call error related negativity show up almost immediately when we make a mistake.

In other words, the brain is built not just to do things, but to notice discrepancies and then update error detection is part of learning. Prediction error is part of learning. Our brains change by comparing what we expected with what actually happened. So that's probably like a lot of information right now, but it's so powerful.

So, if you need to re-listen to that, just rewind like 30 seconds and listen to that one more time. After all of that, it means mistakes are not just emotionally survivable, they're biologically useful when we respond well to them. But responding well is the key because if every error leads to shame, defensiveness, or even like avoidance, then the lesson gets blocked.

If every hard conversation becomes a threat to identity, then growth slows down. That is one reason self-compassion is more useful than self-attack if you actually want improvement. The American Psychiatric Association has highlighted that self-compassion can make people more open to reflection and change with less fear of failure.

I love that because for me, that's practical. Beating yourself up doesn't automatically make you more accountable. Sometimes it makes you more afraid. Sometimes it makes you hide faster, and sometimes it makes you perform remorse instead of actually learning. A healthier pattern is to own it, examine it, repair what you can, and then grow from it.

And that's what leaders do.

I want to make all of this real in business terms. Let's say a customer, a client, a patient, they leave. I do not want that. I do not enjoy that. I do not shrug that away and say, well, whatever, onto the next. I actually care deeply. But after the emotion settles, I also need to ask better questions.

Was it a fit issue? Expectation, issue, service gap, communication, miss values mismatch, something we should have seen sooner? Was this something we can fix at a systems level so future clients, patients, customers have a better experience? That's how organizations evolve. If every client relationship were easy, if every review were glowing, if every handoff were smooth, if every team member stayed forever, if every customer loved every outcome, then yes, life would feel easier in the moment, you would also lose a huge amount of information.

You would lose the signal that tells you where friction is. You would lose the feedback that exposes what still needs strengthening. Again, that does not mean you seek pain. It means you do not waste pain. You don't worship it, you don't dramatize it. You don't build your identity around it. You learn from it, and that's what I want leaders to hear in this episode.

Leaders go first and the hard stuff, because somebody has to teach the room how to handle reality. If the leader gets brittle, the team gets anxious. If the leader gets defensive, the team gets quiet. If the leader gets dishonest, the culture gets political. If the leader gets reflective, the team gets braver.

It's not a theory, guys, this is culture formation, and for those of you building leadership teams, please hear me clearly. Do not just choose people who are competent. Choose people who are courageous enough to go first with you. Choose people who can say, I missed that. I need help. We need to fix this. I think we're off here.

I know this is uncomfortable, but it really matters. And if you are the founder, the CEO, the owner, the director, the person with the final responsibility, then you especially do not get to ask your people for a kind of honesty.

You are unwilling to model. You go first. You go first in feedback, ownership, apology, clarity, learning, steadiness. Sometimes you go first in taking the hit. It's not weakness maturity. Jeff Bezos's. Day one mindset at Amazon centered on staying adaptable and avoiding the complacency that comes when companies start acting like they have already arrived.

That mentality is bigger than Amazon. It's a reminder that organizations rot when they stop learning. That's part of why I'm okay saying we're not perfect, not because I have low standards, but because I have high standards for growth. I don't need dentistry support to look flawless every second. I need us to keep getting better.

I don't need Dentistry Support Academy to be the best school that ever existed because as soon as I hit that, then I don't know where I can compare myself against to get better. I need all of my brands to be honest enough to see what needs work. I need us to be resilient enough to handle feedback without falling apart.

I need us to be humble enough to adjust. I need us to care enough to repair when repair is possible, and learn when repair is not. That's what good leadership looks like to me. If you're listening to this today because you're trying to become a stronger leader, let me give you something simple. Stop measuring yourself only by how rarely something goes wrong.

Start measuring yourself by how truthfully and effectively you respond when it does. That's the difference between fragile leadership and durable leadership. Fragile leadership needs constant validation, guys. Validation is overrated. When you get to the top, there's very few people that will even give it to you.

And if you think, I just wanna work for myself because it won't be so hard, I promise you there's still someone signing your checks, whether that's a client, customer, or patient, there's still someone signing your checks. Durable leadership. It can survive feedback. Fragile leadership needs to look right.

Durable leadership needs to get better. Fragile leadership avoids the story. Durable leadership knows the story can teach.

Let's bring us to our, that's good moment. As we close out this episode, the, this is the recap I want you to take with you.  You've heard me say it multiple times in this episode. I know this is a longer episode but stick with me. We're almost done. Leaders go first.  They don't go first because they enjoy discomfort.

They go first because somebody has to model that truth. They have to model what ownership and growth look like in real time. If you get a bad review, it's not automatically the end of the story. If a client leaves, it's not automatically proof that everything is broken. If something does not work out, it's not automatically a verdict on your ability to lead.

Sometimes it's friction, a systems problem. A people problem. Sometimes it's just the cost of building something real with real humans that have real work to do. What matters is what you do next. Tell the truth. Look closely. Learn accurately. Repair what you can. Don't waste the lesson. Don't let one hard moment become your whole identity and do not build a leadership culture where everybody is more committed to looking polished than getting better.

If you're building a team, built it with people willing to go first with you. If you're leading a business, stop treating difficulty as disqualifying. If you're carrying a hard story right now, don't be ashamed that leadership feels exposed. It's part of the work. Just make sure the exposure is producing wisdom.

That's the good in this, not that mistakes happen, not that criticism feels good, not that losing a client or a customer or a patient is fun. The good is that honest leaders can turn hard moments into cleaner systems, stronger cultures, and wiser decisions, and that's what I want you to remember after today's episode.

Thank you for being here with me at No Silver Spoons. This podcast is about building without entitlement leading, without pretending and growing through the real things, not around them. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who leads a team, owns a business, or is learning how to carry responsibility without losing themselves.

And if you listen to episode one 17 and this one back-to-back, then you already know the thread. We're not chasing perfection here. We're building the kind of leadership that can tell the truth. Take the lesson and keep moving.  📍 I'll catch you in the next episode.