📍 Hey everyone, welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm Sarah Beth Herman, and today is one of those episodes that I've been looking forward to recording for a bit now. And not because the conversation is bigger than others, but because it starts something completely new for this podcast.

For the next ten weeks, we're going to be doing a series that I'm calling The Human Side of Leadership. This series is going to carry us through the end of summer and close out season five. My team and I have already started building season six, and I can't wait to share what's coming because it's going to be much more focused on strategy, execution, growth, and preparing businesses to finish the year strong as we head into twenty twenty-seven.

But before we talk strategy, I think we need to spend some time talking about people because I have become convinced that strategy only works as well as the people responsible for carrying it out. And that is true if you are leading a dental practice. That is true if you are building a business. It's also true if you're raising a family, and it's really true if you're leading a church, a nonprofit, a classroom, or even just trying to become a better version of yourself.

Leadership has never been just about decisions. It's always been about people, and people are wonderfully complicated. You know, I get asked fairly often where my ideas come from. People assume that there's one book that changed my life, one mentor, one conference, or a business coach that magically came alive.

And the truth is, I don't have an answer that's really neat. Over the last twenty-five years, I have had the opportunity to build five companies. I'm currently the CEO of Dentistry Support, but that's only one chapter of my story. I've hired more than seven hundred people across nine different countries.

I've worked alongside hundreds of dental practices throughout the United States, and I've spent thousands of hours sitting in conversations with doctors, office managers, treatment coordinators, entrepreneurs, executives, front desk teams, billing specialists, insurance coordinators, and business owners from industries that have nothing to do with dentistry.

I don't tell you any of that because I think titles matter and moments matter. And honestly, I don't tell you because I think numbers impress anyone. I tell you because every one of those conversations taught me something that I wasn't expecting to learn, and

that's what I start noticing, patterns. Not the kind you see on a spreadsheet, the kind you see in people. The more people I meet, the more I realize something. Different names, different companies, different personalities, different countries, different backgrounds, and yet the same patterns always show up.

Someone avoids a difficult conversation, someone holds onto an employee six months longer than they should have, someone refuses to change a process that clearly isn't working anymore. A patient says they'll call back; they never do. A leader wonders why morale keeps slipping.

A team member quietly just checks out.  Different stories, but the same human patterns and once I started paying attention, I couldn't stop seeing them. 

The more I pay attention to people, the more I realize I'm not really studying dentistry anymore. I'm studying human behavior. Dentistry simply happened to be where I was watching it unfold every single day, and I think that's why I've stayed in this profession for so long. Yes, I love dentistry, but what keeps me curious are people.

And one of my favorite quotes comes from Maya Angelou. She said, "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." And I've thought about that quote a lot over the years because I don't think leadership is about pretending that we have arrived. I think leadership is about staying teachable.

The moment we believe we've got everything figured out, I think we stop paying attention, and paying attention may only be one of the greatest responsibilities a leader has. Not because leaders have better answers, but because leaders have the opportunity to notice things that other people don't  I don't think experience automatically makes us wiser.

I think experience simply gives us more patterns to compare today's problems against. There's a difference there. One leader sees an employee who's frustrated, and another leader starts asking why. One leader sees declining treatment case acceptance, another starts wondering what changed six months ago.

One leader sees conflict, another becomes curious about what nobody is saying out loud. Curiosity, it changes everything. In fact, I'd go as far as saying curiosity has served me far better than confidence ever has. Confidence is valuable, but confidence can sometimes convince us that we've already found the answer, and curiosity reminds us that there may still be another question worth asking.

And I think we've lost a little bit of that along the way. We live in this world where everyone seems to have an opinion. Everyone has advice. Everyone has framework, a blueprint, a formula, the five steps, the seven secrets, the one thing that supposedly is going to change your business forever. I've read those books, guys.

I've attended the conferences, gals. I've heard the coaches, everybody. Some of them were phenomenal. Some weren't. But none of them Changed my life by themselves. Not one. Not even just one of them. They influenced me, and they did challenge me, and sometimes they frustrated me. Sometimes they completely changed the way I thought about something.

But none of them built any of my companies or brands. None of them hired my employees. None of them had the difficult conversations for me. None of them carried the responsibility that comes with leadership. They gave me pieces. The responsibility of figuring out where those pieces fit, you see, that was all mine.

And that's exactly how I hope you listen to this podcast. Please don't ever listen because you think I have all the answers, because I do not. I honestly hope that you disagree with me sometimes. I hope something I say makes you pause. I hope you go read someone who completely disagrees with me and then come back and decide what you think because I don't want followers. I want thinkers. That's why this series is going to exist. Over the next ten weeks, we're gonna explore questions that have fascinated me for years.

Why do good people leave great organizations? Why do patients stay loyal? Why do teams resist change? Why do some leaders create calm, where others intentionally create chaos? Why do people hold onto beliefs long after those beliefs have stopped serving them? Why do some businesses continue growing while others plateau?

We're gonna talk about neuroscience because I'm obsessed with it, behavioral psychology because it's really important you start thinking about it, leadership, communication, dentistry as always,  business. But more than anything, we're gonna talk about people because I honestly believe that understanding people is one of the greatest competitive advantages any leader can develop, and I think it's one of the least talk about,

so thank you for being here. Thank you for trusting me with part of your day. I'm really looking forward to this journey over the next 10 weeks, and I have a feeling these conversations are going to challenge all of us, myself included, because every time I prepare for an episode like this, I don't just learn something about leadership

I usually learn something about myself, and I have a feeling that's exactly where this series begins You know, there's something I've caught myself saying over the last few years that I never would have said 20 years ago

When I was younger, I thought leadership was mostly about making decisions. Make the decision, move the team, solve the problem, keep going. And now I think leadership is much more about interpretation. It's about paying attention to what's happening underneath what everyone else can already see. I'll give you an example.

Let's say you walk into your office on Monday morning and someone says, Hey, John, morale is really low." That's an observation, but that's not an explanation. It's a little bit like saying someone has a fever. The fever isn't the diagnosis. It's the clue that something else is going on.

I think we do this all the time in business. Production is down or revenue is down and insurance is behind or billing is behind. Collections have slowed. Patients aren't accepting treatment. People aren't scheduling appointments. Turnover is increasing. The schedule has, it has holes. Those things, they're real, right?

But they're symptoms. The question I find myself asking now is, what is this trying to tell me? That one question has probably changed the way I lead more than anything else because somewhere along the way, I realized that organizations, they communicate, not with words, but with patterns.

The challenge is that patterns are quiet. They don't announce themselves. They don't send you an email. They don't schedule a meeting. They don't give you a cold shoulder. They simply repeat themselves until somebody finally notices. And here's where I think experience becomes valuable.

Not because experienced leaders always have the right answer, but because they've seen enough patterns to recognize when something feels familiar. I remember reading a paper by psychologist Gary Klein, who studied how firefighters, military leaders, emergency physicians, and other experts make decisions under pressure.

One of the things he found was fascinating. You see, experts don't make better decisions because they know more facts. They make better decisions because they've seen similar situations and recognizing patterns that newer people simply haven't experienced yet.

That changes how I think about experience. Maybe wisdom isn't about having more answers. Maybe wisdom is about recognizing patterns sooner. That idea stays with me, because I think that's what 25 years in dentistry has really given me, not certainty, but perspective. There have been moments where I have walked into an office or I have entered into a phone conversation that's got 17 people on it that are all executives in dentistry and within minutes of being there or listening to the conversation, I'm already thinking, "I've seen this before."

And not because every business is exactly the same, 'cause they're definitely not. Every culture is different. Every doctor is different. Every team is different. But , people are beautifully predictable in some ways. And when communication disappears, trust usually follows. When expectations become unclear, frustration fills the gap.

When people don't feel heard, they eventually stop contributing. When leaders stop listening, teams stop talking. Different businesses, but same pattern. I don't think that's unique to dentistry. I think it's just human nature. Several years ago, I became fascinated with behavioral psychology and neuroscience, and not because I wanted another certification, not because I wanted to sound intelligent.

Honestly, I wanted to understand why two intelligent people could look at the same exact situation and come to completely different conclusions. That question bothered me. It still does, actually. The more I read, the more I realize our brains aren't objective computers. They're prediction machines.

They're constantly trying to make sense of the world based on previous experiences. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscience and author of How Emotions Are Made, explains that Our brains are constantly predicting what comes next based on what we've already experienced, rather than simply reacting to the present moment.

Think about that for a minute. If our brains are constantly filling in the blanks with yesterday's experiences, no wonder two people can experience the same meeting differently. No wonder one patient hears reassurance while another hears criticism. And no wonder why one employee sees feedback as growth, while another experiences the same exact conversation as rejection.

They're not necessarily reacting today, they're interrupting today through yesterday. That changed how I chose to communicate. Makes me slow down a little bit, makes me ask more questions, It makes me realize that leadership isn't simply transferring information from my brain into someone else's.

Leadership is helping people feel understood before expecting them to understand me Stephen Covey wrote something years ago that I still think about often: " Seek first to understand, then to be understood." It's one of those quotes that almost sounds too simple until you try to live it.

Because if you're anything like me, when someone disagrees with you, your first instinct is usually to explain yourself. Mine certainly was. I'd explain more. I'd give another example, clarify my point. Surely, if I explained it well enough, everyone would immediately agree. Life has been kind enough to humble me on that one, because leadership isn't about winning explanations, it's about building understanding, and those aren't always the same thing.

I think one of the greatest shifts in my own leadership happened when I stopped asking, "How do I get people to understand me?" And started asking, "What experience might they be bringing into this conversation that I can't see?" That question has changed difficult conversations with employees. It's changed my clients' relationships with me.

It's changed the way I interact with friends, my conversations at home. And not because I suddenly became a better communicator overnight, but because I became a better listener. And I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about leadership. We celebrate great speakers. We don't talk nearly enough about great listeners.

The best leaders I've met, they really listen, not so they can respond, not so they can correct someone or prove a point. They listen because they're genuinely curious, and curiosity has become one of my favorite leadership qualities because curiosity doesn't assume. It investigates. It slows down just enough to notice what everyone else rushed past.

That's exactly where we're headed over the next nine episodes. We're going to explore trust, burnout, patient behavior, decision-making, resistance to change, team culture. Not to give you formulas, but to help all of us become better observers of people, because I honestly believe that's where extraordinary leadership begins

Before we wrap up today, you know what time it is. It's time for our That's Good moment. If you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know it's probably my favorite part of every episode. It's where I get to leave you with the thoughts that I hope stick around long after you end this episode. And the first one is this.

I hope over these 10 weeks, you give yourself permission to become curious again. Not curious because you don't know enough. Curious because the people who continue growing are usually the people who never stop asking questions.  Somewhere along the way, especially as leaders, we start feeling like we're supposed to have all the answers.

We're the owner. We're the doctor. We're the CEO. We're the manager. People are looking to us. Without even realizing it, we can start believing that leadership means certainty. I don't think it does. I think leadership means creating enough space to keep learning. The second thing I wanna leave you with is this: Pay attention to patterns this week and all the weeks moving forward, not just the obvious ones.

  Pay attention to what your team jokes about. Sometimes humor points to things people don't quite know how to say out loud. Pay attention to where communication breaks down, where people seem energized, where they seem discouraged,

Realize that patterns are always telling us something. The question is whether we're slowing down enough to notice. And finally, I want you to remember that leadership isn't reserved for people with a title. Some of the greatest leaders I've ever met were never and will never be a CEO. They've never been doctors, owners, directors.

They're simply people who made everyone around them feel seen. They listened, they noticed, they cared, they were dependable. They made difficult situations feel a little less difficult simply because of how they showed up, and that is leadership. And if this series accomplishes anything over the next nine more weeks, I hope it helps all of us become just a little more observant, a little more thoughtful, a little slower to assume, a little quicker to ask a question.

Because I have a feeling that the better, we understand people, the better we'll become at serving them, whether that's inside of a dental practice, a business, our families, our communities. I think it matters Well, thank you for spending part of your day with me. I don't take it lightly that you choose to press play every week, and whether this is your first episode or you've been here since episode one, I hope you know how much I appreciate you being part of this community.

Over these next ten weeks, I hope you'll come back each Monday and join me for another conversation. Some weeks you're going to agree with me, some weeks I'll talk way too fast, and some weeks you'll never agree with me. But I think that's really healthy. My goal isn't to convince you to think like I do.

My goal is to help you think a little deeper about the people around you and maybe even about yourself. Because I've learned that the most meaningful growth in my own life didn't happen when someone handed me all the answers.  It happened when someone asked me a question, I couldn't stop thinking about.

That's what I hope this series becomes for you. Next week, we're diving into a conversation that I think almost every business owner has had at least one point or another

The title is going to be You Don't Have a Staffing Problem, You Have a Systems Problem. And before you think you know where we're going with that title, I promise you it's probably not the conversation you're expecting. Until then, keep paying attention, keep asking better questions, keep looking for the patterns, because I have a feeling, they're trying to teach you something.

I'm Sarah Beth Herman. Thank you for joining me for another episode of No Silver 📍 Spoons. I'll catch you on the next episode.