You Don’t Have to Be Finished Learning to Lead
Dear Early Career Dentist,
If you’ve got a few minutes between appointments, I have a question for you: When did you start thinking of yourself as someone who could lead?
Early in your career, it’s easy to assume leadership belongs to someone further down the road. The practice owner. The department chair. The dentist who has been involved with organized dentistry for 20 years and somehow knows everyone in the room. Especially when you’re still learning and building confidence. Still calling someone when you encounter a case that makes you think, Okay, I would really like a second opinion here.
Surely leadership comes later. Except the profession can’t wait until everyone feels completely ready.
Every generation of dentistry eventually has to make room for the one coming behind it. Experienced leaders retire. Committee chairs rotate off. Practice owners begin thinking about succession. New ideas, new technology and new ways of practicing change what the profession needs from the people guiding it. Someone has to be ready to step forward.
That someone is you.
Don’t panic! Stepping forward doesn't mean you suddenly stop needing guidance yourself. In fact, one of the most interesting things about being an early career dentist is that you’re standing in both places at once. You have people ahead of you who know things you don't know yet. And you already know things someone behind you desperately wants to know.
A dental student wondering what that first year of practice is really like doesn't necessarily need someone 30 years into their career. They need the dentist who graduated three years ago. The person who remembers the interviews, the first contract, the first difficult patient, the first time they had to make a clinical decision without an instructor standing nearby.
You don't have to be finished learning to have something worth teaching.
That’s built directly into the mentoring program we're launching in the new CDS Lounge. Early Career dentists have a unique role in the program: you're the only career phase that can participate as both a mentor and a mentee.
You can find someone further along who can help you navigate ownership, leadership, a specialty, career decisions or whatever comes next while, at the same time, you can turn around and offer your own experience to a student or newer colleague who is standing where you were not very long ago.
That exchange is how a profession sustains itself.
Mentoring isn't the only way to begin. Leadership might mean joining a committee, getting involved with your Branch, volunteering at an event, or speaking up when you have an idea. Just saying yes when someone asks you to take on a little more responsibility.
You don't have to start by running the meeting. Start by showing up for it.
Leadership isn't a title someone eventually hands you.
Because leadership isn't a title someone eventually hands you. It's a collection of smaller choices: to participate, to listen, to share what you know, to learn what you don't and to leave the profession a little stronger for the people coming next.
Between appointments, think about the people who helped you get this far. Keep asking questions. Keep learning from the people who have been there before. And when you can, share what you’ve learned with someone just getting started.
You don’t have to be finished learning to have something worth teaching. That’s how leadership begins — and how we make sure there’s someone ready to lead the profession next.