Garlic and Oil and the Secret to Dental Practice Culture Improvement (Yes, I’m Serious)
If you own a dental practice, you already know you can be clinically excellent and still feel miserable at work. You can be doing “fine” financially, but if your culture is off, your days feel heavy. That’s why so many dentists end up searching for dentist burnout solutions even when they’re doing everything they were told would work. On the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, we talk constantly about building a dental practice that runs on systems and people, not on the owner grinding harder. Because real dental practice growth isn’t just about marketing or production. It’s about the environment you create, the leadership you model, and the way your team experiences the practice every single day. If you want to grow your dental practice, increase dental practice revenue, and improve dentist work-life balance, culture isn’t optional. It is foundational.
This idea hit me in the most unexpected way, a ridiculous lake house drinking game called Garlic and Oil. Memorial Day weekend, I was exhausted and ready for bed when my brother-in-law talked me into staying up to play it. The game is like quarters, except with a bunch of Italian-themed rules. You say “ready set spaghetti,” you reverse directions, you shout “red pepper flakes,” and if you lose, you get pelted with limes and bow tie pasta while everyone screams “garlic and oil” and “shame.” It’s chaotic, embarrassing, and completely hilarious. And while I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe, I realized that the thing making it fun wasn’t the rules. It was the shared ritual. Everyone knew the language, everyone participated, and everyone bought in. That’s culture.
Why Culture Isn’t Built by Mission Statements
Most practice owners assume dental practice culture improvement comes from writing core values or putting a mission statement on the wall. I’m not saying those don’t matter. They do. But culture is built in moments, not posters. Your team bonds more over shared experiences than shared tasks. If your practice is nothing but tasks, it becomes transactional. And when it becomes transactional, people stop caring, drama increases, turnover rises, and suddenly you’re stuck in survival mode wondering why dental business management feels so hard.
This is one reason dental practice coaching and dental business coaching work so well when done right. It pulls you out of the chair mentally and forces you to focus on the invisible things driving the practice. A dental practice consultant can help with numbers, and books on dental practice management can give you frameworks, but culture is something you create in real time. It’s how the practice feels. It’s how you show up. It’s how your team treats each other when you’re not watching.
Your Energy Is the Culture (Whether You Like It or Not)
This is the part that can sting. Your culture is usually a reflection of you. Leadership energy is contagious. If you show up tired, grumpy, and checked out, your team feels it immediately. If you show up with enthusiasm, humor, and intention, they mirror that too. The hard truth is that leadership means leaning in even when you don’t feel like it. That’s how you build a practice that supports your life instead of consuming it. That’s also how you eventually reduce clinical days for dentist owners without the practice falling apart, because your team isn’t dependent on your mood to function.
When practice owners tell me they want clinical day reduction dentist goals, or they want to grow dental practice profitability while working fewer days, they often think the answer is more systems alone. Systems matter. Dental practice operations systems, scheduling structure, training, accountability, and the whole machine. But culture is the force that makes your systems stick. A great system in a bad culture still fails because no one wants to follow it. A good system in a great culture gets adopted fast because the team wants to win together.
Rituals That Make Your Practice Run Better
One of the easiest ways to strengthen culture is to build rituals that create connection. Your morning huddles can become a ritual instead of a boring checklist. One of my DPH coaches, Dr. Henry Ernst, has his team recite core values together daily like an oath. That’s not “cheesy.” That’s identity. It’s a shared moment that reinforces how the team thinks and behaves.
Another example from our practice is appreciation tokens. Every team member gets three tokens each month and hands them to coworkers with a specific reason for appreciation. At the monthly meeting, those tokens become raffle entries for prizes. This isn’t about prizes. It’s about training the team to notice what’s good and to say it out loud. Over time, it changes the emotional tone of the office. That’s one of the most overlooked forms of dental patient management, because patients can feel when the team respects each other. Culture shows up in how patients are greeted, how problems are handled, and whether the office feels calm or chaotic.
Inside jokes are another underrated shortcut to culture. At our practice, we don’t call retainers “retainers” internally. We call them “retinas.” It’s dumb. It’s hilarious. And it creates a sense of “this is how we do things here.” These little shared language moments build belonging, which drives retention. And retention drives practice growth for dentists far more than most owners realize.
Peer-to-Peer Communication Is How You Stop Being the Bottleneck
If you want to build a scalable practice, you need the team communicating without you. That means normalizing peer-to-peer feedback. We call it P2P, and yes, we joke around with it. “Can I P2P you?” turns into “Can I pee on you for a second?” because apparently we’re still 12 years old. But the point is serious. When team members can address issues directly, the culture becomes stronger, problems get solved faster, and you stop being the person who has to manage every tiny thing. This is the type of dentist leadership training most owners never get, because dental school doesn’t teach you how to build an organization. It teaches you dentistry. The business side, dental business management, dental practice guide fundamentals, and actual leadership, comes from education, coaching, and experience.
This is also where dentist associate recruiting and management gets easier. Associates don’t want to join chaos. They want to join stability. And stability comes from a team that communicates well, follows systems, and has a culture that feels healthy.
The Real Cost of Not Investing in Culture
A lot of dentists ask, “How much does it cost to shut down for meetings?” It costs money. We shut down two hours a month, and we do a full day every quarter for training and connection. I pay the team for it. I’ve paid for food, events, barbecues. Sometimes I’m literally paying people to hang out and build relationships. But it costs far more not to do it. The cost of turnover, stress, poor patient experience, and constant friction will drain your practice faster than any training day ever will. If your goal is to increase dental practice revenue and strengthen dental practice profitability, culture isn’t fluff. It’s an asset that compounds over time.
Conclusion: Want a Better Practice? Build Better Culture on Purpose
If you want your practice to grow without you grinding harder, you need to treat culture like a system. This week, take a look at your practice and ask yourself what rituals exist right now, what shared language your team has, how people feel walking into work, and how often you’re intentionally creating connection. Culture isn’t built by accident. It’s built by repetition, shared experiences, and leadership that shows up consistently. That’s how you create dental practice growth that lasts, and that’s how you build a practice that actually supports your life.
If you want help implementing real dental practice operations systems, improving leadership, reducing chaos, and creating a practice that can run without you, this is exactly what we do inside Dental Practice Heroes Coaching. Whether you’ve been reading dental practice books, searching for books on dental practice management, or listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast wondering how to finally put it all together, coaching can accelerate the process and prevent the common mistakes that keep owners stuck. Visit dentalpracticeheroes.com to explore coaching and training options, and let’s help you build the team-driven practice you’ve been trying to create, so you can work less, earn more, and actually enjoy the life you’re building.
