The way you guide your morning huddle is quietly deciding how your whole day goes.
Try this experiment tomorrow morning: don’t say the word “crazy” once, no matter what happens. Not in huddle, not under your breath at 9am, not at the end of the day when you’re recapping to your spouse. Just for one day, ban the word entirely.
I promise you it changes something. We banned it in our practices a while back, and it remains one of the simplest, cheapest culture fixes we’ve ever made.
You can build the best system in the world, but if your team is fractured into “me versus them,” the system won’t save you.
Why We Banned the Word “Crazy”
Here’s what we noticed: the second we started describing days as “crazy,” every day became crazy. The patients were crazy. Team members were crazy. Doctors were crazy. It stopped being a description and became an excuse that gave everyone permission to flush the day down the drain before it even started.
To be clear, this isn’t about pretending every day is calm. Dentistry has genuinely hard, genuinely busy days, but there’s a real difference between “today is busy” and “today is crazy,” and the second one carries a hidden message: this is out of our control, so don’t bother trying to fix it. When you catch yourself reaching for that word, stop, regroup, and ask instead: what are we actually going to do to keep today from turning into that?
The “I” Problem Hiding in Every Team Conflict
Watch closely the next time something goes sideways in your practice, and you’ll usually catch the same pattern. Everyone retreats to their own island. The team feels like the doctor is perpetually unhappy with them, so they get defensive — I didn’t set up that room. I wasn’t even here that day. I did my part. Meanwhile the doctor is on their own island — This is my reputation. I’m not staying late again. I have somewhere to be.
I, I, I, I, I — on both sides of the room. It turns into a standoff instead of a team, and nobody actually wins a standoff. The schedule doesn’t care who was technically right.
Nobody’s asking for kumbaya here. It’s not going to be rainbows and butterflies every single day, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty. But if you’re not actually with your team — not just adjacent to them, actually in it together — you have to ask yourself what you’re doing this for. Everyone in the building wants the same outcome: good patient care and a day that runs the way it’s supposed to. Which means the goal was never in question. Only the “I” language made it feel like it was.
What Doctors Get Wrong About Motivating Their Team
Here’s an uncomfortable truth for the doctors reading this: your team does not care about your schedule the way you do. They’re not losing sleep over your reputation, your missed gym session, or the fact that you’re running late. I’m sorry — but it’s true, and it’s not personal. What they do care about is their own time, their own plans, their own life outside these walls.
Which means if you’re trying to motivate your team by explaining, again, how stressed you are — that’s landing on deaf ears, because they’re already dealing with their own version of stressed. The move that actually works is flipping the frame: acknowledge that they have somewhere to be too. Show a little empathy for their evening, not just an appeal to yours. It costs you nothing and it lands ten times harder than another reminder of everything that’s riding on getting through today.
Be the Lighthouse, Not the Loudspeaker
At the end of the day, your team looks to the doctors — and to associate doctors, if you have them — to set the tone for the room. After that, they look to their team leads. This is often the hardest link in the chain, because if your team leads are the ones sighing and saying “well, here we go, another crazy day,” that becomes the emotional temperature of the entire shift. Whatever gets said out loud in huddle is essentially what gets manifested for the next eight hours.
Being a lighthouse means showing your team the behavior you want reflected back — steady, calm, believing they can pull off a good day because you’ve watched them do it before — instead of lecturing them about what they got wrong yesterday. Ask instead: what was different on the good day? Usually the answer isn’t dramatic. There’s rarely a miracle. It’s just the boring stuff, done consistently — which, ironically, is a lot harder to pull off than it sounds.
Fix the System, Not the Person
When something does break down, the instinct is to land squarely on the person who was standing closest to it. But the sharper question is almost always: is this actually a person problem, or a system problem? Because the moment a repeated hiccup gets treated as evidence that someone is bad at their job, it stops being a fixable moment and starts becoming part of how that person sees themselves. That’s a heavy, often unfair thing to attach to someone whose heart is genuinely in the right place.
Fix the system. Keep believing in the person. Say both out loud, not just internally.
How to Bring This Into Your Own Huddle
- Retire the word “crazy” from your team’s daily vocabulary, and notice how much the framing shifts.
- Catch “I” language in real time, yours and theirs, and gently redirect toward “we.”
- Lead by demonstration, not by repeating the same critique in a new tone.
- Separate the system from the person every time something breaks down, out loud, so your team hears the distinction too.
- Ask “what was different on the good day?” instead of only reviewing what went wrong on the bad one.
The Bottom Line
None of this works if your team doesn’t feel like you’re actually in it with them. Systems and roadmaps matter, but they only hold up if the room believes everyone’s rowing in the same direction. Be the lighthouse. Watch what changes.
If you’d like to talk through how to build more of this “we’re in it together” mentality into your own practice, schedule a quick call at https://www.pivotdentalsolutions.com/widget/bookings/pivotsolutionscall, or email us at connect@pivotdentalsolutions.com. We’d genuinely love to hear what’s working in your practice too.
