Is an open-book management style right for your dental practice? Absolutely, yes!

The success of a dental practice hinges on three key factors: patient care, financial stability, and team satisfaction. However, these three elements don’t operate in a silo—each influences and is dependent upon the other.

A thriving practice doesn’t simply deliver excellent care; it does so with a dedicated and enthusiastic team that is engaged, informed, and invested in their workplace’s continued success. No task in a successful dental practice is truly a one-person job. Every function—from front-desk scheduling to chairside assistance—relies on collaboration.

When it comes to a practice’s financial health, the same concept applies—financial success demands collective effort. Enter open-book management, a management style that can empower your team, foster accountability, and propel your practice forward.

What Is open-book management?

Simply put, an open-book management style means you share financial and strategic insights with your employees. The goal: fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration in which employees think beyond their individual roles and understand how their actions affect your practice’s big picture.

Go ahead, silence your internal alarms.

If this notion makes you uncomfortable, you aren’t alone. Sharing your practice’s financial information—revenues, profits, and losses included—isn’t the standard, and when you stray from the norm, it’s common to experience hesitation.

Stepping into the unfamiliar comes with its challenges. You might find employees are uninterested in the numbers. You may worry that sharing numbers will lead to a lack of understanding, frustration, or competitiveness. Absent context, you wouldn’t be wrong.

Numbers alone can be misleading. They can feel empty, lack in meaning, and make it seem to employees that you care only about their production. However, when tied to your practice’s vision, values, and goals, numbers take on meaning. When shared in the right way, numbers can empower your team to be proactive problem-solvers.

Here are three key strategies to make open-book management work in your practice:

1: Focus on the business of dentistry

Your team shouldn’t need an accounting degree to understand your practice finances. The key here is keeping the financial data you share simple, relevant, and actionable.

Providing your team with detailed spreadsheets and reports can be counterproductive; instead, think of your financial transparency as a way to engage and empower your staff, not to overwhelm and burden.

Start with—and stick to—the basics. Sit down with your team to identify metrics that affect your practice’s success, including production, expenses, and profitability. Next, connect these metrics to your goals for productivity and patient experience. When employees see how their daily efforts contribute to practice success, they may take more ownership and actively find ways to improve your profits and efficiency.

2: Trust your team to take positive action

Now that you’ve shown your team the numbers and helped connect them to their daily work, it’s time to let them act. Give employees the freedom to make an impact and drive your practice’s goals forward.

Let’s say your goal is to keep team expenses under 30% of your total office production. At the same time, you want to expand employee benefits. What level of monthly production supports this goal? Get your team involved in achieving this. Break your projections into reachable hourly, daily, and weekly production goals. Then, sit back down with your employees to brainstorm ways everyone can contribute.

Your task doesn’t end there; you still need to follow up and track progress. Don’t forget to celebrate employee and practice wins along the way. When your team sees how they’re contributing to the practice’s success, they may be more motivated to act.

3: Connect practice to personal success

For open-book management to truly work, individual team members must feel a personal stake in your practice’s performance. This doesn’t mean setting automatic pay raises every time your profits increase. It may, however, take the form of a compensation structure (i.e., wages, benefits, and rewards) tied to measurable growth.

When your team understands that practice profitability leads to higher wages, better benefits, and more workplace improvements, they become invested in driving that success. This is a win-win situation. Your full transparency can eliminate workplace questions about where your practice’s money is going and foster a culture of collaboration in which everyone on your team works together toward a common goal.

What’s the bottom line?

If you want to encourage your team to be self-motivated problem-solvers who take possession of their work, open-book management can set them on this path. From you, this will require a willingness to collaborate and communicate clearly, making your financial insights accessible and understandable, not overwhelming.

It may be tempting to zero in on patient care. However, for a practice to thrive, it must run efficiently and profitably. That only happens when your team understands, cares about, and enthusiastically contributes to your success.

So, are you ready to open your books?