MDS Leadership Academy

All-star leadership of a team can be learned and accomplished by more than trial and error or role modeling others (including bad behavior). This course will help prepare you to be an effective leader, understand your leadership style, think strategically, manage your team more effectively with less stress, and deal with inevitable conflict among team members without losing sleep at night.

Learning Objectives:

• Experience the basics of effective leadership by understanding your style and how to interact effectively with others on the team-DISC Profile (to be completed prior to the session).
• Understand effective leadership traits and behaviors that inspire others to follow.
• Appreciate ineffective leadership traits.
• Learn how to build and maintain trust in your organization/practice.
• Identify the characteristics of an effective team and a dysfunctional team.

Develop conflict management skills through Crucial Conversation techniques

To positively develop both personally and professionally, leaders and team members should take steps toward a healthier, happier workplace. By incorporating effective communication in your day-to-day life, you will experience a shift in both your mindset and your outcomes. In this session, you will learn how to lead and communicate effectively from wherever you are in your professional career, and how to build a powerful team that meets goal after goal by incorporating business acumen and communication skills into your practice for professional success.

This session will show you how to:

• Lead your team and elevate practice performance.
• Actively listen and create healthy conversations.
• Grow both personally and professionally as a team.
• Run meetings that matter.
• Set goals and recognize accomplishments.

Dental hygienists hold the key to your practice’s success, with nearly 80% of the practice revenue coming from their chairs. This program aims to develop a foundation for exceptional leadership skills to create a true partnership with the dental hygienist through a unique method of partnership that will transform employees into practice stakeholders.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify the critical components of an effective workflow for preventive care.
• Evaluate how to establish an effective communication style with the registered dental hygienist (RDH).
• Discover five best practices in “hand-offs.”
• Review how to create and implement a schedule to maximize revenue.
• Learn how to ensure your hygienists and dentists are aligned.
• Determine how to effectively set goals and action plans to maximize revenue.
• Analyze techniques to create a positive culture of trust and respect.

Suken teaches dentists how to bridge the gap between high-level practice strategy and high-speed clinical execution. By balancing analytical logic with deep empathy, his approach guides participants to simplify complex dental practice challenges, build actionable roadmaps, and foster psychological safety within diverse clinic teams. Attendees will learn how to confidently own their leadership voice while expanding the room to elevate and empower the voices of their entire staff.

Learning Objectives

• Bridge Practice Strategy and Execution: Master frameworks to convert long-term clinical and business vision into immediate, high-speed team action.
• Simplify Complex Dental Operations: Learn to dissect massive practice and operational challenges down to their core, actionable roots.
• Cultivate High-Trust Dental Cultures: Build psychological safety within diverse practice teams to drive deeper collaboration and patient-centered belonging.
• Activate Authentic Practice Leadership: Balance strategic clinic logic with empathy to confidently lead as a dentist while elevating your staff’s voices.