412: Mentoring Young Dentists

The Savvy Dentist

If you're a practice owner and you've thought about hiring young dentists recently, then I guarantee the topic of mentorship has probably factored into those conversations. Young dentists seem to be graduating, requiring, and requesting more mentorship than ever before.

The opportunity exists for practice owners to use mentoring programs to attract and retain the best and brightest young dentists in our practice, but there are some challenges … and those challenges typically occur when there's miscommunication about what's on offer and what's expected.

Sometimes young dentists might feel like they're signing up to a practice that has a great mentoring program and they are disappointed about what's on offer.

From the practice owner's point of view, they feel like they're giving up a lot of their time, energy and expertise to train a dentist that might stay or may not stay.

And so there's a gap; a bridge that needs to be spanned.

In this episode of The Savvy Dentist Podcast we close this gap and show you how to get everyone on that same page.

Dr. Camelia Maris and Dr. Jeff Kho join Dr. Jesse Green, and together they explain what good mentoring looks like, how to structure it, what are the challenges that young dentists face as they start their career, and what are the challenges that practice owners face in trying to help the young dentists get started in their career.

Camelia and Jeff both have a wonderful broad perspective. They're looking at things from both sides of the fence. How do we support the young dentists? How do we give them the best start in their career? And how do we acknowledge that it's their responsibility to be self-reliant while also putting in place some of the building blocks that will give them that start that they're looking for?

Be sure to register for The Dental Summit here.

• [4:50] - Where are young dentists struggling the most? And as practice owners, how can we best help them?
• [15:01] - The word ‘mentoring’ is used a lot currently, and often is a recruitment tool when interviewing young dental candidates. So what IS ‘mentoring’ and how differently can it be perceived by young dental graduates, and dental practice owners?
• [19:20] - How to help young dentists flip their assumption that mentoring is a one way path. It’s important that they take responsibility for their personal growth.
• [24:07] - If you do not have the time to put together a curated mentor program, there are outsource options?