Welcome to 2025! This is it…”your year.” The year everything will be different.

You have spent countless hours identifying the issues you want to improve in your practice. That work has enabled you to devise the perfect plan to fix all that is wrong in it. Now it is time to put that plan into action. Just like you did in 2024…and 2023…and so on.

What happened to all your plans those times? Why is your practice still facing the same struggles year after year? Well, as Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth!” Crude…but what he meant was having a plan is great. Now can you execute that plan in the face of adversity?

Execution is entirely different from planning, and it requires its own set of leadership skills to be effective. The first such skill is communication, and, in particular, avoiding that infamous situation best described by George Bernard Shaw, namely, that one of the biggest obstacles to communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

You have to begin with a message that is clear, simple, and precise. Yet, no matter how well you believe you have crafted your message, you can be certain that someone on your team will interpret it differently from what you intended.

Those who understand the importance of execution are painfully aware of this reality. So, they do not rest on their laurels from one effective presentation of their plan.

They follow up. They ask the team to show if they understood. When necessary, they correct the message. If that sounds like a lot of work, rest assured…it is!

That is why a master of execution understands they cannot succeed on their own. They must master the second essential skill and learn to delegate responsibility for some aspects of execution to other team members. Effective delegation requires you to put the right people in the right positions to ensure success. You need great judgement to identify those people, and you need to be willing to train those people to ensure they have the skills to bring the plan to life.

But just because you have the right people fully trained and ready to rock does not mean you are done. Executing a plan means something about the office is going to change. And we all know how much people love change.

Even when your team agrees things could be better and they think your plan is a great one, when they are under pressure with phones ringing, patients in front of them, ops to turn over…it becomes all too easy to just revert back to what they know.

So, masters of execution never assume the new plan is being adhered to. They must master the skill of perseverance. They have to be willing to stick to the plan and be prepared to constantly follow up on its progress. They schedule regular reviews to assess how the change is going. In fact, they will schedule these reviews in advance. If things have not moved along as far as they would like, they will investigate why that might be the case.

Finally, it is unlikely that the first iteration of your plan will be executed flawlessly. You will need to identify flaws and adjust your plan quickly to keep any momentum going. That means you will need to exercise the skill of decisiveness to make any necessary adjustments that will move you past your roadblock. Then allow the circle to repeat as you follow up on the latest adjustment.

A failure to execute has spelled the end for many CEOs at some of the largest companies. While it may not mean the end for you as a Dental CEO, it can prevent your practice from evolving in a dental landscape that is changing rapidly.

So develop those execution skills, such as communication, delegation, persistence in follow up, decisiveness…and just that willingness to stick to it. Without being effective at execution, you just might get an unpleasant reminder of what happens to the best laid plans!