Nothing destroys trust faster than saying one thing and doing another.
Before Planet DDS, I had never worked in dental practice management software and had no background in dentistry. My experience was in construction, international infrastructure projects, and running a bottleless water cooler company. I came in with an engineering degree, an MBA and the belief that I could figure out a new industry.
What I quickly realized was that none of that prepared me for the first challenge of the job, which had nothing to do with product roadmaps or go-to-market strategy. It was building trust.
You Are the Foreign Organism in Dental
I often describe the experience of entering a company as an outside leader as being a foreign organism trying to enter a host body. The body’s instinct is rejection. At Planet DDS, the core team had been together for six years when I arrived. They had built something real. They knew the customers, the product, the industry and each other.
I knew none of it. Walking in as their new CEO, I was asking them to follow someone who, by every conventional measure of domain expertise, had no business leading them.
The temptation in that situation is to overcompensate—to project authority you have not earned and to let the title do the work the relationship has not yet done. I resisted that, partly by choice and partly because it would have been obvious. The most important thing I did in those early months was simply lead from where I actually was: the least knowledgeable person in the room. That humility was not a strategy. It was just the truth.
So, in your first few months, resist the urge to fix things. Instead, go learn them. Block time to sit with people across the organization, ask questions you don’t know the answers to, and treat every role as a class you haven’t taken yet. You’ll be a better leader for it, and your team will know you mean it.
Say What You Don’t Know
Early on, new leaders can fall into the trap of nodding along to things they do not fully understand and implying expertise they are still building. That never served me. What actually worked was saying, clearly and without embarrassment, “I don’t know the answer to that, but let’s go figure it out together.”
That phrase sounds simple, but it requires more confidence than most people think. You are admitting a real gap in front of the people you are supposed to be leading. But when you say it and mean it, something changes. People stop testing you. They start working with you instead.
There is a broader principle underneath this. Admitting what you do not know signals that when you do speak with conviction, you mean it. That consistency is what credibility is actually built on. And over time, it sets a tone for the whole organization: that intellectual honesty is something to be respected, not papered over.
Earn It Early Through Action
Humility earns goodwill. It does not, by itself, earn respect. For that, people need to see you move the needle.
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