How Often Do You Think About Your Dentist?
- Jun 5
- 3 min read
They’re not excluding you. They just don’t think of you.
How often do you think about your dentist?
You think about them when you have a toothache. When your six-month checkup reminder shows up. When something in your mouth goes wrong.
The rest of the time? You don’t think about your dentist at all. Not because you don’t like them. Not because they’re not good at what they do. You just don’t have a reason to think about them beyond the one thing they do for you.
There is a leader in every organization who is someone else’s dentist.
I coached a senior director — we’ll call him Garrett — who was brilliant at operational efficiency. When the company needed a process redesigned or a workflow optimized, Garrett was the call. And he’d deliver. Every time. World-class work.
But when a strategic initiative came up — a new market entry, a leadership restructure, a cross-functional project that didn’t fit neatly into his lane — Garrett’s name never came up. Not because anyone had decided he wasn’t capable. They just didn’t think of him. He was the operations guy. Operations was what he did. Why would you think of the operations guy for a market strategy?
Garrett felt it. He’d see the meeting invites go out for the interesting work and his name wasn’t on them. He’d hear about initiatives after they’d already been staffed. He started telling himself a story: they’re excluding me. They don’t see me as strategic. There’s a ceiling here.
But when I asked around, nobody was excluding him. Nobody had decided he wasn’t strategic. They just — didn’t think of him. He was their dentist. They only thought of him when they had an operations toothache.
I told Garrett: “They’re not keeping you out of the room. You’re not in the room because you’ve never given them a reason to put you there. You’ve been so good at one thing that you’ve accidentally made yourself invisible at everything else.”
That’s the Dentist Trap. Your expertise becomes your cage. The better you are at one thing, the more people associate you with only that thing. And the more they associate you with only that thing, the less likely they are to think of you for anything else.
What it’s like to live next door to The Dentist.
You like them. You respect them. You’d recommend them to anyone who needs what they do. You just don’t think of them beyond that. And that’s not a judgment — it’s a pattern. They’ve trained you, through years of consistent expertise in one lane, to see them as that and only that.
The cruelty of the Dentist Trap is that it rewards excellence in a way that creates invisibility. The better you are, the more you get pigeonholed. And the more you get pigeonholed, the less opportunity you get to show range.
If you’re reading this and feeling that familiar sting of recognition — here’s what to do about it.
You don’t need to stop being great at what you do. You need to start being visible at other things. Contribute one thought in every meeting that has nothing to do with your specialty. Volunteer for one project outside your lane this quarter. Send your boss one observation about the business that goes beyond your function.
The goal isn’t to become a generalist. The goal is to expand the aperture — to give people a reason to think of you beyond the one thing they already know. Your expertise is the foundation. It’s not the ceiling. Unless you let it become one.
The question on the porch:
What would your colleagues say you’re known for? If the answer is one thing — just one — and that’s all they’d say, you’re someone’s dentist. The question is whether you’re willing to do something about it.
The Leaders in Our Neighborhood is a series about the patterns we all recognize — in the people we work with, and sometimes in ourselves.
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