Building Credibility and Trust as a Dental Industry Leader
This article was written by CEO Eric Giesecke of Planet DDS and originally published on Forbes.com.
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.
When I joined my current company, there were problems that had been sitting unresolved for years. They had persisted because no one with both the authority and the will to act had made them a priority. I focused on those first. By identifying the low-hanging issues and fixing them quickly, I could demonstrate competence without having to claim it. I was not the dental software expert, but I could show the team that things got better when I was in the room.
Each of those early wins chipped away at the skepticism. Over time, they stacked into something that looked like respect, and eventually into trust.
I made a deliberate effort in those early months to get to know team members as people, not just as direct reports. I also got on the ground floor of the work itself: shadowing employees, sitting with customer support teams and learning the texture of their daily problems from the inside out. This was not a performance of engagement; I genuinely needed to understand what people were dealing with because they deserved a leader who had actually tried to understand it.
Many of those same team members are still at our company today. I do not think that is a coincidence. People stay where they feel seen. And when a leader is willing to sit alongside the people on the front lines, it sends a message that no all-hands meeting can replicate: No one in the organization is beneath their attention.
Actions Have to Match Values
Nothing destroys trust faster than saying one thing and doing another. People notice the gap between words and actions long before you do, and once they see it, it is very hard to walk it back.
Our team values are collaboration, accountability, authenticity, empathy and trustworthiness. These are the standards I hold myself to before anyone else.
If transparency matters, you have to share the hard news as readily as the good. If you value accountability, you must hold yourself to the same standard you set for others. If you talk about empowering people, you have to actually let go of the decisions that belong to them.
Now, with more than a decade as CEO, I am certain that the trust built in those first uncertain months was the most valuable thing I created here—not the product decisions, not the strategy and not the growth. The trust.
The industries you have not worked in, the knowledge you are still building, the relationships that take time to form—none of that disqualifies you from leading well. What matters is showing up honestly, staying curious, following through and making it clear through your actions that you are there for the mission and the people around you. Everything else follows from that.
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