The hardest moments reveal the values already in place
Early in my career, I was a teacher in an early childhood education center. And I was the only male teacher on staff. That’s not unusual to say out loud now, but at the time, in that field, it was rare enough that people noticed. Parents noticed. Some were fine with it. Some weren’t sure what to make of it. One parent decided to say something.
She brought her concern to my center leader directly. Not to me. She questioned whether a man belonged in the classroom with her child, whether I could be trusted the same way the other teachers were trusted. It’s the kind of conversation that could go a dozen different directions depending on who’s sitting across the table. My leader could have hedged. She could have offered a vague reassurance and moved the conversation along just to get through it. She didn’t do either of those things.
She looked at the parent and said, essentially, that she trusted me. That I was no different from any of the female teachers at that center. That I was there to care for her child, and I would do that job the same way anyone else on the team would. No qualifiers. No soft-pedaling around the concern to make it more comfortable.
What stays with me, even years later, isn’t just that she backed me. It is how she did it. She didn’t dismiss the parent’s concern outright, and she didn’t throw me under the bus to smooth things over either. She held both at once. She heard the parent seriously enough that the parent felt heard. And she was firm enough in what she said about me that there was no question where she stood. That’s a hard needle to thread in the moment, with someone standing in front of you waiting for your answer.
I’ve thought about that conversation more times than I can count since I started leading teams of my own. Not because I think about being the only male teacher in the room anymore. I think about the composure. The way she didn’t need extra time to figure out what she believed. She already knew. So when the moment came, she wasn’t deciding what to say, she was just saying it.
That’s the part leadership training doesn’t really prepare you for. You can read about difficult conversations. You can practice scripts and frameworks for delivering hard news. But adversity doesn’t wait for you to find the right words. It shows up mid-sentence, in the middle of a normal day, and asks you to respond right then with whatever you actually believe. What that parent was really testing, whether she meant to or not, was whether my leader’s values held up under a little pressure. They did.
I carried that lesson with me long after I left the classroom, and it showed up again once I got into dental.
Anyone who’s spent time in a dental office knows the moment I’m talking about. A doctor questions a team member’s judgment in front of others. Or a team member pushes back on how a doctor handled something, openly, in a way that leaves no room to pretend it didn’t happen. It’s uncomfortable, and it usually doesn’t stay between the two of them. It lands on the office manager’s desk, because someone has to sort it out.
That’s not a scheduling problem or a policy problem. It’s the same moment my old leader faced in that hallway. Someone is watching to see whether you’ll hedge, take a side to make it easier, or actually stand in the middle of it and lead. The office manager who can be clear and concise while still supporting both people, the doctor and the team member, is the one who earns trust in that office. Not because they picked a winner. Because they didn’t need to.
That doesn’t mean staying neutral. Supporting both people is not the same as refusing to take a position. Sometimes leading through it means telling the doctor his tone crossed a line. Sometimes it means telling the team member she was out of line to say what she said in front of a patient. Holding two people at once is not the same as picking neither side. It means deciding, out loud, what you will defend and what you will confront, and then doing it even when it costs you something.
And if it’s left unresolved, it doesn’t stay contained to those two people either. Doubt spreads. Team members start second-guessing what they say around each other. Doctors stop trusting delegation. Patients feel it too, even if they can’t name what’s off. What started as one disagreement becomes the tone of the whole office.
The stakes only get higher the more offices you’re responsible for. Picture it landing in a single week. Three people gone from locations you’re supposed to be watching over from a distance, two of them without warning. The easy read is that this is just the market, that good people are impossible to find right now, so you post the openings, sweeten the sign-on bonus, get someone new in the seat. That response feels responsible. It also skips the harder question sitting underneath it. Did those three people actually run out because talented people don’t exist anymore, or because somewhere between growth and oversight, they stopped believing anyone above them still saw them? That’s not a question you get to sit with in an annual review. It’s sitting on your desk the day the third resignation letter shows up, whether you’re ready for it or not.
This doesn’t hold up if you’re figuring it out for the first time under pressure. So before adversity finds you, and it will, it helps to already have answers to a few questions.
None of that is complicated, but none of it happens by accident. It gets decided before the moment shows up, not during it.
This is where leading with intention matters most. It’s not a mindset you reach for in the moment; it’s a decision you make ahead of time about what you believe and how you’ll show up when the room gets tense. My old leader wasn’t improvising that day in the hallway. She already knew what she believed about me, so when the moment came, all she had to do was say it. That’s the goal for any leader in dental too. Know your people and know what you stand for before the hard conversation ever lands on your desk. Adversity will always find you. Whether it defines you or reveals you depends on whether you were ready before it showed up.
