Milbourne Dental Group operates nine practices across the West Midlands, employing 140 people including dentists, hygienists, dental nurses, treatment coordinators and reception teams. The author is Practice Manager for the three largest sites, with 52 staff reporting through two site leads. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.
Table of Contents
Task 1: Briefing paper on the use of reflective practice in personal and professional development
AC 1.1 Analyse the importance of continuous personal and professional development in achieving organisational objectives
Closing the gap between current and required capability. Analysing the fundamental purpose, organisations set objectives requiring capability they do not always possess. Milbourne’s objective of reducing failed appointments by a quarter depends on reception teams having conversations they were never trained to have. Development is what converts an objective into something deliverable rather than aspirational.
Regulatory and professional necessity. Analysing a driver specific to healthcare, clinical staff are required to undertake and record continuing professional development as a condition of registration. Analysing the implication for management, development in this setting is not discretionary spending that can be deferred in a difficult year; a lapsed registration removes a clinician from the rota entirely.
Adapting to change. Analysing why standing still is a decision rather than a neutral position, the introduction of digital scanning across three practices changed what nurses do daily. An organisation whose people do not develop cannot adopt anything new, regardless of what it purchases.
Retention and engagement. Analysing the people dimension, evidence links supportive, capable management and access to development with commitment and retention (Barends, Rousseau and Janssen, 2023). In a sector where dental nurse vacancies take an average of eleven weeks to fill, retention is an operational matter rather than a human resources preference.
Consistency across a multi-site group. Analysing an organisational driver, nine practices operating to different local habits produce a patient experience that varies by postcode. Structured development is the mechanism through which a group behaves as one organisation rather than as nine independent businesses sharing a logo.
Succession and organisational resilience. Analysing a risk Milbourne carries, both site leads were developed internally and no successor exists for either. Development is what prevents capability walking out of the door.
Meeting patient and service quality expectations. Analysing a driver particular to a clinical setting, patients judge a practice on how they are treated as much as on clinical outcome, and complaint themes at Milbourne over the past year concern communication rather than treatment. Development addressing how staff explain treatment plans and costs bears directly on the group’s retention objective, and no amount of clinical excellence compensates for a poorly handled conversation about a bill.
Alignment between individual and organisational development. Analysing a tension worth naming, individual development ambitions and organisational objectives are not automatically the same. A nurse wishing to train in implant assistance and a group needing better appointment conversion are both legitimate and different. Mullins (2022) notes that development which serves only the organisation produces compliance while development serving only the individual produces mobility, and the useful position sits where the two overlap.
Analysing the limits honestly. Development consumes time that clinical staff would otherwise spend with patients, and it produces transferable skills that competitors may benefit from. The defensible position is that development targeted at capability the organisation will actually use returns more than it costs, and that generic provision frequently does not.
AC 1.2 Evaluate the use of reflective practice in personal and professional development
What reflective practice contributes. Reflection converts experience into learning. Evaluating why this matters, experience alone teaches relatively little: a manager who has handled twenty difficult conversations badly has twenty years of practice at handling them badly unless something intervenes. Reflection is that intervention.
Surfacing assumptions. Evaluating a specific contribution, reflection exposes beliefs the practitioner holds without examining. My own assumption that reception staff resisted new booking processes because they disliked change proved, on examination, to be an assumption about people rather than an observation of them.
Improving judgement rather than knowledge. Evaluating what distinguishes reflection from training, training supplies knowledge while reflection improves judgement about when and how to apply it. My difficulty is rarely that I do not know what good delegation looks like; it is that I do not notice the moment when I should be doing it.
Learning from what worked as well as what failed. Evaluating a common distortion, reflective practice is often applied only after difficulty. Examining a success is equally informative and considerably rarer, because nothing prompts it.
Supporting professional requirements. Evaluating its formal role, reflective accounts form part of the CPD evidence clinical colleagues must maintain, so reflection is an established practice in this workplace rather than an imported management technique.
Building capability that outlasts a single problem. Evaluating a longer-term contribution, reflective practice develops the ability to learn from experience generally rather than resolving one situation. Northouse (2025) treats self-awareness as foundational to leadership development, and reflection is the principal mechanism by which it is acquired, since few managers receive the sustained external feedback that would otherwise supply it. This matters in a sector where most managers reach the role without formal preparation for it (Chartered Management Institute, 2023).
Evaluating the limitations candidly. Reflection is self-reported and vulnerable to self-justification, since the person examining the evidence is the person with an interest in the conclusion. It is also uncomfortable, which is why it is easily deferred. And it produces insight without producing change unless something converts one into the other. Evaluating what makes the difference, reflection that ends in a specific committed action changes practice; reflection that ends in an observation does not.
AC 1.3 Evaluate approaches to reflective practice
Gibbs’ reflective cycle. Six stages: description of what happened, feelings, evaluation of what was good and bad, analysis of why, conclusion about what else could have been done, and an action plan for a similar future situation.
Evaluating its strengths, the structure is accessible to someone reflecting for the first time, and the explicit inclusion of feelings prevents the sanitised account that purely analytical models invite. The action plan stage is what converts reflection into change. Evaluating its weaknesses, it is designed around a discrete incident and suits routine practice less well, and the description stage frequently consumes disproportionate effort, producing accounts that narrate at length and analyse briefly.
Schön’s reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Schön distinguishes reflection during an event, where the practitioner adjusts as they go, from reflection afterwards.
Evaluating this distinction as the most practically useful available, it identifies two different capabilities requiring different development. My own reflection-on-action is adequate and my reflection-in-action is weak: I recognise afterwards that a conversation went wrong and rarely notice at the time. Evaluating the model’s limitation, it describes what happens without providing a method for doing it, so it diagnoses rather than guides.
Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. Concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation, forming a continuous loop.
Evaluating its contribution, the experimentation stage is what most reflective models lack: it requires the practitioner to test the conclusion rather than merely reach it. Evaluating the weakness, the cycle assumes learners move through all four stages, and in practice people favour the stages matching their preference and skip the others.
Borton’s developmental framework. A deliberately simple three-question structure: what, so what, now what. Evaluating its use, its brevity is its strength, since a model that can be held in the head is one that gets used in the moment rather than written up afterwards. Evaluating the trade-off, simplicity comes at the cost of depth, and it offers no prompt to examine feelings or alternatives, which means an unreflective practitioner can complete it without learning anything.
Evaluating the three comparatively. They are complementary rather than competing. Gibbs supplies structure for a specific event, Schön supplies the distinction between reflecting during and afterwards, and Kolb supplies the requirement to test what was concluded. The approach I have adopted uses Gibbs for incidents and Kolb’s experimentation stage to ensure conclusions are tried rather than filed.
Task 2a: Evaluation of own performance in the workplace
AC 2.1 Using the principles of reflection, evaluate own performance in the workplace
Assessment undertaken. I completed a structured self-assessment questionnaire covering the management capabilities relevant to my role, rating each on a five-point scale, and asked both site leads and one dentist to rate me on the same instrument. Comparing self-rating against others’ ratings is what makes the exercise evaluative rather than merely descriptive.
| Capability | Self-rating | Others (mean) | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operational planning and rota management | 4 | 4.3 | +0.3 |
| Communicating decisions clearly | 4 | 2.7 | −1.3 |
| Holding difficult conversations | 3 | 2.3 | −0.7 |
| Delegating and letting go | 2 | 2.0 | 0 |
| Developing others | 3 | 3.7 | +0.7 |
| Managing upward to the clinical directors | 3 | 3.3 | +0.3 |
| Responding to setbacks | 4 | 3.0 | −1.0 |
Evaluating the outcomes. Applying Gibbs’ framework to the pattern rather than to a single incident, the description is straightforward: on five of seven capabilities my self-assessment sat within half a point of how others rated me, and on two it did not.
My honest reaction to the communication gap was defensive, and recording that is part of the exercise. My first explanation was that respondents had misunderstood the question, which is precisely the self-justification reflection is vulnerable to.
Evaluating what was good and bad, the alignment on delegation is genuinely useful: I rated myself lowest there and others agreed, which means I already know my weakest area and have not acted on it. The misalignment on communication is the more significant finding, because I did not know about it.
Analysing why the gap exists, I communicate decisions once, in writing, and treat the matter as closed. Both site leads described learning about changes from their teams rather than from me. What I experience as efficiency, they experience as being informed late.
Concluding what else I could have done, the pattern suggests I have optimised my communication for my own convenience rather than for the recipient’s understanding.
Evaluating the response to setbacks gap, this one is harder to interpret. I rated myself well and others did not, and the free-text comments referred to my becoming quiet under pressure. I had read that as composure; it has evidently been read as withdrawal.
What the exercise revealed about the method. Reflecting on the process itself, the value came almost entirely from the comparison rather than from the self-assessment. Rating myself produced a picture I already held; seeing three other people rate the same capabilities produced two findings I did not have. Had I completed the questionnaire alone, as the option to do so permits, I would have concluded that my main development need was delegation, which I already knew, and would have missed the communication gap entirely.
Action arising. Two commitments: to confirm significant decisions verbally with each site lead before written communication goes out, and to seek explicit feedback after the next period of operational pressure rather than assuming my own reading of it.
Task 2b: Reflective account on the impact my working style has on others in the workplace
AC 2.2 Reflect on the impact own working style has on others in the workplace
The working style framework applied. I have used the DiSC model, which describes working style across four dimensions: Dominance, characterised by directness, pace and focus on results; Influence, characterised by sociability and persuasion; Steadiness, characterised by patience, consistency and support for others; and Conscientiousness, characterised by accuracy, structure and attention to detail.
My assessment placed me strongly in Conscientiousness with a secondary Dominance element, and low on Influence and Steadiness. Recognising the limitation of any such instrument, it describes preference rather than capability and produces a simplification of something more complicated. It is nonetheless a usefully specific starting point.
Impact on individuals: the newer site lead. My Conscientiousness preference shows in how I brief. When my newer site lead took over the Solihull practice, I gave her a detailed written handover covering process, exceptions and reporting requirements, running to eleven pages. I regarded this as thorough support.
Reflecting on the impact, she told me at her three-month review that the document had made her feel the role was more complicated than she could manage, and that she had not asked questions because the level of detail implied she should already understand it. My intention was support; the effect was intimidation. The style that makes me reliable in operational planning made me unhelpful in developing someone.
Reflecting on why I did not know. Considering why an eleven-page handover seemed reasonable at the time, I produced the document I would have wanted. That is the recurring error underneath all of what follows: I have been managing people by asking what would work for me rather than what would work for them, and the distinction had not previously occurred to me as a distinction.
Impact on individuals: the experienced dentist. The Dominance element shows under pressure. During a week when two nurses were absent, I reallocated the list without discussing it with the treating dentist, on the reasoning that speed mattered and I had the information required. He raised it directly and fairly: the decision was defensible and the process was not, and he had been treated as a resource rather than a colleague.
Reflecting on this, my working style produces good decisions quickly and generates resentment when the people affected are not part of them. In a professional setting where clinicians hold autonomy over their own practice, that cost is higher than it would be elsewhere. Buchanan and Huczynski (2023) observe that professional staff respond poorly to administrative decisions taken over their heads, which describes this accurately.
Impact on teams: the reception team. My low Influence and Steadiness show at team level. Team meetings I run are efficient, agenda-driven and short, and I have been pleased with that. Reflecting on it after the feedback described above, an efficient meeting is one where little is said by anyone else. The reception team’s suggestions have historically reached me through the site leads rather than directly, which I had attributed to hierarchy and now think reflects the meetings I run.
Impact on peers: the other practice managers. Reflecting on a relationship outside my own team, the group’s four practice managers meet monthly to agree shared process. Colleagues have described me as the one who raises the exceptions nobody has thought of. Reflecting on both sides of that, it improves the quality of what we agree and it lengthens every meeting, and on at least two occasions a workable proposal was abandoned because I had identified enough edge cases to make it look unmanageable. My Conscientiousness preference improves decisions and can prevent them.
Impact on teams: the positive side. Reflecting even-handedly, the same style has clear benefits. Rota accuracy across the three sites is the highest in the group, compliance documentation has passed inspection without action, and staff have told me they value knowing exactly what is expected. Conscientiousness produces a well-run operation, and I should not conclude from three uncomfortable findings that my working style is a problem to be eliminated.
What I take from this. Applying Kolb’s requirement that a conclusion be tested rather than merely reached, the pattern across all four examples is the same: my style serves tasks well and people less well, and the cost falls on those who most need support rather than instruction. The corrective is not to become a different person but to recognise the situations where my preference is a liability, which are development conversations, decisions affecting clinical autonomy, and any meeting where I need to hear from others.
Three actions follow. I will replace the written handover approach with a staged conversation over the first month for the next appointment. I will consult before reallocating clinical lists except in genuine emergencies. And I will restructure team meetings so that the standing item is what the team raises rather than what I have to tell them, which will make the meetings longer and is the point.
References
Barends, E., Rousseau, D. and Janssen, B. (2023) People managers: an evidence review. Scientific summary. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Buchanan, D.A. and Huczynski, A.A. (2023) Organizational behaviour. 11th edn. Harlow: Pearson.
Chartered Management Institute (2023) Taking responsibility: why UK plc needs better managers. London: CMI.
Mullins, L.J. (2022) Management and organisational behaviour. 12th edn. Harlow: Pearson.
Northouse, P.G. (2025) Leadership: theory and practice. 10th edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.