A senior partner in our network told me last quarter that he didn't feel comfortable giving his associate honest feedback. I asked him why. He said: "If I'm wrong, he'll resent me. And if I'm right, he'll resent me more."

That sentence explains, more clearly than any survey, why most clinical mentorship in private practice never actually happens. Both sides default to the safest available behavior: avoidance dressed up as professionalism. Small talk in the hallway. Surface case discussions over coffee. A polite distance that protects both careers and develops neither.

The instinct, once practices recognize the gap, is to start a mentorship program. Assign mentors, suggest monthly meetings, hope conversations happen. They don't. Generic mentorship fails for three reasons: no structure to make hard conversations safe, no shared agenda that forces preparation, and no cadence tight enough to make the mentor an actual part of the associate's working life.

Our answer is a structured peer partnership; senior and junior surgeons meeting every two weeks with a defined four-part agenda: what's working, what's hard, what I see that you don't see yet, and what's next. It's explicitly not a performance review and not a chart audit. It's prospective, developmental, and structured as a peer conversation rather than a judgment.

The part most senior partners want to avoid, sharing one honest observation the associate hasn't seen yet, is also the only part that changes the trajectory. The structure forces the move so the partner doesn't have to manufacture courage in the moment.

Six months into rollout, practices running this program retained associates at a meaningfully higher rate, with shorter time to projected production and higher confidence in the practice as a long-term home. The practices that resisted it, "we already talk, he knows where my office is,” had higher turnover and lower partner satisfaction across the board.

Independence built your practice. Interdependence builds a partnership. The practices that resist structured mentorship are the ones still operating on the assumption that the founder's individual presence is the practice's entire competitive advantage. It isn't. The practice's real advantage is the system that produces the next generation of partners.

Your partner in excellence,

Josh Everts, DDS, MD
Chief Clinical Officer, OMS360