What skills are needed to be in a well functioning team?

This question rewards structure over a simple list. Rather than naming every skill you can think of, aim to pick a few key skills, and for each one: explain why it matters, give a personal example that demonstrates it, and connect it explicitly to dentistry. This shows genuine understanding rather than rote memorisation of “good” qualities.

Key skills for an effective team

• Communication — ensures everyone understands their role, keeps workflow smooth, and builds trust and a positive working environment.
• Leadership — provides direction and helps coordinate a team toward a shared goal, even when you’re not formally “in charge.”
• Delegation — ensures tasks are distributed appropriately, playing to individual strengths and avoiding overload on any one person.
• Empathy — allows team members to understand each other’s perspectives and work together respectfully, especially under pressure.
• Problem-solving — helps a team navigate obstacles or disagreements constructively, rather than letting them derail progress.
• Adaptability — allows a team to adjust when circumstances change, which happens constantly in a busy clinical environment.
• Reliability — builds trust within the team, since colleagues need to know they can depend on one another to follow through.

Ultimately, these skills work together to build trust, shared responsibility, and mutual respect — the real foundation of any strong team, rather than any single skill in isolation.

Reflecting on your own experience

Whichever skill(s) you choose to focus on, make sure you include a genuine personal example, clearly explaining the role you played and how your contribution helped the team succeed. Go a step further by reflecting on what the experience taught you, and how it’s helped you grow both personally and in terms of your readiness for a professional environment like dentistry.

Linking this to dentistry

Whatever skill you discuss, tie it back explicitly to working within a multidisciplinary dental team. Strong teamwork in a dental practice depends on clear communication, mutual respect, and genuine collaboration between everyone involved — dentists, nurses, hygienists, and therapists alike. Effective teamwork leads to better patient care, improved efficiency (which matters hugely in an NHS setting where a dentist might see around 30 patients a day), and a safer clinical environment overall. It also shapes how patients experience the practice — a well-functioning, harmonious team can make patients feel more at ease and more trusting of the care they’re receiving, which connects directly to one of the 9 GDC principles, and matters particularly for anxious patients.

Suggested structure for this question

• Choose two or three key skills rather than trying to cover every possible quality — communication, leadership, empathy, adaptability, and reliability are all strong choices.
• For each skill, explain why it matters to a functioning team, before giving a specific personal example that demonstrates it in action.
• Reflect on what you learned from that experience, showing genuine personal development.
• Link each skill explicitly to dentistry, referencing the multidisciplinary dental team and the impact of good teamwork on patient care, efficiency, and patient trust.
• Conclude by summarising how these skills, together, build the trust and shared responsibility that underpin any well-functioning team — in dentistry or otherwise.