HEALTHTAC West 2024 Panel: Empowering Our Leaders — How Are We Training Tomorrow’s Executives and Leaders?
By Jim Nelson | September 10, 2024
SAN DIEGO, CA — At the recent HEALTHTAC/Senior Living News team building/networking/learning event in this SoCal coastal city senior-living operators and suppliers from across the nation joined the two sister companies at their boutique retreat.
This article highlights the final panel discussion at that event (click here if you missed any of the previous articles), a panel that dived into how we’re preparing and empowering tomorrow’s leaders. The panelists were Denise Anderson, the vice president of senior living at National Church Residences; Cassie Grisar, the senior director of marketing and brand awareness for Brightwater Senior Living; David Mills, partner, president, and chief operating officer of AgeWell Solvere Living; and COO Laura Willingham of Milestone Retirement Communities.
As the moderator, I began by asking National Church Residences’ Anderson about her company’s succession planning.
“The first thing we did as an organization was recognize that succession planning can no longer be just restricted to C-Suite level leaders who are nearing retirement,” she said. “We recognize that all of our leaders are mission critical, so given the current state of the job pool — and when you think about what you really want in your leaders, that job pool shrinks a little bit more — we had to really start to focus on doing succession planning for all leadership levels. The second thing we recognized is that asking someone who is not approaching retirement age to participate in the selection and development of their own successor could be pretty uncomfortable. It’s one thing to be approached because, ‘You’re doing a fantastic job. We recognize that you’re high potential. We want to help develop you and invest in you in order to get you ready for that next level position,’ but that’s completely different than, ‘You’re doing a great job, your contribution is valued, and oh, by the way, could you select one to three people that could do your job if, God forbid, you were hit by a bus tomorrow? And could you train them and work with them in order to get them ready to step into your role?’ First of all, ‘Nobody can do my job,’ right? We kind of all feel that way, and so we really had to take a sensitive and thoughtful approach to training all of our leaders at every level in order to make sure they understood that this isn’t a slap in the face. We are not saying that you’re not good at what you do. We want to work on a succession plan for you, too, for your growth journey. But at the same time if we are really going to ensure that our mission is bubble wrapped and protected, and that we can transition leaders over time with minimal impact to the residents that we serve, then we have to have a really thoughtful plan in place for making sure that those critical leadership positions are always going to be covered by the right person. So, every leadership position, every manager, department director, clinical leader, all the way up through VP level and C-Suite level has a succession plan that they’re working through.”
The next question went to Grisar: How does Brightwater develop executives for the future?
“This year has been a big emphasis on partnering with FutureSYNC,” she replied. “Our company is very diverse and all levels of experience, and in partnering with FutureSYNC we create development plans that hold each other accountable. We work as a team; we collaborate on opportunities for us to see where we can improve. We have internal coaches, external coaches, and coaches through FutureSYNC to help us get through any obstacles that we may be faced with at a central office level or with community teams, ensuring that we’re all aligned with the same goals in place.”
Mills then talked about AgeWell’s plan for assessing potential leaders for how they align with the company’s values.
“Something like what Denise brought up, we are working through Q4/Q1 putting in place a succession plan across the board for each leader,” he explained, “but what I’m really starting to look at is the slowdown of the plan, to make sure that people are truly prepared for their job. Because what I’m finding is, and I hate to say it about the executive directors in the buildings and some of the home office team members, five percent of them really push and get better and better. So, the big thing now is to try to get that five percent hired, figure out how to get that in. I came from Marriott, and we were two-thirds promoted from within, one-third from outside. That is kind of my goal now, to make sure that we get everybody to the value proposition that they need to be: loyalty, integrity, transparency, and entrepreneurship. I’m the oldest one on the panel, and I think of succession plan almost constantly, because who takes the reins from you? Do you sell? Do you keep it? Do you give it to whoever? So that’s important to me. I actually, I have people that are in line for what I do, because I’m not that worried about it.”
Milestone Retirement Communities has been bringing its existing leaders up to speed with AI-supported decision making and smart-system tool optimization, so I asked Laura about that process.
“We made a commitment as an organization to support our leaders with working smarter,” Willingham answered. “It’s been one of our initiatives this past year. We were looking at leadership burnout, we were looking at leadership disenfranchisement, if you will, so we started to work with partners who could reduce some of the external stressors. We wanted to find real-time communication tools and regulatory support elements in day-to-day work. We are finding it going well, and we are finding it challenging because it’s causing some anxiety among our leaders. Some of them are really used to tools, and they’re in their patterns, and they’re feeling really good about it; asking the adoption of some of these new tools is causing a sense of vulnerability, so we’re working side by side to say it’s okay. We’re all doing new learning together, and we have grace with that. And adopting new learning can be very stressful for folks, especially coming out of the Covid fatigue period of time, and as senior leaders we have to say, ‘It’s okay,’ and work together through that. So, it’s a mixed bag. We’re going to go through this process through the end of this year. Our ultimate goal is to find AI supporting tools, to identify KPIs, because that’s where we really want to get to.”
Anderson then spoke about NCR’s process for mentoring and developing up-and-coming leaders.
“It’s funny, you mentioned earlier at what point do we sit a server down and say, ‘It’s time for you to be mentored and developed’?” she said. “We start thinking about it almost immediately. We use behavior-based interviewing and we hold onto those notes. We go through that interview process not only trying to see if someone can do the job, but how they do the job and does the how align itself with our mission as an organization. Soon after that new hire starts, we do a couple of different things: We pull those interview notes out and identify areas of strength where we believe that we can help them continue to grow and develop; we put peer mentors in place for pretty much all of our positions — that’s not an optional piece as we make sure that employees are assigned to someone who’s been doing the job that they’ve been hired into for an extended period of time, in the way in which we would like to see the job performed, so that they get to learn good habits, learn the National Church Residences way from the very beginning, grow to connect to the mission in that way — and we do some other things that are more optional. We have a mentorship program; we call it AIM — Achievement In Motion; we allow for positions to do external coaching to an extent; we support local leadership development programs through LeadingAge. I’m actually a LeadingAge Ohio coach for Leadership Academy, and so we’re constantly pushing people to be able to have the support that they need in order to grow. Now, we do recognize that not every employee wants to move to that next position or grow through the company; some people just want to stay doing what they’re doing because that’s what they love. But that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to get mentorship or development. We look at that in just a different way and say, ‘Okay, how do we develop you into the perfect whatever — fill in the blank — job title.”
Brightwater has experienced a lot of growth over the last few years, so I was curious how they continue to successfully retain executives long-term, while also cultivating a positive culture of creativity.
“I would say that we’re very lucky to have a president who allows us to make decisions and also the freedom to fail,” Grisar noted. “Whether it’s at the community level or the central office level, he puts a lot of trust in the people that he hires and the people that we hire. I’ll give a really funny example: We have a huge emphasis on social media right now where I’ve been allowed to hire a social media manager. Facebook is obviously our priority, but we’re now starting to push TikTok and have them for all of our communities. You have to have TikTok trends to get views, and a trend about a month ago was for businesses always accepting new patients. So, we came up with this semi-funny idea that we were going to do a couple videos that say, ‘Always accepting sugar daddies,’ and then flip it to ‘Residents.’ He sees it, and he’s cringing, the president of the company. Happy to say the videos are still up and I’m still employed.”
Fee Stubblefield of The Springs Living was the keynote speaker for our event, and he talks in his book, A Culture of Promise, about the importance of empowering the people below you to make decisions. So, I asked Mills about his point of view at the top of the company ladder and how AgeWell Solvere Living empowers its team members to make decisions.
“Similar to what Cassie was saying,” Mills responded, “we leave a lot of freedom. I heard years ago, ‘Committees don’t get anything done all the time,’ but I have to say, we’ve got very small executive groups that we review together. Because I shouldn’t be the only one making decisions. I don’t have the expertise that Cassie has, I don’t have the expertise that Laura has; I have different expertises. What I’ve learned to do is let people roll, listen to what they have to say, make educated decisions and seek to understand.”
“I think part of that is what you have to do to recruit and retain good leaders,” Willingham answered when she was asked the same question. “Especially today, they have to feel semi-autonomous. I think that’s how you acquire excellent talent. But in order to do that, I think as an organization, you have to be really confident in what you stand for and communicate that effectively; otherwise, it will fail. I think you need to know what your priorities are as an organization and you have to communicate those effectively and consistently across your organization, so that leaders feel good about what they can and can’t do. I think you need to be comfortable in your policies and procedures and know that they don’t dictate everything. ‘I’m not a process person, but I have the IQ because you’ve hired me with that IQ to be able to understand them, execute them, and read the room, because I’m going to have to bend them from time to time. You’ve put me in a place, in a position so that when I’m in front of a regulator, when I’m in front of a family, when I’m in front of a difficult situation with a team member, I’m going to use those as resources and be able to execute your ultimate mission as the organization, to deliver a message.’ Because really, truly, once we’re in the C-Suite area, we’re creating a certain thing, but anyone in that middle management down to frontline, those are ‘change’ leaders. Those are individuals carrying messaging, creating culture. They are going to be the people that represent your organization most effectively. As an organization you really have to be firm in your communication abilities. And if you do that well, they’re going to be your most powerful individuals.”
“I just got done reading a book called Unreasonable Hospitality,” Mills added, “and in the book they had a thing: community smart versus corporate smart. The whole chapter gave me a lot of pause because, to your point, there’s things that you should leave for the community to do, there’s things that you should make easy for them to do, because we’re the servants for the communities.”
“I think,” mentioned an audience member, “one of the toughest situations that any business has to deal with is you have a top performer, you have no position that you can promote them to because the person in charge of them is also a top performer. Are you guys trying to create new roles for them? How do you handle that situation?”
“Yes, we absolutely have situations like that,” Anderson responded. “Our organization, because it’s large and we have several different divisions, we notice that we’re always thinking about growing. The reality is, for us at least, people can grow this way, and they can grow that way, so we started doing a lot of cross training and creating opportunities where people can see what’s happening in other divisions where there might be an opportunity for a next level that’s not directly above them. The other thing is, it doesn’t just have to be more responsibility within our organization; can they sit on a board that’s going to impact us? It still gives that person an opportunity to feel like they are growing, even though it’s not necessarily moving into a different role just yet. And that’s gotten really great feedback from folks.”
“We started a thing,” said Mills, “I call it ‘The Best of the Best.’ If I use that in real life, I’d probably get in trouble. But what we end up doing is put them on a monthly call with me to just to give us ideas, just to implement ideas from the field. These are the 100 percenters. They’re doing some of the meetings for us. They’re starting to get cross trained. This is a way to get them moving in the right direction. On the C-Level guys, we keep mentoring them because we know that like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you can’t do it forever.”
“We do add some compensation opportunities,” Anderson finished, “some financial incentives to that. Because people are often not just looking for more responsibility, they’re also looking for more compensation, so we try to build that in.”
