The CEO Series: Fee Stubblefield, The Springs Living
By Jim Nelson | September 19, 2024
Fee Stubblefield, the founder/CEO of The Springs Living and the keynote speaker at Senior Living News’ and HEALTHTAC’s recent executive event in San Diego, is also the author of an Amazon #1 bestseller in the Business & Money category.
In A Culture of Promise: The True Story of a Small Company’s Quest to Transform the Senior Living Industry, Stubblefield shares how a promise he made to his grandmother when he was an adolescent drives the culture at his senior living company. It’s a book about promises, with a very human quality to the storytelling, but as Stubblefield recently told me, the “undercurrent to the entire book” is “the relationship with capital and operators.” Call it a business book with a personal touch, or a human story with a business component — either description works.
SENIOR LIVING NEWS: What motivated you to write A Culture of Promise?
FEE STUBBLEFIELD: I wrote the book because I look at starting a company and running a company, in a way — not as important as but similar to — raising a family and children, where as parents, we put everything we have into these kids that delight us, frustrate us, test us. We learn from, we’d lay down our life for, all that someday they grow up and leave us. I think it’s a great metaphor. It would be the greatest compliment of what I’ve tried to build to have The Springs Living leave me, or I leave it. Because I’ve been a CEO for 28 years now, at some point — I’m probably the most excited I’ve been in my career about the future, so I’m not going anywhere — but at some point, when you get close to being a CEO as long as you’ve had a mortgage, maybe you have to start thinking about transition. And organizations must have succession, they must hand off to the next generation. So, the number one reason is I wrote it for that. The number two reason is I wrote it because I had to; it was something that I just knew I had to do. I knew that these ideas, these things that I’ve observed, are observations. A Culture of Promise is not about me telling anybody how to do anything, because each of us are unique and authentic, but there’s common principles, and we can learn from the experiences of other people. Our trial and error, stumbling, successes, failures along the way, our apostrophe, the hidden things that maybe aren’t the shiny, glossy things, the more challenging things, are actually probably more valuable for people to know than all the successes that we had and all the high occupancies and the IRRs and all of that; it’s probably going to be more important that they realize what almost took us down.
SLN: Do you feel like you’ve kept the spirit of that aspirational promise that you made to your grandmother all those years ago, which you write about in A Culture of Promise?
FS: One hundred percent. That’s why I think the relationship with capital and operators, the structure of that — which is really an undercurrent to the entire book, is that interface between how capital and operators work together — is, to me, the foundation that you build that success on. That’s why I haven’t sold. I could have sold and retired a long time ago. I’ve thought about selling some of our most challenging buildings and getting the hell out, but I go to answer the question, ‘Who’s going to take over?’ I hope it’s not arrogance, but I’m trying to say, ‘Who could I sell to that I know that our employees and our residents and our purpose would be protected and cherished?’ Because I think our leadership team is Guardians of the Galaxy, right? Our job is to protect that environment that happens in the communities, the doves, the caregivers, the people that are warm, and protect that environment and make it work inside of our business promises, the interface with capital, and all those outside things that can eat you. I love that Guardian of the Galaxy metaphor because that’s kind of how we see ourselves; our job is to guard what happens in there. I haven’t wanted to sell, but I’ve got to think about it because someday I will have to leave, so my focus now becomes, ‘How do I transition this company that maintains that original promise that I made to my grandmother. How do I fulfill that? That’s the key focus of the second book that’s in production right now; this book (A Culture of Promise) is the cornerstone, but it’s not the whole structure. The next book is the structure of how to do just that.
SLN: What are the practical steps by which a company grows a successful culture?
FS: By making sure all the business promises and the business components are in service to fulfilling your core promise, which is to take care of somebody, and to realize that every organization must have all four of Schneider’s cultures in there. It must have the collaboration, control, accounting, healthcare, and it must have the best-in-class element too; that would be more like Apple, like Steve Jobs — “I want to put a ding in the universe” — but he didn’t give a damn about how you felt, right? So, he was very aspirational in his goal, but he didn’t care, he wasn’t personal. We want to put a ding in the universe, but we have to do it in a way that’s nice, that feels good. Every organization, even Apple, would have been better off had Steve Jobs had more of that enrichment culture and empowered that in his organization. Every organization has all four cultures in it, and it has to balance it. The difference is that each industry has a primary culture overlay, and that primary cultural overlay takes different leaders to be successful. That’s why I’ll be very bold in saying that I think there’s a lot of cultures of control — capital in particular — that are in control of all the decisions happening in the properties, with leaders who are directives, which they should be for that control, but they will never be able to lead the way that their customers and the employees that really make a difference are going to do in an enrichment organization. They will never be able to do that without an understanding and a commitment to and, at the foundation, the very core of their organization, being true believers in the mission and taking care of people. It’s not going to work.
SLN: What are some of the key ingredients that go into making sure that the people you hire are the right people?
FS: I go into the concept of distilling your organization in the book, and the idea came from realizing that I thought I grew up in a good, churchgoing, respectable family in Pendleton, Oregon, and then one day I realized that I came from a family of moonshiners. That point of view really defines how we look at bringing people into the organization, very similar to what my grandfather did and how he made his special recipe: he would take his ingredients and put them through a process so that he got the end result. We’re doing the same thing. The difference is we’re distilling for three things. Most organizations only distill for KSAs: knowledge, skills, and abilities. That is not even close to enough. The first thing you should distill for is actually values: Is there a values match? Does the values of the person that’s going to be taking care of people match the organization’s [values]? We can’t measure values; we can observe values through behaviors, so you have to have a process for finding people that have a values match. And your organization has to have, I believe, in a business that serves other people, a deep belief and commitment to the quality of how that person that is joining you, how their story is connecting. So, knowledge, skills and abilities, values, and story are the things that we look for at The Springs. It’s amazing when you can find somebody that might have had a brother or sister or a parent who went through some tragedy — maybe it was cancer or maybe this person was a caregiver — and then their story connects with our organizational story. So, it’s a process of distilling, but it’s also a process of like attracting like. And the one thing I can promise you about the people you want caring for your residents — your customers — is that if you’re all about the money they will smell that a million miles away, and they might show up to work for a while and go through the paces, but you will lose them.
SLN: So, when you’re interviewing people what methods do you have for evaluating their values and finding out how they align with yours?
FS: Our system starts very much like other people’s systems, with a typical application process. But A Culture of Promise is actually part of our distillation process. People will read that book, identify with it, and then want to join with us because there’s a value match. We have a lot of YouTube videos, and we put our company story out there as part of the distillation process. This all started back in the early days when I used to do employee orientation. After my grandmother passed, my wife made a video of her life with all the old pictures set to some really moving music. And one day, we were struggling with this because our turnover rates were high, and I decided to get the new employees together and show them my grandmother’s video, and then tell them, ‘This is why I do this.’ Then I would watch them, and if they’re on their phones or they’re texting or not engaged, they’re not going to work out. So, we started Springs Info Sessions, where instead of hiring people and then doing that, we said, ‘We’re going to invite you to an info session, and we’re going to show you the video.’ This is even before you get to apply. We want to find out if you’re exhibiting the behaviors that would care deeply about what we do. That’s just one of the things that we use.
Interviewing into The Springs can take years, and it can take meeting a lot of people. It’s a little bit of a group think in that if you’re coming onto a team, the chemistry of that team is more important than whether you have all superstars, right? Because we can train a lot of these skills, but we can’t train values.
We use other communication tools and distillations. We have an assessment tool for distilling the type of leadership style — are they a good leadership style for the department and the position that they’re in? It takes a lot of time, and it’s a lot of investment, but every organization has to build their own still, like my grandfather would say, and that takes heat, pressure, and process to come up with the end product you’re looking for, which is smart, intelligent, purposeful, caring people to serve other people.
SLN: You talk in A Culture of Promise about quality quite a bit. Can you walk me through the various ways in which quality plays an important part in culture and in The Springs Living?
FS: Quality is a very overused word, but it’s too important to be overused. Quality for us is what we’re after. It’s something that we can all agree on. How you define quality is really important. One of the challenges we’re having in our profession right now is that we can’t agree what our quality metrics are. Are they falls, hospital readmissions? Are they ratings on your survey, whether people like the food or not? That is a superficial indication of quality. There’s a deeper way. We’re asking the wrong questions. I asked a lot of questions in the book, and I list out things that give some clues to how we think about quality but how, in our industry, can Net Promoter Score, Employee Net Promoter Score not be an indication of value? Every other industry uses it, but we don’t want to use it? We don’t want to make it part of how we look at how customers look at our industry? No wonder we have an adoption problem. As an industry, we must define quality, something basic, and we have to listen to our customers to do that.
SLN: In A Culture of Promise you write about a 3D Vision Framework.
FS: This is the Venn diagram of all your stakeholders, and organizations cannot thrive unless they have clarity. Your business actually has multiple stakeholders. It’s got your customers — residents and their families or patients and their families — the employees, of course, are one of your key stakeholders, and you’ve got your investors and all the people you make business promises to. Those actually intersect in a Venn diagram, and you’ve got to keep the balance on like a three-legged stool. This is how we looked at it. And our job as the leadership and management teams is to manage that balance, like riding a surfboard or skateboard, you’ve got to be good at keeping that right in the middle. You’re going to mess up, you’re going to get off balance, and if you recognize it, you can react and get back. Because if you get out of balance, it’s not very long before you’re going to wreck and so you have to balance the needs of all those groups, and that’s our job as leaders in this industry, to keep that balance. Employees go through the same process that our customers go through in moving in. I got a job [interview] one time, and I remember going into the restroom to straighten my tie and make sure my hair was in place, because I wanted to make sure I made my best impression, and I said, ‘If they offer me this job today, I think I’ll take it, but I’m not sure I’m going to stay here.’ It’s the same process our customers go through: They say, ‘I’m going to move in, or I’ll move my parents in, but we’ll see if they fulfill their promises to see if I stay.’ All we want them to do is make a decision to join us. Then what are the things we have to do to get people to make the decision, ‘Let’s stay here’? For an employee, it’s more about a career. For residents, it’s more about one of, if not the final chapter of their life, where they have a sense of purpose and they want to be there; it’s not about the building, it’s about the people that support their lives. Investors do the same thing. An investor will make an investment in a company, and if that goes well, they’ll do more, and then maybe they’ll commit to a longer-term relationship. We view all the stakeholders exactly the same. They all want the same things.
