By Steve Moran
Fara Gold is a senior living icon and sales and marketing master. She has turned around senior living organizations and served as an asset manager for senior living owners. She has successfully managed the launch of a number of vendor companies in the senior living space. Finally, she is a friend and a valued advisor.
1. What is the most important leadership lesson you have learned?
Ask rather than tell. By practicing Covey’s “assume best intentions” I can always “ask” to “learn.” By asking others I can help them be a part of the solution.
2. What has surprised you most about being a leader?
The need to have broad and collaborative, not perfect, expectations. Perfection crushes spirits and any hope to inspire others. Let go of expectations to be surprised by unexpected outcomes. Understand everyone is trying their best with the skills, experiences, and leadership they have at any given time.
3. What is the best leadership advice anyone ever gave you?
My Mentor in Healthcare and subsequent mentors have consistently helped me to Listen. Listen, and then . . . listen more.
4. When you are faced with impossible challenges where do you find strength?
I find strength in my faith and in my training in Human Development. I believe in the intrinsic good of human beings. That we’re fundamentally good and our actions are to heal the world.
5. If you were to compare yourself with a historical, movie, or storybook character as a metaphor for how you lead who would it be and why?
Marie Curie has inspired me since I was a little girl. She believed in the power of an unseen and unknown substance and went about in her persistent work as an applied physicist to discover Polonium and the principles of radioactivity, as well as to be the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes in Science.
She was proud to be married to a Nobel Prize winner and inspire her daughter to also win a Nobel Prize. Marie Curie’s curious mind and persistent work are the two principles I greatly admire and have aspired to achieve in all my professional and personal endeavors. I often am called upon to share a strategy or concept that may be new to investors or operators. I have the courage to venture into new areas or unknown tactics to try to realize better or different results.
This series is all about leadership. What inspires, what is most important. It is also meant to be fun. If you know someone who should be featured here we would love to hear from them or from you.
