Author: Steve Moran

We live in a culture that increasingly celebrates perfection and brutally punishes people for even slightly missing the mark on perfection.

Reachable goals should not be easy. They should be set at a level that, with high performance, the goals can be met.

What makes these leaders so terrible is that they immediately go defensive rather than trying to find common ground.

One of the biggest challenges leaders face is thinking that they don’t have any drama, but the truth is, they are the cause of all the drama. 

The Argentum 2022 conference is history. It was the first conference produced by HPG, and they did a great job.  

If you are leading an organization that is floundering in mediocrity, you have a tremendous opportunity to turn things around.

It would be easy to make a list of risks and ventures people took that turned into dust, yet risk avoidance can be a terrible strategy.  

Believe it or not in a twisted way, if you want a better more positive organization you need to as a leader be less positive. Here is why.

Would you stay and hope the universe will get you to higher occupancy or do something radical because you are in a desperate situation?  

Workers pick places to work largely on pay rates. Having a single toxic person makes it more expensive to hire future workers.

I believe there is a tremendous opportunity to help team members working in your communities have better conversations.

If you were ever feeling cynical about the senior living industry you will not be after reading these responses.

The needs in this area are great, though not as sexy. But I find myself drawn to the idea that it is a noble enterprise.

NIC has designed their spring conference with the specific challenges and opportunities that are on the minds of senior living leaders.

In this environment, it might seem disrespectful to talk about making senior living fun. Except we know that fun is … well fun.

Joe Biden announced broad sweeping changes for nursing homes that include much bigger sticks and the promise of better carrots.

Mark Rober lays out the 4-step process he uses when creating anything new. Are you skipping to step four most of the time?

The great opportunity is to capture the stories of residents, families, and team members. It starts with you stepping up to be the singer.

It’s so easy to fall into this trap. But it makes us less effective as leaders, less effective as family members, and it makes us less human.

These are worthy concepts for all of us. If you were to grade your organization on these 5 concepts what grade would you receive?

What if this year were the year you decided not to grow at all, but rather the year you decided to get better?

There has never been a time when this was more critical in senior living. It’s the difference between thriving and just surviving.

I sat down this evening and decided to make a list of reasons why you shouldn’t, and I won’t, miss the spring NIC conference.

It feels like the other foot is about to drop, that we are just one random floating virus away from complete disaster.

It’s a great time to reflect on lessons learned last year and explore ways to improve the life of your community and your team.

Here are the things that Malcom McLean did to turn shipping upside down and there may be some serious lessons for senior living.

I get that it’s complicated. But solutions will only come when the industry admits we have some bad actors doing terrible things.

The fundamental problem is that residents are supposed to get with the program rather than a program that is driven by the residents.

Our happiness is almost entirely determined by the standard we judge ourselves by. This is worth thinking about.

No one wants to get anything wrong EVER. But . . . this is not a reality; we all get things wrong. And it’s actually a good thing.

For those of us in the industry, every year the list comes out, there is always some “What the hell?” head-scratching.

Over and over again I hear these stories from good leaders. But this might even be good news because it is fixable . . .

What if you had access to an endowment to make sure you could pay all your bills, allowing you to create the ideal senior living community?

It seems to be moving into the category that Memory Care occupied 7-9 years ago, as the “can’t miss” new product for today.

It seems unlikely that we as an industry could ever spend enough to make senior living cool. But something like this might.

Some found ways to first survive and then thrive. Others continue to struggle and some have simply closed their doors.

From swag to content to vendors to technology. Here are some of the highlights from SMASH 2021.

A huge party with lots of music and dancing. In a moment that was missed by most, a horrible ugliness happened.

You need to increase revenue. Increasing rates is not the answer!! But what if you . . . can I get a little crazy here?

We mourn the loss of a great leader in senior living. Gene’s legacy will live on and continue to enrich the lives of generations to come.

Learn the secrets to getting occupancy HIGHER than before the pandemic. This senior living organization is doing it.

This retention hack may sound a bit crazy. But when you really think about it, it actually makes sense . . . and it’s super easy.

It’s fascinating to be at a conference like SLIF, filled with C-suite executives, when blockbuster news breaks, like the implosion of Eclipse.

The short answer is: I don’t know but I hope so! This organization is using accreditation to show they’re the “best of the best.”

You will make your community a better place, the world a better place, and . . . You will have higher occupancy!

There are 5 Communities in my neighborhood and I have no idea what makes one better, or even different, than the other.

When things are going bad it is likely a combination of these things, all of which can be fixed, though some of the fixes are painful.

Right now, like never before, senior living operators need to focus on what their core mission is. Where do you need to focus?

One day as people drive by where your community sits, there is instead an empty lot . . . would anyone notice? Would anyone care?

There was hope that this monster was rapidly on its way to being tamed. Now it’s back and bringing a new set of challenges.

It may make us uncomfortable. We may try to avoid talking about it. But we’d be better off addressing these and trying to fix them.

How Atria’s One Thing Campaign could transform the lives of your residents and staff, and make you more money.

Senior living professionals, residents, and their families list things that senior living operators do that are awful. What would you add?

Headlines that tell us that the vaccine isn’t 100% effective. It makes you wonder if you are putting yourself at risk of dying.

Tremendous opportunity to innovate still exists. But it requires taking some significant risks and experimenting with big ideas.

When thinking about quality in senior living, the right question is: What would delight residents, family members, and even team members?

We have enough trouble with unfair headline-grabbing attacks from the media, we simply do not need this kind of attack.

We love hearing from our readers, viewers, and listeners. We would love to hear your thoughts about these poll results.

This made me so frustratingly mad, that I wrote a letter to the Author and submitted it to the Letters to the Editor department.

Great leaders start with how they think about their place in the world, their business, their teams, and their customers.

I have been thinking a lot about conferences this past few weeks. I am like . . . a little kid thinking about Christmas.

I’m not so sure we learned much from the pandemic and it drives me crazy. Here are lessons we could have learned (and it is not too late).

Leaders hate it when things go wrong and they hate it most of all when they are at fault. But does casting blame really make it better?

People’s needs are complex and they need someone serving them who is compassionate, understanding, and solution-oriented.

There are reasons your competitors are succeeding and you are not. Do you want to be the ass-kicker instead of getting kicked?

Can you create a high-trust, high-performance culture that minimizes waste and maximizes mission-driven efforts?

Ever hired someone and then find out they turned out to be big fat liars? Here’s a single question that can help you uncover the truth.

I have always thought of gossip as this near-universal bad thing. But there is actually a term for good gossip.

On June 10, 2011, with trembling fingers, I pushed the publish button for the first-ever article at Senior Living Foresight.

We keep dancing around this issue, this truth: nursing homes are obsolete, they are past their prime, they need to be put out to pasture.

This is a conversion that both baffles me and saddens me . . . maybe even frightens me. How do we combat this kind of thinking?

What would 40 seconds of compassion mean to your team members, your residents, your family members . . . your prospects?

I am 100% convinced this would be a fast & inexpensive path to full occupancy, though totally counter-intuitive.

Life and business are massive, imperfect, messy, continuous experiments. Risks are necessary for success. How do you take risks carefully?

But how does one become okay with this, if you are the owner; if you are a senior-level manager; if you are in the industry?

If you trust you will get burned from time to time. If you don’t you are in a constant tug-a-war with your team. Which side do you bet on?

This issue of Rock Weekly caught my eye because it talks about a new frontier that is still in its early stages: healthcare at home.

I recently came across a document from the 1940s that seems to accurately talk about what ineffective organizations are like.

While I dislike it when people call themselves servant leaders, I believe that being a servant leader is the right approach . . . sort of.

The question every leader, every manager needs to be asking is this: What kind of manager/leader are you going to be today?

As an industry, we mostly just stand by and take this. We need to be much more aggressive about being better about telling our story.

One of the most distressing parts of doing leadership development is that most leaders way overestimate their effectiveness as a leader.

Just as Apple and Facebook are embroiled in a fight over consumer data privacy, in a very real sense, senior living is at a crossroads too.

I am pretty well convinced that most leaders have not spent much time thinking about what really matters to them.

Only Steve Moran could make a connection between million-dollar electric sportscars and senior living . . . what do you think?

If we are honest, the good old days were not as good as they could have been, not even as good as they should have been.

The best and easiest way to minimize failure is to keep doing the same old things we have always done. There are two problems with this . . .

Reading the earnings transcript made me feel like I was reading a modern version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

Are for-profit nursing home operators (and by extension assisted living operators) the enemy? I think not.

As leaders, we often have to make big decisions and choices where the outcomes are, or feel like they are, scary. What will you do?

AHCA and LeadingAge announced a sorely needed long overdue reform agenda for nursing homes, they are calling the “Care for our Seniors Act”.

I knew my team liked being a part of the organization and mostly liked me as a leader, but . . . you don’t know what you don’t know.

A leadership lesson that is critical: Leaders get blamed not for the problem but for not solving the problem.

It is our industry. And we are not carrying the water when it comes to helping people understand what we do, and what the differences are.