Author: Steve Moran

The better way is to study the issue and candidate and make your voting decision based on what you believe is best for the country …

Imagine the cumulative effect of making decisions this way. When we align our choices with the insights of the best leaders, the potential is enormous.

The more interesting question to me was what those being led in senior living think about those who lead them.

Protecting residents from falls is a measured balance between protecting against falls and quality of life.

If you are willing to do the hard work of conducting a premortem on the project you will end up with something way better. Here is how it works. 

While I am a believer in the importance of value-based care, I also worry that it will become the next big fad that everyone hopes will lead to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

We make big, hairy, audacious promises to older people, their families, and team members. We have to be different than Delta.

It seems counterintuitive to creating a good work life, but not so fast. It turns out that trash talk can create a positive, heightened sense of competitiveness.

Because he is willing to be challenged, even eager to be challenged, he will always end up with the best ideas.

You simply never know when that person who fired you, who stopped doing business with you, will be in a position to help.

As leaders we have to guard against this. It hurts our business, it hurts team morale, and it can cost you business.

The evidence was there that leadership was the problem, and they ignored it.

Over the last few months I have run a number of polls about timely and critical topics in senior living. Take a look at the results.

We are in the senior living business! But really, what does that mean?

When leaders and their teams own problems with a solution mindset, problems — even big problems — become solvable.

Independence Day is a day to celebrate the freedoms we have to speak, to start businesses, to fail, to celebrate in the most free nation.

Is it even possible that doing them yourself — doing them internally rather than outsourcing them — is not the best use of time and resources?

Imagine that in your senior living company, you had someone who had some real authority to get to the bottom of problems

A year ago I wrote an article titled “The Nursing Home Flimflam Game,” then sent the draft to leaders at a number of senior living trade associations, who universally hated it.

Billy Chemirmir killed at least 22 women who lived in a number of senior living communities in the Dallas, Texas, area.

If they were moral, they would still shine the light on industry problems — something that is painful but noble — but they would tell the whole truth rather than a distorted truth.

I have a couple readers who love to call me out when they disagree with something I have written here or published on social media, and I love them for this.

When we do the right thing, we build tremendous loyalty that over time will come back in terms of higher occupancy and fewer legal claims.  

When organizations are managing risks right, they first assume that things will go wrong, and because of that assumption …

They nearly universally have one trait that actually makes it even harder for others to be like them. Here is what it is:

Think about how you would react after complaining about some service or product if the company simply asked, “What would it take to make it right?”

They want to know that sometimes you don’t know what to do, that you make mistakes. Mostly they want to know who the real you is.  

There are in this world a few industries that are remarkably failure resistant. The question is what makes them different?  It’s a single thing: They are obsessed with failure.

A significant aspect of what I do is visit senior living communities. I find it really hard to write about the industry without experiencing it for myself.

If you have the courage to tackle these questions, you will be more successful and happier in your professional and personal life. 

Imagine that for all of 2024, at the end of every workday, you asked yourself: Who did I create value for today?

The thing I hate most about the conversation is that it represents knee-jerk thinking of the general public.

Most of our readers are “bosses,” and as a boss, you have a profound impact on the lives of your team members.

Senior living owners and operators would sleep like babies — if only we were willing to believe the industry can be turned around. 

The Washington Post appears to be intent on hurting older people in this country, and I don’t know why!

What the experiment told me is powerful, wonderful, and not hugely surprising. We are a group of people who really care about other people.

My dream is that we start being more forthright about fails where the consequences were minimal or nonexistent. That we can tell the lessons we learned.

How much better off the industry, residents, team members would be if we were to take a proactive approach to these disasters.  

What no one has really studied are the people who start searching and then never move in. Why did they say no to senior living? We need to explore this.

All this doom and gloom misses an important truth. We have incredible capacity to figure out new, unthought-of solutions.

If this is true, then it is a massive management failure and should be a lesson to every industry leader who tolerates this kind of behavior.  

Some of the industry will love and explore what we need to learn from this series and how we can use it to be even better. 

This did not have to happen; it should not have happened. Here is what went wrong.

The hard truth is that if you see underperforming companies, underperforming communities it is always, 100% of the time, a leadership problem.

I hope you look at this list and say to each of them, “Nope, I don’t do that.” And if you can’t, maybe they need some rethinking.

The question I was left with is this: What would serve the senior living leadership community better: leaving it up or taking it down?

The best leaders, the leaders who are running great organizations, have figured out that the pain of change is always worth it.

As a leader, you know theoretically that the people you lead are watching you, but likely you have no real idea how much.  

This was maybe my 14th or 15th NIC. This is a raw dump of my impressions from the conference, influenced by presentations, conversations, and observations.

This creates a tough and delicate problem, because to be frustrated with older people not “getting it” is in itself a kind of ageism.

We know for sure that when we talk about these things they get better. We know that by talking about hard stuff we find solutions.

Are you going to NIC? If you’re still debating attending NIC in Chicago, here are some of the important things to know.

Real ageism makes assumptions about older people’s capabilities and judges them before figuring out their capabilities or not.

We see things happen that seem obviously inevitable in hindsight. The question is this: What can we learn from it?

The risk of not knowing is massive. There is also risk for a damaged reputation, which makes it harder to attract new residents and staff.

We are heading down the road to a disaster for senior living operators, residents, and team members, and only the capital providers can change that. 

Once you believe in the possibilities for your community, you can develop an action plan to get there. What do we have to do to get to 90% occupancy?

If we approach all audiences the same, we are setting ourselves up for failure and our audiences for frustration and confusion.

We have a great opportunity to not be like other companies and to instead be like companies that realized customer service is everything.

Next time something goes wrong in your community, it is worthwhile to think about it in terms of how you can use it to your advantage …

It got me thinking that someone should start a senior living advocate business. Learn more about this in the article …

How are you doing with involving your residents in growing your business … other than collecting money from them?

More and more I realize that we don’t actually have very good models for getting old. This is particularly true when passing the traditional retirement age.

I worry that in senior living and most of the world of business we have come to expect praise and accolades for simply delivering what was paid for.

If you do this, everything else you worry about will take care of itself. Your occupancy will be crazy good. Your recruitment and retention will be a snap.