Since becoming CEO of Asbury Communities in 2015, Doug Leidig has been a changemaker forging new ground for the organization and senior living as a whole.
Under his leadership, the Frederick, Maryland-based nonprofit has transformed from being a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) provider to a diversified aging services organization. Today, its business lines include pharmacy, PACE and its ThriveWell tech arm. Leidig also has restructured the leadership, driven the creation of a new corporate office and instilled a culture of innovation and resilience.
Through the Changemakers series, Leidig discusses the steps he has taken to lead Asbury to a bright and lucrative future in senior living. He talks about the different facets of change the industry is experiencing on social, technological and economic fronts — and why the senior living sector still needs to change more quickly.
We’ve reported on a lot of changes that you’ve been driving at Asbury over the last few years. If you had to pick out one or two that you are especially proud of, what would those be and why?
Leidig: A few come to mind, and the most recent one is the evolution from a CCRC business model to a diversified aging services organization. We’ve quickly added pharmacy, PACE, we have an IT company and we have therapy, so we’re more than just a CCRC model.
I think that has helped us move forward a lot faster, and by bringing in experts for each of those divisions, it has been easier to navigate the pandemic.
The second one is the redevelopment of my system leadership team and direct reports. I balanced the team with people who grew up in the industry like myself, and I’ve also brought in outsiders to create diversity of thought, background and experience. It has helped us challenge the way we do business and look for ways to improve.
The third one is the purposeful development of strategic business partners, so that we no longer look at people as just vendors or clients.
We’re very diligent and purposeful about picking organizations that can bring a breadth of knowledge to us beyond the services we’re looking to provide. We then have them sit at the table during the master planning, strategic planning and leadership development processes.
Can you walk me through the evolution from a CCRC provider to more of an aging services model? Was it strategic or did it come together piece by piece as you diversified the company?
It’s been purposeful, but it’s taken us about three or four years.
I had been convinced for quite some time that standalone senior living CCRC businesses are at risk. Maybe not tomorrow or five years from now, but moving down the line, I think there are risks. We all know that we have to change our offerings on our campuses, especially to meet the next generation’s demands.
I also knew that 98% of our revenue comes from CCRCs, from the resident rates, so you have to think, “How do I continue moving forward, investing in infrastructure, investing in innovation, investing in our workforce, and growth in all the things we want to do by just relying on resident rates?”
The way to do that is to expand and look for other revenue opportunities — whether that’s owning services provided to our campuses, partnering with existing strategic business partners or selling our external services such as our IT, we must concentrate and build those other business lines.
Where we have failed in the past is when we tried to become a therapy company. We tried to become a pharmacy. We tried to become something else we weren’t. We took a different approach, and through our affiliation with Albright Care Services, each organization entered a mutually beneficial relationship. They had the PACE/LIFE program, life programs in Pennsylvania and a pharmacy, enabling us to expand as a diversified aging services organization, and become even stronger.
I’m curious about just a couple of other changes that you’ve led. One is the cultural creation of “step-down transformers” at Asbury.
Doug: The phrase “step-down transformers” comes from resilient leadership. As leaders in this organization, it’s very important for us to manage the anxiety because through the pandemic, the state of the economy and the social unrest, there’s a lot of stress on all our associates.
We as leaders need to affirm, support, and provide services and resources to our associates and provide clarity and understanding of where we’re going brings a sense of calmness. We all know we make our best decisions when we’re calm, we’re relaxed and we’ve got a diversity of thought around the problem.That’s the culture we’re building.
Just as we do for our residents, we encourage our staff to be themselves when they come here. We should make sure that there’s nothing in that workplace, environment or culture that would deter that. Constantly reinforcing that has helped us a lot as well.
I keep going back to one of our largest campuses in Montgomery County, Maryland, where over 50 different countries are represented in the workforce alone. Regardless of what’s happening in the macroenvironment, you have your own tensions and issues there, but we’ve encouraged everybody to celebrate who they are, celebrate their culture and celebrate their personalities. They have created opportunities on campus to make that upfront and live. I think the more we continue to support that, encourage that, and tell people that, it’s beneficial.
By helping change those experiences for people, we also change their beliefs. That’s where we’re focused because it has to be much more than just words — it has actions behind it.
Can you describe a time when you were trying to create change and it didn’t go according to plan, and where did you go from there?
I think there’s a lot of things that I’ve tried over the years, whether it was in the CEO role or even when I was COO, but one thing that always comes to mind is growth. We were not necessarily in a growth mindset in terms of infrastructure and new business lines.
When I came in as CEO, I was convinced that with a few tweaks here and there, in two years, we could do a couple affiliations and acquisitions. I expected faster results, but I realized quickly that I was being met with resistance for multiple reasons: fear, being averse to risk and expanding beyond who we are. We have had some residents push back when we want to grow because they are comfortable with where they are.
That was one [area] that I felt that I was not very successful in for the first, probably four or five years, and here at year six, we’re finally getting to that point.
Second is the culture of innovation. That was another driver when I came in as CEO, but it took a long time and I did not anticipate the resistance I faced. Innovation means many things to many people and I didn’t provide clarity for my vision.
You mentioned that that innovation means a lot of different things to different people. How do you define innovation?
Innovation comes in either evolution or revolution. I initially sought the revolution but then I realized people’s thought processes are more aligned with evolution.
In other words, how do we take what we’re doing today and make it better by using existing tools, and how do we apply that to our industry or our workforce? Revolution is where you start creating strategic business partnerships in order to do things that we couldn’t on our own.
Once I was able to understand innovation in those terms we were able to compartmentalize and start chunking it off into different areas.
To be a changemaker, you have to be a risk-taker. Agree? How do you describe your own risk tolerance?
I think that goes back to innovation. You have to define the risk. I’m more apt to take a risk on a million-dollar pilot program than a $50 million new venture. I think it depends on the significance of the risk at an organizational level, but failure is always a possibility.
One of the things we learned by embracing that risk of failure is that we also fail a lot faster than we have in the past. Sometimes we let things go on that aren’t working when, in reality, we just have to fail and move on.
It is natural to want to go in and fix things right away when they’re broken. Sometimes, however, you have to take the risk of letting it work itself out. When you go out and you fix it quickly, you get stuck doing things the way you always did them. If we were risk-averse, we’d still be where we were 15 years ago.
I believe the risk-averseness has diminished, but it’s amazing how ingrained it is in our culture. Yes, I’m a believer of risk but I believe in being very responsible about risk.
Can you describe the new corporate office that Asbury created under your leadership?
One of the things that I noted when I became CEO was we still operated in silos, even within the corporate office, which we now call the Asbury Support & Collaboration Center. In the silos, you could go days without seeing somebody because they were either in their office, or the layout of the office wasn’t set up as a gathering space.
The morale was low and the break room was basically a glorified closet. We had cubicles, semi cubicles, typical corner offices and some other additional spaces. It was very hierarchical, and I was always convinced that the more you collaborate, the better off your organization is.
I started designing a new office space with an open floor plan. I created multiple task forces and teams to come up with a hybrid office space concept. [Now], nobody has an office and we’re all centrally located with open workstations. We also have a lot of glass and meeting rooms in a variety of sizes.
Our new space enabled us to become more responsive to the end-user. It has been very refreshing because everyone is more engaged with the organization.
We surveyed everybody in the office about who they work with most and clustered them in groups. That encouraged collaboration and discussions without the disruption of having to track somebody down.
It’s worked out well. Again, you talk about risk — this was a big one. I took an office culture that has been in place for 90 years, breaking it all down to bring us together. Based on the survey and the feedback we got, it’s been a very positive experience for people.
Is there a type of technology that could be especially transformative for senior living?
I think what’s going to change our industry around IT is having the right infrastructure to support virtual reality and predictive analytics when it comes to health. That’s going to be the key. I’m not sure exactly what they are.
For instance, we’re doing a brain-health pilot at Asbury Methodist Village with a new tool that uses virtual reality to measure brain health. We’re collaborating with the REACT Neuro research and development team that is attached with Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical. When we surveyed residents, one of their fears was making sure that their cognitive abilities continue. There’s a lot of people out there starting to study brain health, so we’re now part of that. A person from the Asbury Foundation helped fund the pilot and a complete redevelopment of our brain health program at Asbury Methodist Village.
I know that we’ve already talked about the move to diversify from being a CCRC provider, but where do you see the future going for CCRCs?
I think if I had the answer I’d be doing something different. [chuckles] While we did weather the pandemic, I think it created two camps of future consumers: one that buys into this because they talk to their friends who may have been living on campuses or any CCRC across the country; and another that would rather stay home to avoid regulations and restrictions. Addressing both camps in our communications efforts is going to be a primary focus moving forward.
The new consumer is also a part of the most diverse group that we have ever seen. We typically have the Silent Generation, two or three other generations that can be defined by four or five bullets. You can put them in a box and say, “Here’s generally the way they’re defined,” and you know their needs instantaneously. The new generation’s going to be all over the board.
Whether they have wellness or financial concerns, we can’t be everything to everybody, but we can decide what market we are going to serve moving forward. I think that’s the challenge CCRCs will encounter where they are heading.
It’s not a blanket statement. We have eight communities in three states. I’m not convinced that my answer for our Springhill community in Erie, PA is going to be the same answer it is for Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg, Maryland, or down in Knoxville, Tennessee.
That’s going to create a lot of opportunities and challenges for us as an organization because right now, we pride ourselves on being able to create efficiencies across all the communities. Now, we might not be able to do that, or the way we operate may be a little different. That’s where I see it going. We can no longer be a one-stop-shop for this certain demographic. We’re going to have to expand that and change the way we operate.
Could you see serving different price points at different communities?
I see us sticking to the core of what we have. As a whole, I think our entrance fees are generally reflective of the local markets. We’re going to offer where we’re at now with the middle to upper-middle-income level, but we need to diversify.
When I talk about growth, that low income, moderate housing niche is something that we all have to figure out how to support. I think there’s ways to do that around our existing communities that are already there, but I haven’t been able to solve that problem yet.
Again, trying to stick to our niche is the important part, based on lessons learned in the past. We tried to be something we were not and it cost us greatly.
How to you approach change to be innovative but not too far ahead of the market?
Let’s just stick with the IT part of that. Integrating and aligning our IT strategy with our business strategy is key. That way, they’re not getting ahead of us because they see a bunch of different opportunities. Keeping alignment and studying the market simultaneously is a balancing act, and we’re focused on trying to determine that future market.
While we have a need for our residents in the next five years and we have to continue to invest in the infrastructure and services there, we need to think about prospects that are 15-20 years away. Then we can start building infrastructure with them in mind.
Infrastructure takes several years and lots of money to build. It’s not something that you can just snap your fingers and say, “Okay, oh, I got data,” because there’s so many integral parts. You have to automate and integrate.
That’s a big issue for organizations.
Some people seem to be changemakers from the start of their career and others become changemakers along the way. Can you talk a little bit about your journey?
I have changed over time. I am not the same person that I was when I was COO. And even when I was COO for about 15 years, I changed multiple times.
At that time, Ed Thomas, the CEO of the organization, encouraged and supported professional growth. I had a tendency to focus on the industry, look for change and learn from there. I think there’s a lot of value to that.
When I became CEO, my board chair, Bob Boyd, pushed me hard to get outside of our industry. He was from outside of the industry. He was a voluntary board member who pushed me to get outside our industry and go learn from other CEOs.
He took me to an executive seminar for a few days and I got to sit with people from around the world.
That’s where I changed. The world I was looking at expanded so much more when I became CEO. I was given the freedom to do that.
I think that’s the evolution that I’ve gone through, if I had to step back and look at the last 20 years.
Do you think senior living as an industry is changing fast enough?
[Chuckles] No. No, I don’t think we are. Sure, there may be pockets of individuals within senior living that are changing, but the industry as a whole? We’re not changing quick enough.
I think it’s very evident that we’re still the last people brought to the table for discussion. If we were changing, during a pandemic, senior living would have been at the table to talk about how you take care of infectious disease. We’re not even thought of when it comes to protocol architecture, and that is a serious flaw in the system.
We know how to isolate. We know how to take care. We know how to change services in a disease outbreak. It’s obvious that we haven’t changed enough because nobody else is looking to us for answers.
We need to change the way society views aging. They get to see what we do and how diverse we are, but we’re not telling our story well enough or moving forward fast enough to change the perception of what we do.
We need to get out of our own way and be vulnerable to others regarding partnerships and collaborations. For the longest time, it was always everybody’s little fiefdom, but we’ve all got great things to offer. Being able to collaborate and work with outsiders is just what we need to succeed, but we’re not even close to doing that fast enough.
Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you wanted to share, or any last thoughts on change and senior living?
While I say we’re not changing fast enough, I am starting to see the tide turn because there are new people coming in the CEO positions. There is more collaboration happening and I’m very optimistic about where things are headed. I’m proud of the CCRCs because as a whole, our industry has overcome this with strength. I think we took care of the residents, which is the top priority for all of us.
While we still face many challenges, I could not be more proud to be part of this industry and what we have accomplished.
