Embrace Vulnerability, Control Fear: How Covid Changed the Top Leaders of Brookdale, ISL, Merrill Gardens

April 22, 2020 was a life-changing day for Merrill Gardens President Tana Gall.

Gall was in a committee meeting with a handful of other company leaders when they got the news that 61 residents had tested positive for Covid-19. While Gall was used to playing the part of the unflappable senior living leader, this was different.

“We cried because we were scared,” Gall recalled Monday during a panel discussion at the 2022 Senior Living Executive Conference, which Argentum held in Minneapolis this year. “We didn’t know exactly what to do.”

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But as afraid as Gall felt, she also realized that her leadership of the ​​Seattle-based senior living operator had in that moment grown to be “the strongest it had ever been.”

“I knew I was leading from the right spot, I knew my team was doing what they could,” she said. “It actually changed the way I look at myself and leadership.”

As she writes in her recently published book, Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD) CEO Cindy Baier had a similarly formative day early in the Covid-19 pandemic. In mid-January, former Brookdale board member and Baier’s mentor, Jim Seward, warned that a new and deadly disease was spreading rapidly in China.

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It was “the single most important conversation” in the company’s pandemic response, Baier later told Senior Housing News. What she learned from those early days was to focus on what she and the company’s other leaders can control.

“You have to communicate clearly, and you have to control fear,” Baier said during the Argentum panel.

While Gall and Baier are just two industry leaders, their experience and that of other operators exemplifies the tough situations that many other organizations faced in the pandemic’s early days. And, their challenges and victories can offer guidance for an industry sure to face more headwinds ahead as the pandemic continues.

‘Vulnerability was not a weakness’

As Covid cases crept up in early 2020, so too did a feeling of helplessness and fear among many workers in the senior living industry. In the years leading up to the pandemic, Gall had played the part of a strong leader with all the answers.

“I always felt like I needed to know all the answers, and I had to say them with confidence so that people would believe me and trust me,” she said.

Then came the tearful phone call in April, and everything changed. By showing she was as vulnerable as the rest of her team, Gall believes she strengthened her leadership — and she is not alone in the belief that vulnerability can give way to trust and understanding.

“Vulnerability was not a weakness,” she said.

Carlsbad, California-based Integral Senior Living (ISL) CEO Collette Gray remembers being vulnerable in the pandemic’s early days, too. She recalls March 17 was the day “we shut everything down.”

As she wrote an email to the rest of her team, Gray was struck with the realization that she had no good answers for what to do next. After all, the senior living industry had never struggled against a deadly global pandemic before.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, Gray and the ISL executive team led the company’s response as workers tested residents, secured PPE and cared for residents who had fallen ill.

Gray admitted that the company sometimes “made things up as we went along,” a scary prospect. But the alternative — inaction — was far scarier.

“I’m not going to apologize,” Gray said. “I’m going to celebrate and say no, we did amazing things, and we were there when we needed to be as an industry, as an organization, as a family.”

Zeta Smith, CEO of Sodexo’s senior living dining program in North America, knows all too well the challenges of the pandemic. Her first “live” day in her role was March 6, but seven days later, the Covid lockdowns started. Like Gray and Gall, she didn’t always have all the answers regarding what to do next.

“There were some times where my team was asking me [questions], and I said ‘I don’t know — but let’s figure it out,’” Smith said during the panel.

Not long after receiving a word of warning in January, Baier and Brookdale started preparing for the challenges ahead. Early on, she learned that communication was “critically important” to dealing with adversity, Covid or not.

So, the company set out to produce videos describing the pandemic and ways to delay the spread of the disease. Among the first videos the company made was one pertaining to proper handwashing — and at that moment in time, it felt like a risk to do.

“I remember the discussion at the time at Brookdale was, ‘We don’t want to be known as the handwashing company, and be known for the handwashing video,’” she said. “But what we wanted to do is to talk about the things that were relevant, that were important.”

Among the company’s early accomplishments were leveraging expertise from its resident advisory council, and piecing together an entirely new supply chain for PPE out of small vendors across the country.

Those efforts paid off, and Brookdale never encountered a time when it didn’t have adequate protection for its roughly 33,000 associates. In fact, the company was able to ship PPE to many of its competitors.

Words of wisdom

One piece of advice Baier had for the rest of the industry was to “build your personal board of directors” as she had done in the years leading up to the pandemic.

“Those are the people who have skills that you don’t, who will tell you the truth whether you want to hear it or not, and will help you see the future,” she said.

Another big lesson from the pandemic was that communication and a unified effort can overcome just about anything.

“I absolutely believe that we can do almost anything if we communicate and we work together,” Baier said. “Any one individual is weaker than all of us together — so let’s work together.”

Baier is putting that piece of advice to practice today as she helps facilitate a group of women CEOs. The group — which Baier said started as a simple email chain — has in the past few years grown into a network for women leaders in senior living to share advice, wisdom and guidance.

“Whether it was solving issues with staffing or whether it was, ‘Hey, I’m having a really bad day and I need to talk,’ … that spirit of sisterhood, of partnership, was really critical,” she said.

Gall has taken many of the same lessons to heart. The biggest piece of advice she offered leaders of other operators was to work together, particularly as it relates to the industry’s toughest challenges, such as staffing.

Through mentorship and smarter outreach and hiring practices, Gall sees a future for the industry that is just as bright, but with many more people working in it.

“If you’re 22 today and you get into this industry, you are set. This is the greatest place to be,” she added.

Gray echoed that sentiment, and noted that senior living leaders need to do a better job of conveying the industry’s opportunities to prospective workers.

“We need to continue to get the word out there about this incredible industry, and that we are stronger together,” she said.

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