The baby boomers are coming, and Trilogy CEO Leigh Ann Barney is focused on how best to serve them. Change is at the center of those efforts.
While Covid has already brought plenty of change to the senior living industry, Barney believes there is more on the way around building a new customer experience for the next generation of older adults. Trilogy’s portfolio numbers almost 130 campuses in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan and now Wisconsin.
Through the Changemakers series, Barney discusses change through a lens of senior living service delivery and technology. She also talks about how she sees transparency as a key tool to managing resistance to change at Trilogy.
How have you changed as a leader since starting in this industry?
I started in the industry on the financial side. I wasn’t in operations, and had a different perspective of the business by seeing it from the numbers, banking, accounting, those types of things. In 2007, I believe that was when I actually moved full-time into operations. And I really understood the importance of how to lead the staff in the campuses. The leaders of the campuses and line staff, they’re the closest to the customer and when you’re leading that group of people, it’s much more about serving them because they serve our residents every day. Even in my role now, and with our other senior leaders, we focus very much on how we serve our employees in the field because we need to make sure they have everything, all the tools, resources to do their job.
Then also, you’re building a culture around customer service and employee experience. My leadership style has evolved over the years to be more focused in that direction, because I see how important it is in our operations and to those employees that are closest to our customers.
Do you see yourself as a changemaker and are you always excited to drive change?
I’ve been at Trilogy for 23 of the 25 years of existence as an organization. I believe that the foundation of Trilogy has always been around change and innovation. If you think about 25 years ago when our founder started the company and had the concept of offering multiple services in one location, it wasn’t that prevalent, at least not here in the Midwest. So, the whole idea of Trilogy was innovative and changing.
Some of the other concepts around our original foundation was to be very focused on hospitality and bringing hospitality not just to the senior housing, but all through the healthcare spectrum, because we service skilled nursing as well. I think that has just been ingrained in most of us, and that’s how Trilogy operates. It’s become part of how I lead now and that we always have to be looking at the future, and be proactive in what’s coming to us.
I think it’s a really exciting time to see change in what’s happening in our industry.
What are some ways that you think the senior living industry needs to change in the next five years?
I think a lot of operators are thinking about this right now. Being in the industry for a long time, we all see the shift in clinical needs. People do not want to go into the highest level of healthcare setting if they don’t have to. Senior housing is becoming more clinically focused, and I wouldn’t say even as much from a treatment standpoint although that is part of what we do. It’s also the wellness component. People want us to be kept well as long as possible. They’re much more focused on that. I think as senior housing operators, we’re going to be offering clinical services to help people remain independent. We will try to keep people living the lifestyle they want they want to live for as long as possible, whether that’s independent living or assisted living or whatever meets their needs. Maybe it’s using third parties to help offer those services.
We’ve been talking for years about the boomer generation and preparing for the boomer generation. We’re just now starting to see that changing consumer demand, and there’s been a lot of research done through different organizations to show what this consumer is looking for versus the consumer that we’ve been serving, which is more the Greatest Generation.
As the boomers come along, they want different things in their food, their life enrichment activities, amenities, all those types of things. I think we’ve been talking about it for a long time, but now we’re really at the cusp of it.
As you look across the rest of the senior living industry, do you think it’s changing fast enough to keep up with the times?
Owners and operators in this industry know that change is needed, and they’re ready to do it. The talk at the conferences has been for a while around the changes that are coming. I think figuring out how to do it is another thing.
Figuring out payment models that are going to support those changes, for instance; and the clinical aspect of how to keep people where they want to live longer and serve them. What’s the mechanism to make sure that that can be done with regulatorily, that it can be done from a payment source? That’s why you’re seeing a lot of talk about different payment models. I think operators are ready for the change. They’re just trying to figure out how we get there.
Can you talk about a time when you tried to execute a change and things didn’t go according to plan? How did you pivot and what did you learn as a leader?
In the last 10 years or so, technology has been focused on long-term care because they know the baby boomers are coming. There are a lot of products out there, and a lot of opportunities to say, ‘Wow, this can be really great for our customers, our residents, how can we serve them differently?’
One is around telemedicine. I think we went out early with that and didn’t think about how our residents and their families would look at the technology as a treatment source; and even our providers that we operate with. We were a little early in that and it wasn’t as successful as it may have been if we had waited a little while, found a different technology and communicated a little differently.
Another one is a product that we rolled out. It’s a communication tool and innovation. We thought this was going to be a great product to use in our assisted living residences to communicate with families called Familia. We weren’t getting adoption with our assisted living residents because they are pretty savvy and they already know how to communicate fairly well through social media platforms or texting, that type of thing. But we pivoted and decided to try it in our memory care units and it’s been a great tool.
We piloted it and it just so happened when we started that pilot, it was right at the cusp of Covid. Well, it was a huge winner because families couldn’t visit their loved one, and they were able to communicate through this tool. Our residents don’t have to be tech-savvy to use it. The moral of the story is that we thought we were going in one direction with the product and instead of abandoning it completely, we tried it somewhere else and it ended up being a success. I think that’s how you have to look at technology: Through a little bit of trial and error.
How do you think about timing so that your company can innovate without getting so far ahead of the market that a new idea is on the bleeding edge and it doesn’t work?
We have created what we call the Trilogy Way Council. It’s a group of employees at different levels — leaders, field operators, line staff — who meet regularly; not every month, but at least every quarter.
They take in new innovation ideas and review them. They’ll have presentations that get made to them. They try to focus on areas where we’re looking for improvement. For example, falls. If that’s an area where we really want to focus, then they’ll look at falls technology. They’ll look at different products and then they bring what they think is the best choice for us to pilot forward.
They’ll get some consumer input as well: ‘We think this seems like a good idea, but let’s go to one of our campuses and talk to some of our residents there and get what they think about it.’
Then we’ll do a pilot. Once they bring it to leadership, we’ll look at it and then we make a decision if we want to move forward with a pilot from there. Then we pilot something and see if we like it before we move forward. We do have an internal process so that we don’t get so bogged down with all the new products, and technology, and innovation that comes to us.
This next one starts with a statement, change makers tend to be risk takers. Do you agree with that statement? How do you describe your own appetite for risk?
I don’t know that I think that you have to be a risk taker to be a changemaker.
How I would put it is, I think you can be well-planned for change and try to minimize the risk. That’s probably more how I look at things. If you think about how we do things through our Trilogy Way Council, we’re trying to minimize risk there. Of course, then you get to the decision point and maybe there’s still some risk to it.
I always like to refer back to reading Jim Collins, his book “Good to Great.” He talks about firing cannonballs and the concept of not using all your gunpowder for one cannonball that you fire where you may have a complete miss. In that case, then you need to buy more gunpowder. Instead, take smaller amounts of your gunpowder and go forward with these pilots.
How we do it through the Trilogy Way Council is we test things and see what works. Then you haven’t gone out with one big thing that didn’t work or failed, but you try a lot of smaller things, and then you see what you like and what really works and what serves your needs. Then from there, you put more resources behind that to make it successful. That’s a way that you minimize your risk, but still, you’re always thinking about change and how to innovate.
If you could change one thing about the senior living industry, what would it be?
It would be the image of the industry.
Most people in the general public don’t understand everything that we do and the value that we have. Most of them don’t have any interaction with senior living until there’s a need either for themselves or a loved one, and then they start doing their research. Sometimes they have to make quick decisions. Then I think they learn that there’s a lot of value in what we do and how we serve our customers and our residents from security, socialization, healthcare needs.
I think most people have a negative connotation of senior housing, senior living, until they have an experience with it — hopefully, a good experience. In most cases they do, but as an industry, we have to think about how to show the value that we have. It’s going to get even more important again with the aging population.
What is a word of advice from managing resistance to change?
I believe in keeping transparency. I try to be very open. I think the more information you give people, the easier it is for them to understand and change. If you hold anything back, then it causes anxiety and makes people more nervous about change. Then you have to communicate the why. You have to make people understand why you’re doing everything that you do, why change is happening, and why you have to change. It’s all about communication and those two aspects of it, in my opinion.
Can you talk about how you see the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion in this industry, and what you are doing at Trilogy to drive change in this regard?
First and foremost, I tell our folks we need people to come work in long-term care and in senior housing who have a servant’s heart, who care about the residents we take care of and who have a passion for that. We have to be diverse. We have to look at diverse employee bases and not be un-inclusive in any way possible. The most important thing is to find people who care about making a difference.
At Trilogy, we have a DEI program. It’s a few years old, so it’s still fairly young, but we’ve been very purposeful about focusing on our employee base, setting up employee resource groups within Trilogy to bring that sense of equity and inclusion from the various groups that participate.
We are also using that as a way to help recruit so that people understand that Trilogy is a place that’s inclusive and that they would want to come to be a part of. Then we’re going out and trying to be purposeful with growing employees and leaders that have more diversity. Some of this comes through our educational programs. I know you and I have talked before about our apprenticeship program and how we focus on education and even scholarship offerings. We want to be intentional there to try to grow leaders for our campuses that have diverse backgrounds.
That creates that inclusion feeling for employees to feel more comfortable, or to know that they can grow with an organization. They’re going to see leaders that are like themselves. Again, I always tell everybody this is a marathon not a sprint. But I think we’ve started to build a culture where people understand that DEI is important to us.
2023 is shaping up, as you know better than I do, to be a year of growth and evolution for the senior living industry. In what way is Trilogy changing for the times?
We’ve always had a vision statement to be best-in-class for customer service, best-in-class for employee experience. Covid really became the springboard for clinical excellence.
As an industry I would love to see us all focus on that. There are so many things that we can do to think about wellness first versus just thinking about treating people later in a health care setting.
When people live with us, they’re in their home, and as a provider I think that’s where we have to focus on how we work with technology partners to provide expanded services to our customers.