How Soft Skills, Hospitality Focus Can Make Executive Directors More Effective

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Executive directors are vitally important for senior living operators. The industry asks a lot of them, but I think there’s more support that operators can offer.

From overseeing care coordination and delivering on lifestyle engagement that is increasingly focused on hospitality to keeping the number of incoming move-ins and new hires flowing, the job of an executive director is not only crucial, but also hard. Simply put, an executive director must pick up the phone around the clock and leap into action when others can’t.

It’s simply a hard job at the end of the day, but I think that senior living operators can do more to support the leaders of their communities given how important the role is. While I think it is tempting to build airtight operating procedures and hold executive directors financially accountable, I think operators shouldn’t overlook “soft skills” like listening, communicating, coaching and building trust.

In practice, these soft skills are what I believe determine how residents experience a community and whether or not staff feel supported enough to stay long-term. And at the end of the day, I think these are the true drivers of a good senior living business, potentially more so than occupancy and margins.

Some companies seek out these skills by hiring leaders with hospitality experience, believing that the sector does a good job teaching these kinds of soft skills.

For example, Aegis Living has hired leaders with hospitality backgrounds and experience outside of senior living. General Manager and Partner Phil Clough joined Aegis in 2018 after nearly eight years with Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and nine years with The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. To Clough, good service is not just following through on a plan but truly making someone feel welcome, which is not always an easy feat. 

“It’s not just about executing; it’s about being the face of the community, dictating the ambiance and the culture and the welcome and the warmness of the community,” Clough told me. 

In this week’s subscriber-only SHN+ Update, I examine why providers should develop soft skills and hospitality acumen and offer the following takeaways:

• Why providing good senior living customer experience requires more than just strong operational acumen on paper

• How providers are teaching communication and emotional intelligence with hospitality in mind

• Why leadership pipelines must also focus on hospitality, not only talent development

Good service means more than focusing on the numbers

To Clough’s point, I think senior living quality at its core hinges on helping residents feel well cared for, seen, respected and in control of their daily lives. Communities must combine personalization in services, enjoyable dining experiences and responsive problem-solving with meaningful social connection alongside quality healthcare services. 

I believe certain hospitality principles lend well to senior living resident satisfaction and fit with the desires of prospective residents and their families. A 2022 analysis of Facebook reviews spanning 125 senior living communities by the Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida found five factors that have the greatest impact on resident satisfaction. They include service quality and efficiency, physical environment, social environment, cost and amenities. When reviewers discussed healthcare, their satisfaction focused more on staff behavior than clinical expertise, the analysis found.

A hospitality-focused mentality belongs across all departments and should not be reserved for areas like dining or concierge services. Training of staff responsiveness and interpersonal behaviors to help residents feel supported will be vital in the coming years as older adults demand more from the communities they live in.

Seattle-based Merrill Gardens uses a hospitality-first strategy built around understanding resident preferences and family connections, including interviewing residents and creating profiles to help inform future programming and engagement. The provider connects residents with similar interests, and shared preferences are communicated to department leaders across communities.

I think learning resident interests and preferences is the bedrock for providers operationalizing hospitality within their communities. As Clough puts it, executive directors today must be “the face of the community,” able to dictate ambiance and culture and lead by example to create a welcoming environment for residents and staff. 

“Bringing these skills linked with hospitality is a real and clear differentiator,” Clough told me. “You can build a beautiful community, but unless you have the heart and soul of the people that are within it, it doesn’t capture the heats and minds of families, and people can read right through that.”  

First impressions matter for families seeking senior living options for their loved ones, and Clough told me that hospitality is the “real differentiator” in how families react to visiting a community for the first time.

“From a family’s point of view, if they put this much care into every detail of the building and the general manager is so visible and present, it gives them confidence their loved one will be incredibly well cared for throughout their time in the community,” Clough added. 

Learning residents’ interests and their backgrounds is also vital. To improve engagement, providers can connect with former entrepreneurs, teachers, published authors, poets and artists to share their lived experiences and create meaningful programming opportunities or shared interest groups.

Applying these soft skills requires curiosity about who someone is and the ability to translate those connections into tangible engagement. To that end, it can help older adults retain their sense of purpose, and I believe it is up to operators to motivate community leaders to ask these simple but impactful questions.

Teaching leadership soft skills cannot stop after onboarding

Senior living providers need leadership candidates who already possess interpersonal competence and a tendency toward hospitality. Hiring for these traits is critical, and Atria Senior Living Senior Vice President of Human Resources Meg Pletcher told me some soft skills must be present when someone joins the company as a base for future on-the-job learning.

While training cannot make up for potential missteps in hiring, selecting a leader with a strong foundation of soft skills and interpersonal acumen will be critical going forward in finding the next generation of senior living executive directors.

Pletcher described Atria’s leadership development as an ongoing process, with relationship-building, empathy and judgment included in preparation for executive directors. She noted that technology “can’t inspire a team,” but can provide efficiency to staff that lets them spend more time connecting with residents.

This is critical as operators weigh adding new automation and business intelligence systems. While technology can give time back to community leaders, I believe the real value lies in what leaders do with that extra time. An executive director who gains time but lacks confidence in coaching an employee or addressing conflict may not automatically become more effective.

Pegasus Senior Living offers training that addresses conflict resolution, resident and employee satisfaction and emotional intelligence. The Dallas-based provider also helps executive directors evaluate stress and process frustration through regional leadership support to address persistent challenges in fostering a strong culture.

How an executive director handles pressure or conflict can influence how department heads respond to similar situations, which I believe makes teaching soft skills like composure and self-awareness essential to establishing the foundation for hospitality-focused practices to take hold at a community.

“Instead of running the building, they’re leading the community and developing the people who run the building,” Senior Vice President of People and Culture Katheryn Pigott told me.

This makes it important for providers to support executive directors so that they can become teachers and culture leaders for a community: individuals who can solve problems while also explaining the reasoning behind strategic decisions and remaining open to feedback when handling conflict or disruptive situations in the future.

If executive directors are expected to communicate, coach and create belonging, providers should teach those behaviors.

Leadership development must make hospitality more innate

I think the next step for senior living providers is to make hospitality a core part of an executive director’s skill set.

Senior Resource Group recently hired two executive directors with hospitality backgrounds. One of them dealt with a water pipe failure at a community and responded by proactively updating residents and families, apologizing for the disruption and explaining the community’s plan for addressing it, SRG COO Rob Henderson told me. He credited this proactive approach with helping the community move past the disruption.

To me, what matters in this situation is that the executive director did not wait for the problem to get resolved before addressing residents and families. Hospitality practices are easy to navigate when communities are operating smoothly, but I see the inherent value of these soft skills as having the greatest impact during times of disruption or inconvenience.

Providers should use these moments to prepare aspiring executive directors, and mentorship will be a critical piece of cultivating the next generation of senior living leadership.

SRG’s executive director in training academy provides a framework for this real-world experience and mentorship, with nearly half of the program consisting of rotating between departments to understand all aspects of community operations. Participants work with mentors to complete a “capstone” project addressing practical challenges SRG communities face.

Future executive directors should be able to explain not only how a department functions, but how its decisions affect the people living in the community. To that end, I think fostering and hiring leaders with these soft skills will be critical for success in the years ahead.