Abandon the Vision Statement! Replace with "The Rule of Five"​

In the premiere episode of 'Senior Housing Unfiltered', hosts Tod Petty and Jimmy Carrion of Lloyd Jones Senior Living share their motivation for launching this new real estate podcast series and what listeners can take away from each episode.

Are company vision statements truly helpful in guiding onsite team members to do their best work? Tod shares why his "Rule of 5" is a more effective, practical way to instill greatness in employees in all positions within a senior housing company.

We highlight innovation, solutions, impact makers, and people making a difference in the senior housing field. Every moment is an opportunity for us to influence others and our world. Senior Housing Unfiltered delivers messaging to cause powerful, positive change through values-based leadership.

Transcript

Tod Petty:

Hi, my name is Tod Petty, and I'm here with Jimmy Carrion, my colleague at Senior Housing Unfiltered. Thank you for joining us. As you listen with us today, our highest priority is for you to fulfill your potential, and your dreams, and change the senior housing world for the better.

Tod Petty:

Let's get started. Take it away, Jimmy Carrion.

Jimmy Carrion:

Thanks Tod. Welcome to our first broadcast of Senior Housing Unfiltered. Unfiltered, because our quest is for the sharing of real, relevant, and transparent information to you.

Jimmy Carrion:

I know as we were thinking about this podcast, potential is the word that really came to my mind, and we think of the opportunities ahead of us in senior housing. Potential is real optimistic. It is hopeful. It is full of possibilities. This is how we see the future of our industry. It is our mission to share this with you.

Jimmy Carrion:

Tod and I are broadcasting from beautiful Marietta, Georgia, and we are glad to have you in our journey to disrupt the industry stuck in ancient cultures. Everyone needs a mentor, a guide to help take them to the next level. And we are here to come along beside you and journey together.

Tod Petty:

Thanks Jimmy. We're definitely stuck in ancient cultures in many ways. We include ourselves in those ancient cultures. So we want to disrupt and move forward to the next level.

Tod Petty:

Every one of us can make a difference in senior housing, whatever capacity we find ourselves in. And this podcast is to reach out to multiple groups of people that want to make a difference. We want to attract people that want to make a difference in other people's lives.

Tod Petty:

My team and I will be providing, with each podcast, content and resources needed to grow and bring value to the senior housing world. So, you don't want to miss any episode moving forward. We've got a lot of good stuff coming.

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah, absolutely not. We have a lot lined up and our desire is to provide the best information available, so you can grow yourselves and we can grow with you. Each episode will run about 30 to 45 minutes. We want to make a difference in our audience's lives and help you grow as we grow with you.

Tod Petty:

Absolutely, Jimmy, and we really want to be different. If you're listening to the news these days, the information is repetitive. It's ideological in many cases, and many unsubstantiated facts. Even in the senior housing post-COVID-19 world, I'm just hearing a lot of things that are unsubstantiated.

Tod Petty:

So our quest is to give you information. And when we speak to all levels of leadership, it's our intent to help you, and help their teams grow and prepare for the future in senior housing.

Tod Petty:

So get ready to grow with our new podcast, Senior Housing Unfiltered. Check us out each month. I promise you, I promise you, you'll be happy with it.

Tod Petty:

Let's get right into it, Jimmy. What is the "No-Sell Zone"?

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah, well, Tod, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's no selling. Our programming will not be a 30-minute infomercial. Our guests will not be promoting their business, and just wanting to be on here to talk about what they do. But more about the ideas and thoughts to bring value to our audience and make a difference. We want our mastermind group to grow and be relevant in the capacity they serve in the senior housing industry. And that could be in different levels.

Jimmy Carrion:

We will facilitate a variety of views, ideas, and philosophies. We will share information relevant to all stakeholders in our industry. Executive directors, investors, debt and equity partners, housekeepers, caregivers, healthcare managers, development partners... Well, you get the picture.

Tod Petty:

Absolutely. That's a lot of different people we're going to be reaching with information, but they're all part of this ecosystem that brings great care for the older generations we serve. So what's this "unfiltered" name that you've come up with?

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah. So the unfiltered part is, we're not experts. Our content will not be modified, processed, or refined. Not filtered.

Tod Petty:

That sounds scary.

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah. It's a little scary, but our goal is to be transparent. Now that everyone knows our goal, let's dig in and discuss the five things we do every day as a team, and the concept of the rule of five. So Tod, what is the rule of five?

Tod Petty:

Yeah, the rule of five, this will change your life. It's a pretty simple concept, but it's changed the way our teams have interacted with us through the years.

Tod Petty:

I've visited multiple senior living communities, all types, over the last 20 years. From skilled nursing to independent living, CCRC campuses. And the one thing I love to do, Jimmy, when I visit the communities, is to ask the team members, now, not the manager or the director, but the team members, about the community's vision statement and their core values.

Tod Petty:

That's what you, when you go to a website, "Here's the vision statement. Here's what we believe as a team." And I ask the everyday people that are running those communities about them.

Tod Petty:

I remember one particular community I was visiting had the vision statement hanging somewhere in the front when I walked in. And I asked the team members about it, about their vision statement, and they didn't even know they had a vision statement. They didn't even realize it was on the wall. So somewhere there was a big disconnect.

Tod Petty:

I have come to the conclusion, and through my own experience of having vision statements and core values for other companies, that the organization-stated vision is really practically worthless.

Tod Petty:

When I began my tenure at Lloyd Jones, I decided, "I'm going to quit stressing over the wordsmithing of an abstract vision statement no one will probably ever read, and will have zero impact on my team." What's the point? So instead, every day my quest is to persuade and influence my team members at all levels of leadership to adopt and follow what we're talking about now, the rule of five. That's my quest.

Tod Petty:

When I'm talking about all levels of leadership, I'm speaking to every influencer, at every level, whether it's the investor level, whether it's our level, as we oversee and build teams, whether it's at the community level. Remember, a leader is simply an influencer. So you could have a housekeeper that can influence the entire team in a community, can probably run the show sometimes. I don't care if she's a housekeeper, or he is, that's the leader. And you can have a director who has the title that influences nobody. He has the title, but he's not an influencer.

Tod Petty:

So leadership can be all different groups. It includes everybody. And we expect everybody to participate in the rule of five.

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah, Tod, that makes total sense. I've had my fair share of vision statements, and mission statements, and been part of companies. We're all guilty of it.

Jimmy Carrion:

So, for the team, why do you call them, "Five things we do every day?"

Tod Petty:

Right, so it's a simple concept. Imagine a tree in a field needing to come down. And that tree could be a problem. That could be the need for a solution. That could be an obstacle. That tree could be ancient cultures. That tree's got to come down.

Tod Petty:

So if we get up every morning, and we use an ax each day, and I take five targeted swings toward that tree, I put the ax down, I go to bed, I do the things I do. I get up the next morning and I come out to that tree with my ax and I take five swipes at that tree. That tree is going to eventually fall. If I do nothing, it's not going to go anywhere.

Tod Petty:

And I may not think I'm making progress, but that tree will eventually fall. It may take a week, a month, or a year to bring it down, but it'll eventually come down. A smaller tree can be conquered quickly, while a big tree will take a long time to chop down. The issue is not the size of the tree, or how long it takes to bring it down, but whether or not you and I, and our teams, and the people we serve, are we going to take the time to be diligent to take five swings at it every single day?

Tod Petty:

So the five concepts, the five swings, I have broken down to activities for our teams that are most essential to our success, we must do every day. Now it might be different for other people, and they can come up with the five things they do every day. You can come up with it individually. But we've come up with the five things that we want to do every day. Our five ax swings at the tree every day.

Tod Petty:

Remember, the five things are not what you like to do. It's not your passion. I have a lot of passionate things that I like, but it's not our passion. Nor it's the things that I want to do, my values. Rather, the rule of five asks the question, "What are the five things as a team we must do every day to be successful? What must we do every day to be successful?"

Tod Petty:

So this question strikes at the heart of our daily behaviors and all of our actions necessary to win in the senior housing profession, or, really, in any profession. The five things. So that's the question that we have to ask, "what are those five things?"

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah. Well, Tod, I'm going to dig a little deeper, and this is maybe where we become a little unfiltered. But why is the rule of five better than vision statements or core values for a company? Where vision statements and core values have been used for years and years, and we're coming in here with a whole new concept and saying it's better. Why?

Tod Petty:

Well, so the five things we do every day is practical, when core values and vision statements are not always practical. And I've witnessed companies with core values, but they couldn't live them. They couldn't live them, because it really wasn't a value of their heart, but it looked good on a website. Or it was something that was almost impossible to live up to.

Tod Petty:

Someone might have a core value to be integrous in everything we do. Full of integrity. And that's somewhat subjective. To one person integrity means one thing, and to another it means another thing. So they're setting themselves up for failure.

Tod Petty:

They're not practical. They could not live them. And when that happens, the members of the team, they lose faith in the leadership. I've seen people have core values of integrity, who allowed an employee to stay who was not integrous... I think that's a word.

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah. I think we can use that.

Tod Petty:

The team member was not full of integrity, but they couldn't get rid of the person because they were producing to business for them, though the core value was integrity. So they compromised and demoralized the whole team.

Tod Petty:

What they should have done was to terminate the person no matter what value they brought, because they weren't telling the truth and they weren't an integrous person. And I remember sharing with them, "Well, we need to take this core value down if we're not going to live it every day." So I think core values are hard at hitting. They're not practical.

Tod Petty:

I've witnessed the same thing with vision statements. They're very philosophical, they can't be measured, and they're not practical. You cannot measure them. So these vision statements, usually they come from the boardroom.

Tod Petty:

I've been in those meetings where we're trying to figure out what our logo is, and what's real sexy, and what sounds good, and what's going to be Google-like. And it comes out from members who have to fulfill it without direction. So you have these team members that are drawn to a vision that they can't fulfill.

Tod Petty:

The rule of five is tangible, it's behavioral, and it's measurable than a vision statement. So every day we can review our rule of five, and we can immediately access whether or not we followed the five things that are necessary to take our organization to the next level. The reality is, our organizational culture will be dictated by the things we do daily, every day, then by a vision statement we post on the wall or on our website.

Jimmy Carrion:

Right. I agree. I agree.

Tod Petty:

I hope our audience agrees. We'll see.

Jimmy Carrion:

We'll see what happens. But I know you expect myself and the rest of the team to live by the rule of five each and every day. We're not perfect, and you know that, and none of us are. And the goal is not to perfectly live a set of values each day, or be able to recite a nice, crafted, sexy vision statement, right?

Jimmy Carrion:

The quest is to do five things every day, like swinging the ax. I might do it quicker than you might, but I've got a couple of years on you. That much we can guarantee.

Tod Petty:

I've got a big ax, though.

Jimmy Carrion:

But either way, the best we can guarantee is, over time, that we will go to higher levels of service and delivery. At the end of the day, that tree is going to come down if we do the five things every day.

Jimmy Carrion:

And if you can please share, what are the five things we do every day? Because we've been talking about it, but now let's break it down and really, really dig into what the five things are.

Tod Petty:

Yeah, that's great, Jimmy. So here we go. Remember, these five things, it's not so much that quantity as it's the quality. We're asking to do these five things every single day. And it doesn't matter if we're making exponential success in these areas, or minor. It's that we do them every day.

Tod Petty:

The first area is, lead. I expect our teams at every level to lead. We lead ourselves and our teams to fulfill our purpose.

Tod Petty:

That might be a executive director, never having before a weekly meeting with his managers or her managers, and they're meeting every week. And so maybe they're not meeting on time. So he decides, she decides, we're going to meet every week on time. Maybe they're going over on their meetings and they're not staying on point. So they're going to shut that meeting down in exactly an hour and a half. But they're leading themselves and growing themselves to fulfill their purpose.

Tod Petty:

The second one is, grow. First one is lead, second one is grow. We grow ourselves and our teams to fulfill our purpose.

Tod Petty:

So every day we're doing something to grow. That could be reading leadership books by the executive director. It could be a CNA that we encourage to begin to study the delivery of medications so they can become a medtech so they're growing. It may be meeting with your teams, and having an understanding of valuing other people, and seeking to display that on a daily basis. So that's the second one. We lead. We grow.

Tod Petty:

Third one is, create. We create best-in-class community leadership teams, resources, and experiences. So we create.

Tod Petty:

That can be systemizing our sales and marketing program in a manual that we can pass out to one another. It could be saying, we're going to start having weekly calls to encourage, exhort, edify our teams and hold them accountable. It could be everybody going through Magnetic Marketing by Dan Kennedy. So we learn and teach them there always has to be an offer, there has to be a killer offer, there has to be a deadline for the offer, and there has to be value in the offer. So we can systemize that.

Tod Petty:

The next one is, excel. The first is lead, we grow, we create, we excel. So we chase excellence in all we do.

Tod Petty:

Anybody can do this. A housekeeper that's used to doing only five rooms a week they can say, "Look, I'm going to do six this week." A housekeeper that normally does not engage a resident and just does the tasks, can be taught to make a difference in that person's lives by looking them in the eyes and smiling and ask them, how can they serve them? A housekeeper could decide to grow and become a manager with additional responsibility and mentor their team for them.

Tod Petty:

So that's just little things. We're not saying that we're going to be excellent every day in what we do, but we're going to chase it. And all I'm asking is for incremental success in all that they do.

Tod Petty:

And then the last thing is, serve. We want to serve our clients, our colleagues, our partners, and our communities.

Tod Petty:

In a very simple way, we've done that before, as I've seen a portfolio director decide to meet with the families on a regular basis, once a quarter. Made a trip to the community and met with the families to see how they were doing, and to serve them, rather than sitting behind a desk, checking the boxes, and not becoming involved with their folks.

Tod Petty:

So that's it. That's the five things we created. Let me go through them again. We lead every day, we grow as a team, we create, we excel, and we serve.

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah. That's great. And the big thing with that is, we don't want it to just get stuck in a boardroom of executives or in a board of investors. The great thing about the five things we do every day is that, like Tod said, it's for everyone. It's for everyone to grow. And it's all about intentionality and consistency.

Jimmy Carrion:

Intentionality and consistency are the two most important words in a person's success. I don't know if you agree with that, Tod, but for me, those are the two words that come to mind. A person who is intentional in what they do and are consistent in doing it daily, will be highly successful if they choose the right field of their endeavor.

Tod Petty:

Yeah. And I think that's the key, Jimmy, it's got to be the right field of endeavor. If they're in their right lane, if they're in the right field, if they apply consistent application every day, and they're intentional about it, they're going to grow. If they take those five swings with the ax every day, they're going to grow.

Tod Petty:

And there's some great people in our industry. I mean, the people that are attracted to serve older people are usually supine temperament. They're great servers. They love to bring value to people. They're not really motivated by money. They go home at night and get a good night's sleep because of the people they served and they made a difference.

Tod Petty:

But they have to be respected. They have to be honored and celebrated, and charge them up again to continue doing what they're doing. So the rule of five is huge.

Jimmy Carrion:

Yeah, no, absolutely. I agree. And, wrapping all this up, the rule of five is kind of what we do every day.

Jimmy Carrion:

Tod, what's going on? What's going to happen next month? We had a little teaser going on right now, a little bit shorter of a podcast than we usually do, but what can the audience expect from us?

Tod Petty:

Yeah, so let me just conclude this, Jimmy. I thought about this as you were speaking there. Some people have asked me how we formulated teams and opened very different communities up over the last 20 years, particularly over the last decade. And it is because of this rule of five.

Tod Petty:

We expect every team member to execute on this rule of five. There's no magic formula in opening communities up, filling them up. You have to do it one community at a time, but this is a great leadership principle to accomplish to be successful.

Tod Petty:

So great podcast for today. We are excited about next month because we have a special guest coming to us. We'll announce it through LinkedIn. And we're going to talk about this topic, "Disruption has to take place for innovation to have a space."

Jimmy Carrion:

That's a doozy right there. I cannot wait.

Tod Petty:

Embrace your disruption.

Jimmy Carrion:

I cannot wait to dig in on that and see what people think. Thanks for joining us.

Tod Petty:

Yeah, this has been great. Thank you for all who tuned in, and we appreciate you going on this journey with us. We're real excited about it, and we appreciate your partnership as we change an industry stuck in ancient cultures. Godspeed.