Most senior living companies have one person in the CEO or president role – but some have two.
A handful of companies including Gardant Management Solutions, New Perspective Senior Living and Savant Senior Living have adopted the leadership style in recent years as a way to increase productivity and collaboration among leaders at the top.
Specifically, such strategies are aimed at overcoming challenges with complimentary strengths, building similar visions for company growth and offering quicker responses during high-level decision-making, particularly when coordinating with regional leaders.
But shared leadership structures also pose challenges, including getting the hang of a less traditional management structure and the potential for ambiguity between the co-leaders.
This means that organizations must establish a strong company culture built around communication and trust.
‘Breaking down the silos’ with shared leadership
Senior living operators are not the only companies implementing co-leadership strategies in 2024.
For example, Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) employs two CEOs, Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos. While other companies including Salesforce and Oracle have tried and eventually scrapped co-leader management structures, Netflix has been successful in doing so, according to Fast Company. Public companies led by co-leaders also outperformed a stock market index for 87 companies in 25 years, according to the Harvard Business Review.
Shared leadership has been shown to boost team performance by 34% compared to traditional leadership models, according to a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Another study in Frontiers in Psychology showed that co-leader management structures can impact job satisfaction and employee retention.
New Perspective, which today is led by co-CEOs Ryan Novaczyk and Chris Hyatt, didn’t always have a shared leadership structure. After bringing on Hyatt following his time at Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD), New Perspective named him president, and Novaczyk as CEO, in 2019.
In the time that followed, New Perspective’s leaders came together and weighed the prospect of pivoting to a shared leadership structure, ultimately deciding to name both executives as co-CEO in 2020.
This led to New Perspective “breaking down the silos” of each department within its senior living operations in an effort to improve collaboration among teams and drive operating performance.
“Organizations that I worked for were department-by-department and they weren’t able to cross over to solve problems at the local and regional level,” Novaczyk told SHN. “On leadership, I think we’ve learned from one another and gelled together around the concept of collaborative, servant leadership.”
Minnetonka, Minnesota-based New Perspective currently operates 40 communities nationwide.
Hyatt said the transition to a shared leadership structure was facilitated through shared values, while building off of the strengths of the other leader.
That collaboration was put to the test during the Covid-19 pandemic, when both leaders were on the front lines at their communities solving day-to-day operational challenges.
Just prior to the transition, New Perspective Chairman Todd Novaczyk – Ryan’s father – urged the pair to consider a shared leadership structure, dividing operations and management duties to reflect each other’s personal strengths in running a business.
“We were finding ourselves cross-collaborating and learning from each other at warp speed,” Hyatt said. “It boils down to complimentary strengths.”
Fast-forward to this year, New Perspective secured a $200 million capital infusion in May of this year, along with plans for a future $500 million development and acquisitions pipeline.
“By collapsing the organizational chart and keeping Chris and I closer to the ground, we decreased the risk that we were going to lose our culture by building a traditional model,” Novaczyk said.
With Novaczyk handling the “back of the house” overseeing accounting and finances, Hyatt handles the “front of the house” on operations, with both collaborating to chart New Perspective’s growth.
“Without a doubt it’s accelerated our growth and it’s put us in the strongest position to continue to grow toward our goal of serving 10,000 seniors living life on purpose,” Novaczyk said.
Novaczyk pointed to the company’s recent joint venture regarding six senior living assets with plans for future growth as part of the $500 million investment and development pipeline as proof of concept for the company’s shared leadership structure.
Even amid “quasi-organized chaos” in assembling new teams to tackle recently-acquired properties, Novaczyk said the company’s collaborative leadership approach has spurred growth, highlighting the company’s growing relationship with real estate investment trust Welltower (NYSE: WELL).
Earlier this year, New Perspective entered into a RIDEA-structured deal with the Toledo, Ohio-based REIT, with the company “making a bet on this team and our ability to grow and scale with Welltower.”
Sharing risk, complimenting strengths drive co-leadership moves
Savant Senior Living co-CEOs Adam Zenou and Mochi Bercovich both started as frontline employees before working their way up the ranks to the C-suite.
The Downey, California-based senior living provider currently operates 10 communities.
With a self-described “hands-on” leadership style that puts the two leaders in close contact with frontline teams at the community level, the organization has helped build an environment that allows the leaders to be “more responsive” to staff needs.
That’s based on having complementary skills, balancing risk in decision making and offers more room for communication between frontline leaders and executives.
“We realized that if we combine both of our specialties, we would be able to differentiate from other companies and succeed in that because the senior living industry is very competitive,” Bercovich said.
With Zenou’s operational acumen combined with Bercovich’s marketing background, the pair are able to compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
“I’m more conservative and [Bercovich] is more aggressive and what comes from that is a more balanced outcome,” Zenou said. “Having that balance is what makes us successful in what we do.”
By clearly defining roles for each leader, Zenou said this delineation helps create a unified vision, rather than have staff perceive overlapping responsibilities that could result in confusion.
“It helps us not overstep each other and we ensure accountability by minimizing that confusion and we’re able to consult with each other on decisions that impact our business,” Zenou added.
‘Going to be seen more’ shared leadership in senior living
With intense pressure on operators to reap top-level performance on occupancy, margin and future growth, shared leadership structures could increase as demands for running a profitable senior living business mount.
Gardant Management Solutions, the Kankakee, Illinois-based provider operates over 60 communities and has built an affordable assisted living model to spur future development.
Co-presidents Greg Echols and Julie Simpkins currently lead Gardant. They pitched the idea of co-leadership to Gardant board members in 2023. Admittedly, Echols said board members at the time were hesitant to back the proposal prior to identifying research to support transitions of shared leadership.
“We trust that as collaborative leaders we can accomplish more for Gardant than each of us could individually,” Echols told SHN. “I think this idea that more can be accomplished from a collaborative structure is possible and it takes trust, obviously.”
By employing a co-leadership structure, Gardant is able to eliminate the “possibility of individual failure” when it comes to making impactful business decisions that shape an organization’s trajectory into the future, Echols said.
The new structure is “relevant to Gardant’s future,” Echols added, noting that trust between two leaders is of the utmost importance in bringing cohesion to an organization.
“I think it’s an approach that is going to be seen more in our industry on shared leadership,” Echols said.