The Flyover Group

The Senior Living Executive Director role is uniquely challenging. They must lead communities through a worklife filled with daily conflict and crisis. They work with grieving or irate family members, a workforce with their own stressors and limitations, a 24/7 operation with life or death consequences for mistakes, and they have their own family life, too.

Coaching can help an Executive Director see their role with clarity, work through conflicts and provide a framework for making good decisions.

If you are an Executive Director, it’s okay to ask yourself:

• Is my personal foundation allowing me to perform at my best? 

• Am I operating outside of my comfort zone? 

• Are external factors, like a family struggle or baggage from a previous employer weighing me down? 

• Are there blind-spots or gaps in my soft skills like relationship-building or conflict management?

Our Executive Director Coaching Program

Our certified coaches are current or former Executive Directors in Senior Living. They have lived that life and worked with many other Executive Directors in their careers. 

Why is this important? Because it eliminates the common challenge of supporting an ED—the time spent explaining why the role is so different from any other in Senior Living. Our coaches launch a relationship based on their shared experience as leaders. 

Our program consists of 10 confidential sessions across 10 weeks, with two 1-hour sessions to begin the process followed by 8 half-hour sessions and weekly exercises. 

In the first two sessions, we focus on the person doing the job—their personality and communication style, their motivators and their personal and workplace values. This process provides a baseline for understanding their decisions and reactions.

Remaining sessions focus on the aspirations and specific obstacles faced by the ED. Challenges are broken down to basic, values-driven decisions, both inside and outside of the workplace.

Who Benefits from Coaching?

The program has spillover benefits throughout the organization, starting with the Executive Director but rippling outward. Success metrics include 

• increased longevity in the ED role

• reduced turnover in department heads

• resident and family satisfaction 

• employee engagement  

• overall occupancy

Coaching is a “good to great” process designed to support people who are able to recognize the need to change and their personal role in making that happen. If, in our initial assessment, we see that the situation is beyond our scope, we are committed to saying so and recommending a better course of action.

Coaching is not therapy, and it’s not consulting. The coach is not there to provide answers, but to unlock what the ED already inherently knows.

Senior Living Organizations typically use The Flyover Group as an investment in their ED’s capacity to weather a storm, even before it happens. The program has immense value for both small and large operators, since they all depend on their local community leaders for much of their property performance. The program is beneficial for any leader who wants to improve their ability to manage conflicts, address challenges or improve in their work and family relationships.