It always starts this way …

You get your first job, then another, and another. One day, someone notices that you are good at what you do as an individual contributor and decides that if you are that good, you should be a leader.

It’s perfectly logical but completely illogical. It is possible to be a great individual contributor and a terrible leader.

It is also possible to be a great leader and a not very good individual contributor … I think, since this almost never happens.

A Brand New Job

As a leader, your job isn’t to be either the smartest person in the room or the one doing the most work. The truth is that if you do those things … they are signs you are not that great a leader.

It is your job to be a force multiplier!

That’s it. 100% of your job.

Everything you do should be focused on …

• Providing clarity

• Removing obstacles

• Finding and providing resources

• Generating usable ideas

• Identifying and growing other leaders

Losing Sight

When you do this, there is real leverage, but it is so, so easy to lose sight of this. In the short term, it is likely that you are better than your team at lots of things. Not only better, but you are faster; it is so tempting to simply do it yourself.

Making it worse is that there are things others can do that you like doing and are reluctant to give up. Here is the dirty secret: They probably like it too. But not turning them loose means diminishing them, your team, and your organization.

Being a Force Multiplier

Force Multipliers are constantly asking … “How do I make those I lead more capable in their roles?”

Doing this changes everything, from how you run your meetings to how you spend your days.

In senior living or any people-heavy business, this matters even more. You’re not managing a spreadsheet; you’re managing dozens or hundreds of people who are each multiplying (or not) the effort of the residents and families they serve.

A leader who invests in making their team sharper, clearer, and more confident creates compounding returns that show up everywhere, in retention, in resident experience, in the culture of the building.

Here is the question I want to leave you with:

What specifically does “force multiplication” look like day to day?

Is it removing bureaucratic friction? Is it teaching decision-making frameworks so people stop needing to ask permission? Is it simply being consistent enough that people know what to expect from you?

A Final Hard Truth

Being a Force Multiplier leader means that you have to be honest with yourself about those you lead. If you have someone whose work you can’t improve, someone you end up doing the work for, someone who is not growing … you can’t afford to keep them. You need to send them off to find a better fit or at least be a burden to some other organization.

We all learned the “Trust Sandwich” that technique leaders use when they need to correct someone but don’t want to be the bad guy.

1. These things you’re doing are great

2. There’s this one thing that isn’t

3. But overall you’re amazing

It seems logical. Even kind. But you know the truth, the only thing you actually wanted to say was #2. And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end, you know the compliments feel forced, which somehow makes the criticism worse, not better.

There’s a proven, research-backed way to do this that actually works for you and for them. Take a look.

Read more

I confess that I have great admiration for that rare breed of human beings who are not interested in accumulating and owning things, because I am not one of them.

Instead, I want more and more stuff …

• A kayak

• A Piper Supercub

• A houseboat

• A motorcycle

• A jet ski

• An old car to drive around town

• A vacation home in the mountains

• A vacation home on the Mendocino coast

• The new Pocket Osmo 4 camera

• The new Insta360 gimbal camera

• The new Hover Air flying gimbal camera

• The microphones and battery accessories for those cameras

This is not an exhaustive list. They all sound like so much fun to own.

While I am 100% sure I will never be one of those people who doesn’t want stuff, I think they have a real lesson for me. It just isn’t the lesson I expected.

The Bigger Cost

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the dollar cost of acquiring and maintaining these things, and that is before you even get to the hard reality that next week, next month, next year there will be new things to want.

But the biggest single cost of each of these things is time. Time to learn to use them, time to actually use them, time to take care of them, time to shop for and pay for them.

You can always make more money to pay for more things. Time is a diminishing asset you can never get back. And it is the thing nobody budgets for.

My Time Budget

You might think that at an age where many people are retired I would have plenty of time for toys like this. My time budget is already stretched thin, and most of what fills it are things I never really sat down and chose.

• My dogs need walking, if I am a good dog owner, every single day

• Work

• Golf

• Grandkids

• My wife (I should have put this one first)

• Teaching kids at church

• Lunch with colleagues

• Conferences

• Vacations

• Caring for my chickens

So maybe the real question is not “can I afford this.” It is what current claim on my time I am willing to give up or shrink to make room for it.

The Test

Here is where the camera gear turns out to be a pretty good teacher.

I am obsessed with it. It gnaws at me. The Pocket Osmo 4, the new gimbals, the Hover Air, I want them the way some guys want a boat.

Then I stop and think about the camera gear I already have sitting around my office. A GoPro. An earlier Pocket Osmo. A couple of gimbals. Some of it good, some of it usable, all of it mostly untouched.

I am still shooting with the first version of the Hover Air drone. Not because I can’t afford the new one, but because for what I actually do with it, the old one does everything I need. A newer, cooler version would not make my content better. It might just be a distraction with better specs.

That is the actual lesson underneath all this. Not “want less.” Check what you already own before you decide you need something new.

Where the Test Doesn’t Work

I ran the plane and the mountain house through the same test, and they don’t resolve as cleanly.

There is no old airplane sitting in my garage. The plane isn’t really a purchase, it’s a commitment. To stay safe in it I would need to fly regularly, which means the real cost isn’t the sticker price, it’s an ongoing claim on my time just to keep the option safe to use.

The mountain house is the same kind of math. It isn’t a thing I would own once and forget about. It is a thing that would ask for attention forever.

I don’t have a tidy answer for either one. Some of what I want fails the “check what you already have” test in a completely different way, and I’m not sure what to do with that yet.

The Part I Didn’t Expect

Here’s what surprised me writing this. The stuff sitting in my office isn’t neutral. It’s not just clutter I’ll get to someday.

A GoPro I don’t use, an old Pocket Osmo, half a dozen dead cell phones and old computers, obsolete cables, pocket recorders nobody has plugged in for years. Every one of those was a decision I made once, a “yes, I need this,” and now it just sits there.

It still costs me. I see it. I step around it. I think “I should deal with that” and then don’t. In its own quiet way it takes up the same time and energy I’m supposedly protecting by not buying the new stuff.

So the lesson cuts in two directions, not one. Look hard at what you already own before you buy the next thing. And look just as hard at what you already bought and never dealt with, because it’s still on the clock.

I know which one I’m actually going to do something about this week … honest, I really am … I hope!

Maybe this never happens to you. It’s the middle of the afternoon, you have been on your phone a lot. You pick it up to do something and realize your battery is seriously low … 9%, 7%, 4%.

You feel stupid and frustrated, you immediately start trying to figure out how to ration the remaining battery life until you can get to a charger.

Your team struggles with the same thing in real life. They have a trust battery meter when they look at you, think about you.

So the question I want to explore with you is this: How much does your team really trust you? If it were a battery meter what, percentage would it be at?

Here is the problem … your team doesn’t have a meter that you can glance at to see if things are healthy, okay or in the apocalypse zone.

You mostly find out when it is too late, after they have quit or when they begin to behave in ways that are seriously damaging to the organization.

Here’s a stupid-simple question that gives you an early warning system for exactly that.

Read more

I have horrible sinuses, and I live in Northern California, which means a lot of pollen and agricultural pollution. Not a great combination.

It got so bad that about 15 years ago I had surgery to go in and scrape away all the tissue, giving them a kind of fresh start.

It was better, but I still suffer through several miserable sinus infections each year. Over the last few months, it became one every few weeks, which won me a golden ticket to a new ENT.

The first time I saw him, he took a look with a scope up my nostrils, told me what he saw, showed me what he saw, and offered a treatment plan, and it has been a lot better.

I was back last week for a follow-up.

He could have run the whole appointment in four minutes. Look at my records, look up the nose, ask the perfunctory “How are you doing?” question. Tell me what to do, move on to the next patient.

Instead we talked through what was actually going on, what my options were, what he’d recommend and why. Then we ended up talking about something else entirely, how he’s been using AI in his own work. He is, right now, my favorite doctor. Not because he agreed with me about anything. Because he treated the ten minutes he had with me as an opportunity instead of a transaction.

That is the whole idea of people-first, and almost nobody actually means it when they say it.

Most of the Time

To most people, “people first” means employee first. This is a big problem. First, most companies that say “people first” or “employee first” don’t mean it. Second, the real test, the bigger test, is that “people first” has to mean everyone. Employees, customers, prospects, the world around the organization, everyone that organization, that leader touches.

That’s a tall order, a huge challenge, and it will never be perfect.

In Real Life

Being people-first is not simply saying “yes” to people. Saying yes is easy; if someone asks me for something and I just say yes, I have made them happy for exactly as long as it takes for consequences to show up.

Sometimes people ask for things that are genuinely short-sighted for them, for the organization, for other people they care about. Too often they can’t see the future, that a “no” or a “how about this instead” would be better for them and everyone.

In fact, a leader who says yes is not a people-first leader; they are simply a people pleaser, and over time being a people pleaser always blows up.

I understand this is a slightly paternalistic idea. But the alternative, treating every request as equally wise simply because a person made it, is not respect. It’s dumb. It is abdication.

Every Human Interaction

I like the idea that every human interaction is a kind of product you deliver. But the word that fits better for me is opportunity. Every conversation, every phone call, every five-minute exchange at a nurses station or a checkout counter is a chance to leave someone slightly better off than you found them, or to waste it.

Which gets to the only test I think actually matters, and it is uncomfortably simple: How did I make the people I came into contact with today feel?

Not what did I accomplish. Not what did I get done. But how did the people on the other side of my day feel after I was done being their leader, their doctor, their employee, their vendor?

Measuring Impact

The problem with this test is that it is almost impossible to measure, and almost impossible to say, “If you do these things, have this attitude, it will make you more money.”

You cannot put “how did people feel around me today” into a quarterly report. There is no dashboard for it. Which might be exactly why so few organizations actually build around it. We measure what is measurable, and what is measurable quietly becomes what matters, even when everyone agrees, out loud, that the unmeasurable thing is more important.

Some companies have tried anyway. Southwest built its entire early identity on Herb Kelleher’s idea that employees come before customers, on the theory that a well-treated employee treats the customer the same way. It worked for decades.

And it’s worth pointing out that Southwest’s culture is being tested right now in a very public way, under pressure from activist investors demanding better financial returns, including the company’s first layoffs in its history. I bring it up not as a clean example anymore, but as proof of how fragile people-first becomes the moment it collides with a spreadsheet.

Costco’s Jim Sinegal made a similar bet, paying and treating frontline workers in ways that made Wall Street nervous, on the theory that the math works out over a longer arc than any one quarter can see.

I don’t have a tidy answer for how you build an organization around something this hard to measure. I know the test I want to run on myself more often. Not whether I said yes to the people around me today. Whether I helped them see something bigger than what they walked in already believing, and whether they left the conversation feeling like more was possible for them than they thought an hour before.

I failed that test more than once this week. I’d like to think I’m getting better at noticing when I do.

It feels like Frontier Airlines hires gate agents based on how bad they can possibly be.

Here is just one example.

A man flew from Raleigh-Durham to Boston after a week of business travel. He got to the airport with about 50 minutes to spare. Frontier’s rule is you have to check in 60 minutes before departure or pay a fee to check in at the counter.

He didn’t know he’d missed the window. When he found out, the gate agents told him he’d need to pay $25 to check in. He pushed back. According to his account, the agents piled on, telling him it was his fault for not checking the website, and not in a kind way.

After 20 minutes of arguing, he agreed to pay. As he said it, he muttered that he was never flying this airline again. That’s when it really went sideways. The agents started mocking him, quoting his own words back at him, laughing, pulling out their phones to film him while denying him service. He filmed them right back. The video went viral. Frontier eventually said the two people involved were contractors and are no longer associated with the account.

Watch that video, and you’ll find that it is hard not to feel something close to disgust. Two grown adults, being paid to represent a company, decided the best use of their time was to humiliate a paying customer.

And that’s just one story. There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds: missed weddings, missed funerals, not being in time to say goodbye to a grandmother, grandfather, parent, or child.

I read these stories and find myself wondering the same thing … What do the people at the top of Frontier Airlines think when they see this? How do they justify doing nothing, over and over, as this keeps happening? How do they live with themselves?

I can only guess the thinking goes something like this:

“Those people probably brought it on themselves.”

“It can’t really be that bad.”

“It’s ugly, but it has to be an isolated incident.”

“It is just the press making things up or blowing it out of proportion.”

Or maybe they go out of their way to not read the stories. To not watch the videos. To make sure the bad news never quite reaches their desk.

Or maybe, and this is the one that bothers me most, they are just self-centered enough that they really don’t care. As long as the planes leave on time and the stock price holds, the rest is noise.

The one thing we do know is that THEY DON’T CARE because it keeps happening over and over and over again.

Senior Living

My world is senior living. Our job, our privilege, is to give older adults an amazing experience during what is often the declining chapter of their lives. It is hard, complicated, deeply emotional work, especially for families. Often there is no clean right answer, only the least bad one.

And here is what I actually believe about our industry. Most of our leaders genuinely care. Nobody wants a bad outcome. Every operator I know loses sleep over the rare case where one person, in one community, at one moment, does something they shouldn’t have done. It is nearly impossible to prevent entirely. People are people.

That is not what I am talking about here.

This is Different

I am talking about something very different. I am talking about leadership that sees a constant, repeated stream of evidence that their people are treating other human beings badly, and does nothing. Not a single bad night. A pattern. A pattern anyone paying attention could see.

I can’t begin to understand how a person gets there. But I think it is worth sitting with as a warning for the rest of us.

None of us are immune to slowly stopping paying attention. It happens gradually. You get a complaint. You get another one. You start reading them faster, believing them less, assuming the family is the problem or the reviewer has an agenda. You stop asking why. You start managing the story instead of the reality.

(I know this happens; I see posts on LinkedIn complaining about families not being grateful enough, complaining too much, asking too many questions.)

Nobody sets out to become the kind of leader who lets a video like Frontier’s happen twice. It creeps up on you, one shrugged-off complaint at a time, until caring feels optional.

So maybe the real value of watching the Frontier video is not the satisfaction of being angry at an airline. It’s the discomfort of asking ourselves a harder question. When the complaints come in about our own communities, are we actually listening? Or have we started explaining them away.

A few months ago, we published an article that blew up in the wrong kind of way. It insulted some people, it made others mad, and it was not helpful to anyone … don’t go looking for it, because I took it down.

I was upset by it, my team was upset by it, no one was happy.

I called an all-hands Zoom meeting to talk about it. It was all on me, no one else. My stomach started hurting before the meeting; it hurt all the way through.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the boss: everybody already knows when you screw up. You’re not hiding anything. The only choice you actually have is whether you say it first, or whether you let everybody whisper about it while you pretend it didn’t happen.

At one point in time, I believed that being a leader meant looking like I had it together. Turns out that’s exactly backwards. The bosses I trusted most were the ones who let me see them sweat.

There’s a simple, slightly terrifying practice that fixes this. It takes about fifteen minutes, and it might be the most uncomfortable thing on this whole list. It also might do more for your team than anything else here.

Read more

Here’s what that means in real life.

We have dozens, maybe hundreds, of things we do each day with little or no thought.

We wake up with an alarm or without one. We go to bed early or late. We spend time in prayer, meditation, or journaling, or we don’t. We check email the second we open our eyes, or we wait. We hit Starbucks, Buc-ee’s, or Dutch Bros for coffee and maybe a pastry. We work out, or we don’t. We’re the kind of person who’s on time, or the kind who’s always fifteen minutes behind, and everyone who knows us already knows which one.

None of it feels like a decision. That’s the point. We call this collection of behaviors “your life,” but it’s more accurate to call it a system. And that system determines the quality of your life. It shapes how you lead, how you treat people, how happy you are or aren’t.

You Built This, Even If You Didn’t Mean To

The system driving your life is something you built, whether you meant to or not. Mostly it built itself, one path-of-least-resistance choice at a time. You didn’t sit down and design your mornings. You just kept doing whatever was easiest until it hardened into who you are.

James Clear put it best: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Your goals are what you want. Your system is what you actually get, every single day, whether you’re paying attention or not.

The problem is that path-of-least-resistance habits may no longer serve you well. Some of them never did. You just couldn’t see it at the time, because nobody sees their own system from the outside.

But that’s only half of it. Parts of your system are working. They’re giving you happiness, purpose, connection. The trick is running a system check now and then. Is this working for me? Is it working for the people around me?

And be careful not to beat yourself up over the parts that aren’t. No one’s system works perfectly. It never will, for anyone. That’s not a failure. That’s actually good news, because it means there’s always something left to improve.

Your System Collides With Other People’s Systems

Here’s what makes it complicated. Every person you encounter is running their own system, with their own quirks and dysfunctions. Those systems bump into each other constantly. And if you’re a leader, your system doesn’t just affect you. It has an outsized effect on everyone downstream of you.

Your mood becomes the team’s mood. Your joy becomes the team’s joy. Your anger becomes the team’s anger. Your bitterness becomes the team’s bitterness.

This isn’t just a feeling I have. Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler tracked this for years inside a large social network, and the numbers are almost unsettling. A happy person in your circle raises your own odds of happiness by about 9%. An unhappy one lowers it by about 7%. And the effect doesn’t stop at the people you talk to directly. It reaches three degrees out, meaning your mood is shaping the moods of people you’ve never even met.

Now sit with that as a leader. Your system isn’t private. You’re broadcasting it, every day, to everyone in range.

Tuning Your System

Here’s the part that matters most: your system can be changed. Not overhauled overnight- that never sticks- but tuned, one piece at a time. Change one thing. See how it goes. Keep what works. Drop what doesn’t. Try the next thing.

Start small. Smaller than feels meaningful. That’s fine.

Skip the pastry in the morning. Promise to say something kind, or just smile, or say good morning, to everyone you encounter for one day. Park as far from the front door as you can and take the walk. Take ten minutes in the middle of your morning to just walk, no phone. Ask one person, once a day, how you can be helpful to them. If you’re habitually late, commit to being early to exactly one meeting this week.

Pick one. Not five. One. Run it for a week and watch what happens, not just to your own day, but to the people standing closest to you.

Your life is the by-product of your lifestyle. The good news is, you’re still the one running the system. You can start editing it today.

Can you imagine interviewing a senior living executive director, or a manager of any division or location, and after finding the one you want to hire, saying to them, “The job is yours if you would like it, but one more thing. You will have to pay $25,000 to get the job.”

This is exactly what Texas Roadhouse does with each of their restaurant managers.

I get it, restaurants are not like senior living, or any other business. A manager who cuts a few minutes off ticket times or gets a table turned faster is directly, measurably moving the number that determines their paycheck.

Senior living is a lot messier. Every business has its own kind of messy, some more, some less, which means you have to be careful about what you borrow. You cannot bolt Texas Roadhouse’s exact formula onto a company and expect it to work the same way.

How It Works

Here is how it works at Texas Roadhouse. The restaurant manager is required to invest $25,000, and in return they get 10% of that location’s profits, plus stock in the parent company.

That $25,000 is not gone for good. It comes back to them at the end of a five-year contract, essentially returned as a lump sum once they have proven they can run the place. So it is less a bet than a deposit, cash they lock up and trust the company to hand back.

The 10% of profits is where the real money shows up. Texas Roadhouse does not publish exact per-location profit numbers, but restaurant industry compensation data puts total managing partner pay, salary plus profit share combined, somewhere between $260,000 and $490,000 a year, averaging around $350,000. For a restaurant manager, that is not a bonus. That is a completely different tax bracket.

Skin in the Game or Just a Job?

Here is the big question. Do your leaders have real skin in the game, and if they did, how would it change things?

Most organizations reward the wrong things. Occupancy targets. Budget adherence. Staying under a labor number. All of those things matter, but none of them are the same as asking, “Did your customers have a great day today?” You can hit every number on the spreadsheet and still be running a place nobody feels great about.

What the $25,000 Actually Buys

What makes the Texas Roadhouse model brilliant is not the $25,000. It is what the $25,000 forces to happen next.

Your first instinct might be that this is just about money in someone’s pocket, and sure, that is part of it. But the honest truth is the only way that money shows up is if the manager creates a genuinely great experience for the people walking through the door. There is no shortcut. You cannot fake your way to higher profits at a restaurant that depends entirely on repeat customers walking back in the door. The incentive and the mission point in exactly the same direction.

That is the piece most comp plans in every industry get wrong. We ask leaders to hit financial targets and separately ask them to deliver great experiences, as if those are two different jobs pulling in two different directions. Texas Roadhouse built a structure where they cannot be separated. If the experience is bad, the money does not come.

Skin In The Game

So what would a “skin in the game” plan look like in your organization?

It does not have to mean asking someone to write a $25,000 check, though there is an argument that even a smaller deposit changes how a manager shows up to work every single day. It could mean tying a meaningful piece of compensation, not a token bonus, to how you make people feel, without ignoring the financial numbers, so that neither one can be gamed at the expense of the other. It could mean profit sharing structured so that a leader genuinely benefits when the organization thrives, not just when the budget is met.

The specifics matter less than the principle. Give your leaders a real stake in the outcome, not just accountability for the outcome. There is a difference. Accountability means you get blamed if it goes wrong. A stake means you actually win when it goes right, and everyone can see the difference in how a person shows up.

I don’t have the formula. I’m not sure anyone in our industry does yet. But somebody is going to figure this out first, build a comp plan where their best leaders have real skin in the game, and the rest of the industry is going to spend years trying to catch up. I’d love to see it be someone reading this.

You know your people. You know their names, their roles, maybe their kids’ names. But do you actually know them?

Real relationships, the kind where people trust you, cover for you, tell you the truth even when it’s ugly, don’t happen without vulnerability. That’s true with your spouse, your best friend, and it’s true with the people who report to you. The problem is that vulnerability at work feels dangerous. What if you ask people to open up and nobody says a word? What if someone opens up too much, and now you’re in the middle of something you didn’t sign up for?

That fear is exactly why most leaders never try. And it’s exactly why the ones who do produce teams nobody else can build.

Here’s a way to do it that’s simple, fast, and almost impossible to get wrong.

Read more

What if the only thing standing between you and next month’s rent was how well you treated a resident today?

Of course, that’s not how senior living actually works.

We don’t lose a resident because of one bad Tuesday, the way a restaurant loses a customer over one bad meal. Most residents stay for life once they’re in. But a Wall Street Journal article about Texas Roadhouse got me wondering what would happen if we operated as if it were true.

Right now, senior living is facing a ton of problems operators have no control over. Staff acquisition and retention, increasing labor costs, increasing insurance costs, increasing food costs …

Most operators have dealt with it by increasing rates, which has largely worked out due to rising demand, but in the long term, one can’t help but wonder whether this cycle is sustainable.

That’s the backdrop I had in mind when I read a Wall Street Journal article about Texas Roadhouse, the number-one casual-dining chain in the US. There were so many good things in that article that it will become a short series.

The Texas Roadhouse Approach

Texas Roadhouse is all about beef. Way more than 50% of their menu items contain beef, and beef prices have gone sky high. A problem they didn’t make and can’t control. The other side of the equation is that, while customers are extremely loyal, they are super price-sensitive. Texas Roadhouse represents a dining-out experience at a relatively reasonable cost.

They did three things:

1. They examined every single expense they had, asking, “Where can we shave a few pennies?” with the goal of maintaining the customer experience. This has direct application to senior living. Spending time exploring how to reduce costs, even pennies, can pay big dividends. Too often in senior living, this has meant degrading the resident experience, which is exactly the wrong approach.
   

2. They raised prices at a rate significantly lower than their expenses had increased, focusing on what was important to their customers.
   

3. They were willing to accept reduced margins in order to retain and grow their customer base.

There are times when this is a good long-term strategy. It ultimately comes down to a single question: “Does the customer feel like they are getting good value for the money they are paying?”

Here’s where it gets interesting for every leader. Point 2 is a hard pill for any organization to swallow, and at first blush, it doesn’t seem to have direct application to senior living. We don’t typically have repeat customers. Once we get someone in, most of the time they either stay for life or leave because they’re unhappy, never to return.

But word of mouth is its own form of repeat business. When residents and families feel like they’re getting value, they tell their friends. When they feel like they’re not, they tell their friends too, and that story follows an operator around a lot longer than one unhappy family ever will.

The restaurant industry lives and dies by whether a customer walks back through the door tomorrow. We don’t have that daily reckoning. Nobody’s tallying up our score sheet each night the way a diner does after a bad steak.

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe the absence of a daily reckoning is exactly why it’s easier to let things slide.

How would it work for your organization if you treated every single day like it was the only thing keeping that resident and their rent in the building?

Jerry Morgan has been riding Harley-Davidsons with a crew of fellow Roadhouse employees for more than twenty years. One year, they rode from New York to California. He’s 65, and he opened the chain’s first Texas location himself, in Grand Prairie, back in 1997.

Here’s what he said about a plate of food. “When you serve somebody a country fried sirloin, and it’s got gravy, that gravy should have steam coming off of it. You should smell it in your nostrils.” Then he added, “We still have a lot of work to do, but every single experience, to me, that food is our trophy.”

I read that, and it stopped me cold!

Food should be the trophy. Not just eaten. Felt. Experienced.

What’s the trophy in senior living, or whatever your business is?

Where This Comes From

Jerry Morgan didn’t invent that gravy instinct. He inherited it from the man who started the whole thing, Kent Taylor, the founder of Texas Roadhouse, who built the entire company around exactly this kind of obsession, decades before Morgan ever said a word about steam and nostrils.

Taylor didn’t start out chasing a trophy. He started out short on cash, shaking drinks at a TGI Friday’s, working on an MBA, a young dad with more dreams than money.

He got his real education managing a struggling Bennigan’s in Denver, a job he didn’t want, handed to him after he pitched the CEO on his own restaurant ideas and got redirected instead. He poached energetic servers from competitors. He handed out promotional cards to local businesses. Sales followed.

He kept sketching. A ski lodge concept. A Florida salad company. Eventually, a napkin drawing of a Texas-style restaurant, wooden interiors, warm lighting, steaks, ribs, cold beer.

He shopped that napkin around and got rejected roughly 80 times. Three doctors from Kentucky finally said yes, for $300,000. The first Texas Roadhouse opened in southern Indiana in 1993.

None of that story is about food. It’s about a guy who couldn’t stop chasing an image of what the experience should feel like, long before he had the money or the restaurant to make it real. Decades later, that same obsession is still alive in Jerry Morgan’s gravy.

Why This Is Harder For Us

Texas Roadhouse has some of the highest customer satisfaction scores among sit-down chains, according to the market research firm Technomic, and notably so for a brand that hasn’t changed all that much over the years. They got there by deciding, decades ago, what the trophy was, and then building 800 locations that all chase the exact same one. Every steak. Every gravy. Every location, coast to coast, aiming at the same target.

We do not get that luxury, and honestly, I think that is the harder and better version of this question.

A restaurant chain can hand down one trophy from headquarters and expect it to work in Indiana and Texas and California alike. Senior living and many other businesses cannot. What matters most to residents in a memory care community is not what matters most in independent living down the street. What your team needs to hear to feel proud of their work in a small six-bed home is not what a three-hundred-resident campus needs. Even two communities under the same flag, run by different executive directors, might legitimately have different trophies.

That is harder. It means you cannot copy an answer from a corporate deck. But it also means the trophy, once you find it, actually fits the people living and working in that specific building, instead of a generic idea handed down by someone who has never walked the halls.

Some Ideas, Not Answers

So what might the trophy actually be? I have a few guesses, and that is all they are.

For some communities, it might genuinely be food, a resident tasting something that reminds them of their mother’s kitchen, plated with the same care Jerry Morgan wants on his gravy. For others, it might be the five minutes a caregiver sits down instead of rushing off. It might be a family member getting an unprompted photo text instead of having to ask how their dad’s day went. It might be a team member walking out at the end of a shift, knowing someone noticed the good work they did, not just the mistakes.

It might be reading groups; or travel experiences or putting on plays … the list of possibilities is nearly endless.

None of those is the answer. They are only proof that a trophy can take a lot of different shapes, and that shape has to come from the people actually living inside that building, not from an article like this one.

That is the work. Not adopting somebody else’s trophy. Sitting down, community by community, and asking what winning actually looks like here, for these residents, these families, this team. Then building everything else, the schedules, the training, the way people are recognized, around chasing that thing on purpose, the way Kent Taylor chased steam coming off a plate of gravy for thirty years.

So what is your trophy?

Every organization, every department, every leader has frustrating problems or challenges that seem to resist all attempts at finding a solution.

• Your customer service is just not as good as it should be.

• Your customer retention is not making the grade.

• You have too many people calling off.

• People are getting bored with your product or service.

You have brainstormed, talked to experts, read books, asked AI and nothing seems to help. I picked up a crazy fun idea from a reel by executive coach Alisa Cohn, tried it with my own team, and it flat-out worked. It could very well give you the breakthrough you need too.

Read more

A few weeks ago, I was at the California Assisted Living conference in Sacramento. The content was exceptionally strong. They were talking about really big challenges and really solid solutions.

Sitting at the same table with me was a C-suite executive with her notebook open, rapidly making notes. I could see at least 13 bullet points, and the talk was not yet over.

I got to wondering what she would do with those bullet points. Then I realized this was just a single session at a single conference. She would likely go home with 50 to 100 bullet points, even acknowledging that not every presentation would be as strong or as relevant as this one.

The Hard Part

I am not critical of what she was doing. I do the same thing, and I guarantee I attend a lot more conferences than she does. I have so much content right now that I need to write about, and a lot of it will never see the light of day.

The problem is we have too much knowledge for our own good, and a lot of it is contradictory. The more knowledge we get, the more paralyzing it becomes.

And that means nothing changes.

This isn’t just a senior living problem. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton spent years studying why organizations struggle to act on what they already know, and they found something sobering for anyone who loves a good conference session. Companies don’t fail because they lack information. They fail because they don’t act on the information they already have.

There’s research on decision-making that backs this up, too. Past a certain point, more options don’t lead to better decisions. They lead to no decision at all, or a retreat to whatever you were already doing before you walked into that ballroom.

So the problem is not that we don’t know enough. The problem is we know too much, are badly organized, and have no mechanism for turning any of it into action.

The Golf Lesson

My golf coach gave me some advice that has nothing to do with golf.

He told me about a YouTube instructor he likes and basically said, “Just watch that one guy. Don’t go bouncing around to ten different instructors, even good ones. You’ll get conflicting advice, your swing will get confused, and your game will actually get worse.”

That is exactly what is happening to leaders. We are not short on good advice. We are drowning in it.

More input is not the same as more clarity. Sometimes it is the opposite.

Pick one voice. Pick one idea. Go deep instead of wide.

Where AI Earns Its Keep

This is where AI has real value, not the hype kind, the actually useful kind.

Take all those bullet points and dump them into your favorite AI tool. Don’t overthink the input. Just paste the mess in.

Then try prompts like these:

1. Here is why these bullet points resonated with me at a recent conference. In my organization, I am thinking about how to improve, how to fix, and how to leverage whatever these things are focused on.
   

2. I just got back from a conference and have all these notes. Suggest how I might use them to actually get better.

If you are a regular AI user, that is probably all the instruction you need. If you are newer to this, have AI ask you questions first. Let it pull the thinking out of you instead of guessing.

From Notes to Action

When you use AI this way, you can go so much deeper; you can even use it to build a first-class action plan. Not a list of good intentions. Something that is concrete and actionable, something that will yield real, measurable results.

This is what has always been missing. Conferences are amazing at generating insight. They are terrible at generating follow-through. While AI does not fix the follow-through problem by itself, it can solve the “What do I do now? What do I do next?” problem ...

I don’t know what happened to that executive’s 13 bullet points. I didn’t know her well enough to ask, and I suspect that if I had, the honest answer would have been “Nothing.” That notebook is probably sitting in a bag somewhere, already half forgotten.

The knowledge was never the problem. It rarely is. The problem is what happens, or doesn’t happen, in the week after the conference ends.

I might be the world’s best idea thief. Podcasts, LinkedIn posts, Instagram reels, books, emails, and articles, I steal from all of it, then write my own version. It used to bother me to give credit, because I wanted people to think I was the brilliant one. I have come to realize that all brilliant teachers and thought leaders are, at their core, great thieves building on the knowledge of others.

This one came from a reel I saw while on vacation in Europe last week. The thought leader talked about how most leaders have things they need to fire themselves from. When I sat down to write this, the link was dead, so I can’t say for certain who to credit. My best guess, with some help from AI, is Dan Martell, whose leadership content is all over the internet.

Fire Yourself From

Right now, as a leader, you are doing things you shouldn’t be doing. You are doing them because:

• You are using those things as an excuse for avoiding bigger, harder challenges and opportunities.
  

• You are better at doing them than anyone else, or think you are, which is likely a bigger problem.
  

• You like doing them. Maybe they are even fun.
  

• You hate giving up control.
  

• You have just always done those things and never really stopped to think you shouldn’t be doing them.
  

• You are not hiring competent people.
  

The first one should sting a little or a lot. It does for me because I have been guilty.

It’s a Problem

It’s a problem for so many reasons:

1. It keeps you from focusing on the most important stuff that only you can handle.
   

2. It will drive away your best team members, who also want to work on fun, important things.
   

3. It burns you out, making you feel like you are not accomplishing what you need to accomplish.
   

4. It robs you of the joy that comes from seeing team members accomplish great things.
   

5. Every hour you spend doing $20 work is an hour you didn’t spend doing $2,000 work.

Fixing It

For one week, at the end of each day, sit down alone for 10 minutes and make a list of everything you did. The things you worked on, the calls you made, the decisions you made, the things you spent time and energy on. After a week, look at the list and ask yourself two questions for each item. Could one of your team members have done this, maybe even better than you? And is your hourly value high enough that this task is actually beneath what you should be paid to do?

Have courage. Hand off one or two tasks and see how it goes.

You will thank me later. And so will whoever I stole this idea from in the first place.

No pop psychology

Last week I wrote about the false beliefs that make us feel too small, the ones that whisper you’re not good enough, not worthy of the room. If you missed it, start there. This week is about the opposite problem.

And it will be a much harder, more brutal truth.

Most leaders are too impressed with themselves.

They tend to be overconfident, certain, unwilling to seriously consider that they might be wrong. I can read your mind; you are thinking … “I know some leaders like that, but not me.” Yep, you too. Honestly, it comes with leadership. It is 100% true. And 100% true about me.

I have conversations with a lot of leaders. C-suite people, founders, executives who have built real things. And they share a nearly universal trait. They love talking about what they’re doing. What they’re thinking about. What they’re building. What they believe.

They are not so good at listening.

I say that without judgment. I genuinely like these people. And I have to confess, I am the same. I like telling my story. I like talking about my ideas. I catch myself doing it, and I recognize the pattern from the outside looking in. It’s embarrassing.

The Dinner

A few years ago, a prominent leader reached out about having dinner together at a conference we were both attending. The invitation was warm and specific. Something like “I’ve been following what you’re writing, and it’s really good. I’d love to sit down one-on-one, just the two of us. I want to hear your story.”

I was flattered, excited, and more than a little nervous because it was a big deal. Someone this influential, who was curious about me, ready to listen. It felt like a wonderful gift.

We sat down, had some small talk, ordered our dinner, and ninety minutes later it was over and …

That person talked for the entire dinner.

Not most of it. All of it.

They learned nothing about me. Somewhere near the end, there was a flicker of recognition, an acknowledgment that the stated agenda hadn’t quite happened, which led to the promise of a second dinner to make it right.

It never happened.

It won’t happen.

I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even particularly surprised. It was mostly a quiet recognition that I should have actually expected this to happen. Don’t get me wrong. I am 100% sure this person really planned to get to know me to hear my story, but they were so used to being right, being the one who does all the talking, the one who has all the brilliant ideas and insights, that they didn’t even notice what they had done until it was too late to change directions. It was completely unconscious.

That’s what makes it so hard to fix.

The Belief Underneath the Behavior

Overconfidence in leaders almost never looks like arrogance. Instead, it looks like enthusiasm. It looks like vision. It looks like someone who has been told their ideas are valuable for so long and rewarded for it at every level of their career that they have mostly stopped being curious about anything they didn’t come up with.

There is a ton of research on this. Overconfident leaders consistently overestimate their own judgment, attribute success to their own brilliance and failure to external circumstances, and make decisions that look bold from the outside and often costly in the rearview mirror.

This happens because enthusiasm and overconfidence are seen as capability and competence, even brilliance. Certainty feels like leadership. By the time the damage shows up, it’s usually someone else’s problem.

You don’t need a research paper to see it. You have experienced it in your own life. You’ve been in a meeting where one person’s certainty quietly ended the conversation. You’ve watched a leader ask for feedback and then explain, at length, why the feedback was wrong.

If we are honest, it is a subtle or not-so-subtle form of bullying.

Maybe you’ve been that leader. I know I have.

The Same Question, Aimed Differently

Last week, the question was, “What do I need to stop believing about myself?”

For most of us, the first answer was something about not being enough. Not capable enough, not worthy enough, not ready enough. And that’s real. I meant every word of it.

But the same question aimed at a different falsehood requires a more brutal self-assessment.

What if what you need to stop believing is that you’re the smartest person in the room? That your read on the situation is almost certainly right? That the most interesting story at the table is yours?

The leaders who most need to ask that question are the ones least likely to ask it. Because the belief feels like self-awareness. It feels like confidence earned. It’s been confirmed by decades of people laughing at the right moments, following the direction, and telling them they’re exceptional.

And somewhere across the table, someone came hoping for a real conversation.

And went home having had none.

The uncomfortable truth across both of these articles is this: the negative beliefs and the overconfidence aren’t always in different people. Sometimes they live in the same person. Feeling like a fraud on the inside and performing certainty on the outside. That tension is worth sitting with.

What do you need to stop believing about yourself?

Since selling Senior Living Foresight to ProcareHR, the most common question I get is this: “How’s it going?” My answer is always the same: great. I get to do a lot more of the things I like doing and fewer of the things that need to be done but that I hate doing.

One big difference, though …

A larger, more complex organization means more meetings, and more meetings I am not leading. Like all leaders, I think the meetings I lead are way more important and necessary than other people’s meetings.

And of course, they feel the same way about theirs.

This has caused me to put a lot more thought into my own meetings. And more broadly, how leaders can make their meetings more impactful and more efficient. Because here’s what I know: most meetings end in conversation. Very few end in action. There’s a difference, and it matters more than most leaders realize.

Read more

I attend 15 to 25 conferences a year. I have conversations with thousands of leaders, some casual and some amazingly deep. I’ve been doing this long enough that it should feel routine. And yet I am still terrified walking into every single one.

A while back I started doing short one-question street interviews. The format is simple: I walk up to a stranger and say something like, “I’m doing a series of one-question interviews. Can I interview you?”

That’s it.

Easy ask.

Low stakes.

Except it isn’t. Not for me.

Every time. Every day. That first approach is almost paralyzing. In truth, there have been days I didn’t do it at all because fear won. I stood there with every intention of walking up to someone and just ... didn’t.

Here is the crazy, embarrassing part: 95% of the time, people say yes. They enjoy it. The conversations are good. Over four days at two conferences recently, I did nearly 50 of them. And that 5% of the time when they refuse, it has never once been unpleasant.

NOT ONCE

And yet when I walk into the next conference, it will feel exactly the same as the first one.

The belief running underneath all of it goes something like this:

I’m not good enough.

I don’t look right.

I probably sound dumb.

This is not very professional.

I have no real right to be walking up to strangers with a video camera and a microphone.

Knowing that a belief is false doesn’t make it quieter. Fifty successful interviews don’t make it quieter. Years of evidence directly contradicting it haven’t made it quieter.

The Question

What do I need to stop believing about myself?

It seems simple enough on paper.

Just stop believing those things.

Identify them, challenge them, release them. If only it were that easy.

Here is the problem I have — and research suggests I am not alone — I have simply been unable to banish these beliefs. They are too embedded. Too old. They have been living too long in my head. They arrived when I was very young, and they never left.

So here is what I think is more realistic for most of us.

First, accept that it will always be there. Second, stop letting it make your decisions. Because those are two very different things — and only one of them is actually within reach.

Next time you see me doing another video, having another conversation, no matter how comfortable I look — please know that the fear is still fully present. The belief that I have no business being there is still running. And I walk up anyway because I’ve made a prior decision that the belief doesn’t get a vote on what I do next.

That’s not confidence. Not in the way people usually mean it. It’s something more like stubbornness, or commitment, or just enough self-awareness to know that the voice isn’t always telling the truth — even when it sounds completely certain.

I Am Jealous

I’ll be honest about one more thing.

I’m am jealous of people who seem to have actually stopped believing this stuff. Who walk into rooms without the internal negotiation I go through every single time. Maybe they’ve done the work and genuinely rewired something. Maybe they’ve just learned to perform so well enough that they’ve stopped noticing the difference.

I don’t know. Either way, that isn’t my story, and I’ve stopped pretending it will be.

My story is 50 interviews and a paralyzing first approach at every conference. My story is knowing the belief is false and feeling it anyway. My story is showing up not because the fear went away, but because I stopped letting it make my decisions.

That’s what managing a false belief actually looks like — not eliminating it, living past it.

But here’s what’s been nagging at me since I started writing this. We’ve spent this whole article on the beliefs that make us feel too small. What if that’s not actually the most dangerous problem in leadership? What if, for most leaders, maybe even you, the false belief runs in exactly the opposite direction?

That’s part two.

Best-selling author Adam Grant recently recommended this article, “The Personal Value of Conversations Across Serious Disagreement (guest post).” My immediate reaction was something like this:

This is what the world needs right now.

It seems like on social media, people are either too harsh, too agreeable, or too afraid of disagreement. None of which makes the world a better place. None of which helps organizations get better. Here is what I am seeing …

We have a serious societal political discourse problem. There is a small (I think) but vocal group of people who expend considerable time and effort on social media, mostly Facebook, telling the rest of the world what they should be thinking about politics and condemning those who don’t agree. It is based on an absolute conviction that they are 100% right and everyone else is 100% wrong. This thinking makes everything worse. It doesn’t change minds, it alienates people with different opinions, and no one is 100% right all the time. It makes it nearly impossible for those people to grow and learn.

That’s one side of the problem. Here is the other.

Never challenging, never disagreeing makes growth so much harder. I get it. Someone says something you know is wrong or that you disagree with. You want to say something, but … you don’t want to hurt their feelings. You don’t want conflict. What if they come back and want to fight about it? It is easy to conclude it is not worth it … and sometimes it isn’t.

In my own life, I see well-known leaders posting things that are ripe for discussion and disagreement — the kind of disagreement that leads to better understanding — but I have come to learn they hate disagreement. They perceive anything other than praise as an insult to their wisdom and stature. They have to be right all the time. When I see those posts, I mostly just move on. The problem is that all of us who are leaders have blind spots: things we get wrong, things we could be better at, things we miss. In a given year, I write 60,000 to 80,000 words and record at least 100 hours of video content. I write and say some brilliant things that help people. But I also write and say some wrong things — stupid things, things I later regret, things I later rethink.

This is why I welcome hearing from my critics. My critics always make me better.

What Actually Happens When You Push Back

As the linked article points out, when we disagree respectfully — even when we have fundamental moral disagreements — meaningful things happen:

1. It leads to deeper friendships and mutual respect. I confess to having Facebook friends for whom I have lost all respect, not for their politics but for their unwillingness to engage in dialogue, to be challenged.

2. It allows you to rethink your own position, either giving you additional clarity about your beliefs and leadership style, or it opens the door to changing your thinking.

Being willing to accept, learn from, and dialogue with our worst critics is one of the strongest leadership traits available to each of us.

This might be the most insane leadership technique I have ever encountered ... in the best kind of way.

Once a month, the entire corporate team at Heritage Communities abandons their “important corporate office work” and heads to one of their senior living communities to do something way more important.

They do things like raking leaves, painting parking lot lines, cleaning out a pond, scrubbing whatever needs scrubbing. Doing the most unpleasant tasks that no one likes doing, but that have to be done.

They call it Dirty Jobs.

When Amy Birkel, the COO of Heritage, told me the story on Foresight TV, I was enthralled. It’s not just a program; it is something truly revolutionary.

Here is what happens …

Read more