Episode 13: Leading Through Adversity

HumanGood President & CEO John Cochrane shares lessons on the importance of evenly showing empathetic leadership in good times and bad.

Transcript    

Chris Riback: John, thanks for joining us. We appreciate your time.

John Cochrane: Chris, it's great to be with you. Dr. White, great to be with you.

Dr. Alexandria White: Thank you. We look forward to this conversation.

Chris Riback: We have been looking forward to this conversation and as you would expect, we would like to start with you. What was your path to getting here, John? Or to put it differently, what's a lawyer like you doing in a place like this?

John Cochrane: My path to leadership, I think like so many people, was circuitous and somewhat unexpected. I graduated college with a degree in political science and wouldn't you know, all the good political science jobs were taken that year. And so I had to make a choice. I either went to work or I went to law school. And in one of many poorly considered choices in my life, I chose law school. And so I got through law school, signed on to a large firm in Chicago. Went to work as a lawyer and was happily practicing law, which is of course to say I was miserable, but making a good living.

Chris Riback: I was going to say, that's an oxymoron. You don't hear much about happy lawyers so, good to hear that you were one.

John Cochrane: No, exactly. Well for a very short time. And what I discovered is for me, law was a way to make a good living, but not a good life. And I think that awareness led me to a receptivity to be open to something else, I just didn't know what that something else would be. And if you had asked me at the time about the attractiveness of senior housing as a sector, that would've been nowhere on my radar as a potential career move. But I ended up meeting a developer of senior housing who was based in Baltimore, I was living in Chicago at the time with my wife. And I went out to visit him really just to get him as a client for my law practice. And as we sat and visited, he spun out this story about what the 70s, 80s and 90s could be and should be for people. A time of connection and purpose and vitality.

And I listened to this, I thought, wow I'd never thought about this as anything more than just the time that you retire. Which is a terrible word, of course. If you look it up it means withdraw, recede, fallback. There is nothing attractive about that word. And so as a consequence there was nothing attractive to me superficially about this industry. But as I met John, as I toured his community, I was just floored by how active, engaged, lively, vibrant, vital these people were. And I thought, what a great way to live. And I sat at lunch with this guy who was the CEO of his company and I said, "You know if you got a place for me here, I'd love to come work for you."

Chris Riback: In that first meeting?

John Cochrane: In the first meeting. I can't imagine I was this impetuous. But I said, "If you got a place for me here, I'd love to come work for you." And he said, "Well, you know, I'm the CEO so I have a little bit of sway here. I'll see what I can do."

And six weeks later, I left my law practice. I took a 90% pay cut. My wife and I sold a house that we had just spent, I think, a year and a half redoing into our forever home. We'd lived in it for sixor nine months. Moved across the country. Moved into a spare bedroom and started working in a field in which I never expected to find myself.

And what's interesting about that for me is that sometimes when you're open to new opportunities and new horizons, it really pays off. I will tell you, in 30 years in this business, I've never had a day that I didn't wake up eager, excited and ambitious about doing the work of this organization and working in this field. Now, having said that, I've had plenty of days like we all have that didn't go as planned, that got totally knocked off track. Things that didn't work. But I've never had a day that I regretted my decision and did fail to enjoy my work. And I've realized over time that very few people get to say that about their work. And so I'm really uniquely blessed in that way. And again, I wouldn't do anything different. But it was the path I could never have predicted for myself.

Dr. Alexandria White: Amazing, amazing story. So we want to talk about the work. Senior living communities, I have an affinity for senior living communities. My dad spent his final years outside of Chicago in a great senior living community. And so when I think about how energetic and how happy you sound about working for HumanGood, it just, it makes me have rejoice that you love what you're doing. [00:05:00] But let's switch it a little bit. Few sectors were impacted more by COVID than the senior living space. Where does HumanGood fit in the senior living ecosystem? What has the period since March, 2020 been like for you and your residents and particularly your staff with the senior living community, with the senior living community?

John Cochrane: Well, Dr. White you've asked a loaded and nuanced question. You're exactly right. Few sectors have been impacted more by COVID than the senior living space. HumanGood is the sixth largest not for profit in the country, serving seniors. We operate retirement communities that have independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing care and memory support. So a traditional retirement community setting.

And then we have nearly 100 communities that offer residential living and service coordination for low income seniors scattered across the country. So we serve about 15,000 residents, we have about 5,000 team members. And to say the last two years have been challenging is obviously an understatement for all of us, but particularly for our sector. And in the case of HumanGood, we went from a celebratory annual meeting in February, 2020 into full lockdown mode one month later. And only now are we beginning to really fully emerge from that experience?

So you can imagine for residents, for families and for team members, how incredibly disruptive this time has been. How really outside the bounds of anything anyone could have imagined. It's just been the most disruptive environment imaginable. And for residents, we really had to turn this time from one  of severe isolation... And that is one of the biggest health threats facing seniors, it's not diabetes or stroke or heart disease. The biggest threat facing seniors is social isolation and depression. And here we were by order of the health authorities. And reasonably so, having to social people. And that forced us as a company and forced us as a field to find new ways to connect people to their families, to each other, to our own team members. And so we were forced to rethink how we program and how we engage.

And much of that experience quite frankly, was negative. It was hard to sort our way through that. It required a degree of agility that we weren't used to, a degree of experimentation we weren't used to. A degree of experimentation our residents and families weren't used to. But it forced us to become a little more innovative, a little more creative and a lot more intentional about creating those connection points for people. And so while I wouldn't say our experience in creating those opportunities was anything close to seamless, it was messy and highly imperfect. There are takeaways that we're going to use as we come, I hope, out of COVID, in terms of resident connection across our company. For team members go ahead.

Dr. Alexandria White: What are some of those takeaways?

John Cochrane: I think some of those takeaways are that we're more resilient than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. That we, and I'm speaking of we as the HumanGood family. So it's our residents, it's our bond holders, it's our team members, it's the family members. We're more resilient, we're more creative. We're probably willing to work harder and more intentionally than we think we are. And I think those are all characteristics that will serve us well as we come out of this environment.

Dr. Alexandria White: Definitely.

John Cochrane: So there are certainly takeaways, but it was an enormously disruptive time for residents. For team members it was equally disruptive, but in somewhat different ways. So for team members, all of a sudden their work life was tremendously different than it had been pre-COVID. All of a sudden you're concerned about your safety. You're concerned about the safety of the people in your care that you're serving every day. You're concerned about the safety of your family. You're having to come to work and do the same work, but now every time you walk into a room or apartment you're putting on a gown and gloves and a face shield. And so there's the discomfort of that. There's the time of that. There's the un-human, disconnection people are experiencing.

And then what's unique for the team member environment is, their work life has been significantly disrupted. At the same time their home life has been equally disrupted. They've got parents they're worried about, maybe they're living with them. They've got kids who all of a sudden are home and they never expected them to be home. They're worried about homeschooling. They're worried about COVID. They're worried about their families and friends. The usual outlets we have to alleviate pressure, going to a house of worship, going out to dinner with friends, going to the movies, all of that was shut down. And so when you look at the disruptive environment of the world, it's unlike anything we've ever seen. And all of that factored into how we needed to respond as a company.

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes. Very much so.

Chris Riback: How did you navigate that, John? I know you think a lot about leadership. Did you have the leadership skills for the times? Did you going in, would you have thought you did have them? What did you yourself have to learn and which of the skills that you already had served you best?

John Cochrane: Chris, I was fortunate in that I'd been in the CEO role for 10 years when this crisis hit. And so I'd been working long enough and through enough crises, not of this magnitude obviously,trust my own leadership skills and abilities. And just as important, I'd worked with my team long enough to trust their leadership skills and abilities. And so that trust and that experience and that track record allowed us to get our sea-legs I think, fairly quickly. And that was necessary in the early days of the pandemic. As I look at what I've learned and what I drew on I certainly, I think like any leader, drew on absolutely every skill I had to help our teams navigate this. One of the things I needed to learn to do I think was to let go, if you will, and fully trust my team.

And I specifically remember a circumstance where this happened. We were confronted with a particularly sensitive situation, which our team was working to address. I was actually working on something else, but this required sensitive communications and immediate responses. And our team kept sending proposals and questions and presentations back and forth and asking for input, and I simply wasn't able to get to it. And initially I was concerned about that, I felt like I was letting my team down. What I finally realized is, they didn't really need me in this. I didn't have to weigh in, they had this. And I needed to trust them and let that go. And that was validating for them and liberating for me to be able to do that.

So that's one of the skills that I think I needed to learn, or maybe adopt a little more quickly. When I think about skills that helped us navigate this for me and I think for other leaders, I think successful leaders are always learning. And this pandemic, these circumstances, thrust us into learning mode in the biggest most impactful way we could have ever imagined.

Chris Riback: The deep end of learning.

Dr. Alexandria White: That's right.

John Cochrane: It was the deep end of learning. You were thrown into the pool and you had to make it through. And so it draws on what I first look for when I look at leaders, curiosity is the first leadership trait I look for in potential leaders. Because it's so utterly important to sustain success in any environment, and particularly in this one. We need to be constantly learning, sifting for information, gathering that information, analyzing it, synthesizing it and applying it for a desired outcome. And curiosity in this case was critical. We had to be asking why, we had to be looking at alternatives. We had to be hearing alternate points of view. That's always important, but it's never been more important than in the last couple of years.

So as I look back again at the experience I had, the experience my team had. The experience allowed us to have confidence  in ourselves and move decisively when it was required. And I don't know how you get that other than by simple life experience. But it is one of those circumstances where you just got to jump in and do what needs to get done and realize it'll be done imperfectly, and that's okay.

Chris Riback: Combination of being thrown into the deep end plus, to really mix the metaphor, trial by fire.

John Cochrane: Well, and remember that this wasn't the only crisis we were facing. So this wasn't just COVID. But on top of everything else in the middle of this, we had social unrest we had workforce.

Dr. Alexandria White: Correct. Yes.

John Cochrane: Wage pressures unlike anything I've seen in my career. Political unrest that I don't think any of us would've ever anticipated seeing in our lifetimes. And then there's a global nature to all of these crises that just kind of threw the entire world into this disruptive state. So it was a  wild time.

Dr. Alexandria White: So John, as I'm listening to you, I've wrote down some tidbits along the way. You've said words like confidence and curiosity, and phrases such as, open to new opportunities and always learning. And so when I hear those, a phrase comes to my mind regarding you. And to me you're an empathetic leader. And I want you to sit with that for a moment. How do you define empathetic leadership? And I'm just thinking of the things that you've thrown out there along the way, but how do you define it? And can you give us an example of maybe when you've been an empathetic leader, used sensitivity and curiosity and put them all together?

John Cochrane: Well Dr. White, it's a great question. And I think empathetic leadership has always been important, particularly in a field like ours where you're delivering care and service to people and developing personal relationships. So that's key, but I think of empathy as an ability to put yourself into another's shoes and understand the circumstances in which they're living and working and operating. And, again while it's always important I think in time of crisis, it's critically important. When I looked at the disruption faced by our team members I had to, not show a genuine interest, be genuinely interested in the circumstances my team members were confronting every day and I needed to understand what they were going through. What pressures were they facing?

It used to be that we as employers and leaders were concerned about the culture at work with our team members. That was enough. We made a good work environment. That's not it anymore. We've got to be concerned holistically with what they're facing outside of work. And if we don't understand that, we can't possibly help them adapt and achieve and do the work that we need them to do. As HumanGood we talk a lot about our brand promise of inspiring the best life. And one of the questions I'm often asked by team members is, “Does that apply to us?" And my answer to them is, "Not only does that brand promise include you, that brand promise starts with you. Because if I can't inspire your best life, I can't possibly expect you to in turn inspire someone else's and do the heavy lifting." And for me to inspire someone's best life, I need to understand what that means to them. What's important to them. What obstacles are they facing? What fears do they have? What resources do they need?

And when I look at how we show empathy and understanding to our team members, there are things we do I think, big and small, to show the respect and understanding for people. So in some cases it meant giving people an extra week of PTO, and mandating they take it in the next 90 days because we knew they hadn't taken vacation in a year. It wasn't healthy, it wasn't sustainable. We wanted them to check out and take a breath and get some rest. We sent out Hoka shoes to all of our leadership and we told them, "Look, we care about your health and wellbeing. We want you to get outside. We want you to get fresh air. We want you to take a walk and here are the shoes in which you can do it." But they're not all big things.

Dr. Alexandria White: Wait, wait, wait, John. We’ve got to pause on the shoes being sent. I love shoes. That is amazing. So if you just happen to have any more of those shoes, I will take them. But that is wonderful. That is wonderful that you saw that.

Chris Riback: These weren't Alex, just to be clear, I'm going to butcher the name, but these were not Manolo Blahnik shoes. Or, I mean, you understand... this isn't your style shoe necessarily. 

John Cochrane: No, right we may introduce you to that style, Alex. These Hokas are the best walking shoes. And it's funny how people respond to something like getting a gift certificate to buy a pair of shoes. Maybe they need shoes. Maybe they... They probably don't need shoes, but it sends a message that we're aware, you matter, we care about you and we want to equip you to be successful and be healthy. But they're not all big things, sometimes it's just a little thing. Sometimes it's simply picking up the phone and saying, thank you to people.

We have a morning meeting four days a week with our leadership team. Very often we'll talk about new hires we're bringing into a role and someone will get mentioned, "Oh, we're bringing John Cochran in for an IT role." As I hear those things and other leaders hear those things, I'll hop onto email and send off a quick email. "Hey, your name come up in our morning drive. Everyone's thrilled to have you. I'm thrilled to have you. HumanGood is thrilled to have you. Welcome aboard, I can't wait to meet you in person." Those things sound little, but I would advise people don't ignore the little things because you think they don't matter. They're often the things that matter the most. And all it takes is a genuine expression of caring. At the base, it's just not that hard.

Dr. Alexandria White: Speaking of caring, I know that your head of CHRO passed away. And if you feel comfortable, could you unpack how that impacted the community, you and your leadership style? Because we know that our listeners ... we've had CEOs, C-suite members who've lost some key team players. Through the pandemic, through personal situations, and we'd just like a little insight on how you dealt with that.

John Cochrane: It was devastating. It was devastating to me personally, it was devastating to our team. This was someone who, as a person, was really beloved. Who always had the best interest of the brand at heart and the best interest of our team members at heart. And people knew that. And it was so sudden and so unexpected that in ordinary times, it would've been tragic. But I think in these times, with all that was swirling on in the world, it was almost overwhelming for people. It was just... It was right on the edge of, this is too much. And so the only thing you can do is do what we all do when we encountered those circumstances. Hold on to one another, reach out to one another, tell stories, laugh, cry together, get one another through it, be available, have multiple conversations, find ways to honor and remember this person.

And so we confronted it the same way you confront any kind of loss. Very directly, repeatedly, giving people multiple avenues to express how they felt and process something that was really, really difficult for people to process. And again, I think in ordinary times this would've been tragic. I think it was nearly the end for some people because it was like one thing too many. It was one body blow too many. And we had to find a way to hold each other up through it. And I'm really proud of how our team responded in that moment. The interesting thing about crises is, you got to live leadership response you certainly hope from your established identified leaders, but what you also get is a leadership response from team members that you haven't seen before in that role. People who step up and step in, in a big way, to help heal an organization and pull it forward. And we saw lots of that. And so even in those tragic moments, we were able to find nuggets of hope and resilience and strength that we probably didn't know we had.

Dr. Alexandria White: Wow. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing, John.

Chris Riback: John, what's the ownership model for HumanGood?

John Cochrane: We're a not-for-profit, Chris. So we don't actually have any owners.

Chris Riback: Where my head's going is, there will be leaders listening to this who have shareholders. There will be leaders listening to this who have private equity ownership. Or maybe they own the company themselves. I could imagine them saying, "Man, you sound like a great guy. That's wonderful the way you care about your employees and the things that you do, and the shoes that Alex is going to walk down the red carpet with the next time she has a chance. But I've got a bottom line to worry about." How does empathetic leadership connect with responding to shareholders or worrying about the bottom line?

John Cochrane: Well, the first part of my answer is, "So do I." I may be a not for profit but that's a tax saver, it's not a business plan. And so just like a for profit company I need to produce a sustainable bottom line for my organization. The difference is my bottom line doesn't go to my shareholders. My bottom line goes to mission advancement and enhancement and growth. But I have the same business operating pressures that for profit, public and private companies have. And there's not that much difference between how we operate.

And to people to say, "Well, I can't afford to send out shoes to people," I would counter with, "I don't think you can afford not to send out shoes." That cost us $100 a piece for, I don't know however many people we sent them to, 150 leaders or something like that. That's a relatively small expense. Turnover, lack of buy-in, lack of personal drive, the culture that we established by doing those things is absolutely priceless. The sense of belonging and ownership that we get from caring about people, pays dividends for our mission and for the work we do. Whether you are not for profit, a for profit, a public, a privately held company taking care of people is great for the long term bottom line.

Dr. Alexandria White: I agree to everything. John, you're familiar with the #greatresignation, and you know that people are leaving companies left and right not because of pay, but because they don't have a sense of belonging.

John Cochrane: Yep.

Dr. Alexandria White: The company doesn't see them. They're working 24/7 at home doing the dishes and trying to do a report. And trying to teach kids. And so companies, you have to see them. And if sending a pair of shoes will keep someone at a HumanGood, I am for it. All right. We're looking forward, John. There's so much going on, there's so many new things coming up. Given what you've seen and experienced, what we all are experiencing in changes from the pandemic and technology and infrastructure, what does leadership look like going forward? You're pretty young looking, but I know you don't want to work at HumanGood forever. So what about those other leaders that's coming behind you? Tell me about the leadership that they need.

John Cochrane: Well Alex, you're asking a great question. And by the way, you're speaking to something any leader should be concerned about, which is succession planning and development of future leaders. And so it's something I'm highly focused on, our board's highly focused on. I'd like to think I'm not as young as I look, but I'm probably younger than I look at this point. And it's interesting about the leadership characteristics and what are they and how they changed. I've got to say, I'm not sure that leadership going forward looks a lot different than it looks like in any era. How you apply those leadership principles certainly looks different and varies by circumstance.

But I think of effective leadership as requiring positivity and optimism. I may talk more about that later, I think that's absolutely key. Empathy, which we've already talked about. Utterly, utterly critical in any time, and particularly in this time. When I think about navigating through a crisis, clarity, decisiveness, simplicity, absolutely key. I think they're always valuable. They're necessary in a crisis. Commitment to innovation, you innovate or you die. And so I think that's never been more true than now, but it's always been true. Openness to learning, agility. I think those leadership traits have always been important and they're important now, they just get applied somewhat differently.

I think these are kind of bedrock principles that remain constant. I don't think that my leadership style has necessarily changed dramatically. I think you accentuate and amplify different things by circumstance. But I think that people think, "Well, you know, it's a new age and so everything needs to be different." There's a lot that is going to change, but I'm not sure the leadership principles themselves need to change. In fact, I would actually argue that some of the leadership principles I've just espoused, those are the things we need to hold onto most strongly. We need to adapt. Again, we need to apply them differently. But they haven't really changed.

Chris Riback: I could imagine the pushback to your pushback being, yes, but you are... And this is going to sound more sycophantic than I want to. You are more enlightened in your approach than a "traditional leader". So when people do talk about, "I think the need for leadership changes to match the times", I hear what you're saying. The adjectives, the activities, the requirements that they might then be talking about I think, are the ones that you're describing right now.

John Cochrane: Well, yes, Chris, it's interesting. Because as you say that I'm thinking, if somebody were to sit in front of me and say, "Well, you know, I really had to change my leadership in this crisis. It's all different." And in my response to that would be then, "You were screwing something up before."

Chris Riback: Yes. What the heck were you doing before?

John Cochrane: Maybe both.

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes. Yes.

John Cochrane: But it doesn't change. If all of a sudden you decide, "Oh, now I've got to care about my people. I never had to care about them before, but today I do." You were missing the boat before.

Chris Riback: Yes, for sure. John, you likely know that we usually end these conversations with my favorite feature, Dr. White's wisdom. It's where Alex sums up her key takeaways from the discussion. Would you do us the good service? What is John's Judgment, as the team branded it, what are the three to five tips that you would offer to other leaders right now? Don't worry, we'll get to Dr. White's wisdom too, but we're going to go... I'd love to start with John's Judgment.

John Cochrane: I would say that the first takeaway I would offer for leaders is, it's always important, never more than now, to lead with optimism. And I think sometimes people don't understand what optimism means. Optimism is not delusion. Optimism is not denying the reality of your current circumstances. It's not just putting smiley eyes on and pretending that everything's right in the world. You do that, you're leading with delusion, you just look like an idiot.

Optimism means an honest appraisal of your circumstances, combined with a rock solid belief that there's a successful path through those circumstances. And the leader explains to the team, there's a big hill decline, but we've climbed big hills before. We will do it again in here's how. Nobody wants to follow a pessimist, but people will follow an optimist even among the most challenging paths. So that's the first thing I would offer.

The second is, and again this is always important but never more than in a crisis, lead and live your values. Speak about them for sure, but better yet connect the dots for people. So they see how those values drive individual and corporate actions. They need to understand that the values we talk about are the values that frame how we make decisions, how we approach those decisions and they in turn inform the actions that we take. If the values are just words that hang on a wall, throw them out and start over.

And then finally I would say, and again I think this is most important in a crisis but valuable anytime, lead with clarity, consistency and simplicity. A crisis is no time for nuance. People need to know what's expected of them. They need to know what's being asked of them. They need to know where you're going and how you're going to get there. People always need that, and again I think we sometimes make things more complicated than they are. Clarity, consistency, and simplicity, three traits that I think serve leaders well in any circumstance.

Chris Riback: Dr. White. Yes, anything on that?

Dr. Alexandria White:   I approve of John's Judgment. Kudos. But I have to add on, I have to add on. Empathy. Empathy is so important now, now more than ever to see people and allow them to show up. John mentioned curiosity. Be curious, not judgmental. And the last thing that John just said, he said, "You innovate or you die." I love that. And then we're not just talking about products. We're talking about your companies. We're talking about yourself. Your ideas, your mindset, how you think. And so those are just three other things that I want to add on to John's judgment.

Chris Riback: Well, those are fantastic. And the one that I would add on, which speaks to my role here, surround yourself with great people. John, Alex, you are two great people. You're the ones that I'm surrounded by right now. And John, thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for the guidance and the insights that you've been able to share with us.

John Cochrane: Well Chris and Alex, it's been great being with you. Thank you so much.

Dr. Alexandria White: Thank you.