Week 29: The Rules Apply Up | The Other 5%

Why Trust Is Built Through Behavior, Not Hierarchy

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We talk a lot about loyalty in business.

Loyal employees.
Long-tenured employees.
People who are committed to the organization.
People who have each other's backs.

And in senior living, loyalty matters.

Our work is built on relationships. Between caregivers and residents. Employees and leaders. Communities and corporate teams. Operators and ownership groups. Families and the people they trust to care for someone they love.

But I think sometimes we misunderstand what loyalty actually means.

Loyalty isn't something one person owes another.

The strongest loyalty is reciprocal.

It moves in both directions.

If we expect employees to protect the organization, the organization should protect its employees.

If we expect teams to assume positive intent from leadership, leadership should assume positive intent from its teams.

If we expect people to communicate openly, leaders have to create an environment where telling the truth is safe.

And if we create standards for our communities, those standards have to apply to everyone.

Including us.

Imagine a community has a policy.

Maybe it's a process for entering the building.

A communication protocol.

A safety requirement.

A documentation standard.

Whatever it is, we expect the community team to follow it.

Then a Regional VP visits.

Does the rule suddenly become optional?

It shouldn't.

In fact, I would argue the opposite.

The higher you move in an organization, the greater your responsibility becomes to model the standards, not the greater your permission to ignore them.

That may seem like a small thing.

It isn't.

People notice.

They notice when a leader follows the same process they are expected to follow.

They notice when the Regional VP helps clean up after an event.

They notice when a senior leader admits they made a mistake.

They notice when someone says they will call on Tuesday and actually calls on Tuesday.

They also notice when the rules seem to change depending on the title of the person standing in the room.

Those little moments teach people something about the organization.

They teach us whether accountability is a shared value or simply something that flows downhill.

And over time, those moments either build trust or slowly erode it.

Trust matters because none of us operate perfectly.

Senior living is complicated.

People make difficult decisions with imperfect information.

An Executive Director will eventually make a decision their Regional disagrees with.

A corporate initiative will not roll out exactly as planned.

Someone will miss something.

A leader will have a bad day.

A caregiver will too.

When loyalty and trust already exist, something interesting happens in those moments.

We give each other a little room.

Instead of immediately assuming incompetence or bad intentions, we think:

I know this person. I know how they operate. There is probably more to the story.

That doesn't eliminate accountability.

It actually makes accountability healthier.

Because now the conversation can begin from curiosity instead of accusation.

What happened?
What did you see that I didn't?
What can we learn?
How do we make sure this goes differently next time?

That's what reciprocal loyalty looks like.

It isn't blindly defending someone because they're on your team.

It isn't avoiding difficult conversations.

And it certainly isn't lowering standards.

It's knowing that even when we disagree, we're still working toward the same goal.

There is tremendous power in working inside an organization where people believe that about one another.

Because trust travels.

A caregiver trusts their department head.

The department head trusts the Executive Director.

The Executive Director trusts the Regional.

The Regional trusts corporate leadership.

And ultimately, residents and families experience the result of all of those relationships.

The opposite is true too.

Distrust travels.

When employees don't believe leadership will support them, behavior changes.

When leaders don't trust community teams, behavior changes.

People communicate differently.

They take fewer risks.

They share less.

They protect themselves.

And slowly, the organization becomes a place where everyone is trying to avoid being wrong instead of working together to get things right.

That's why loyalty cannot simply be something we ask from employees.

It has to be something we demonstrate to them.

Through consistency.
Through fairness.
Through communication.
Through accountability.
Through assuming positive intent.

And sometimes through something as simple as following the same rule we expect everyone else to follow.

We spend a lot of time asking whether our people are committed to the organization.

Maybe great organizations spend just as much time asking whether the organization is demonstrating its commitment to them.

Because loyalty was never supposed to travel in one direction.

The rules apply up.

And that often lives in The Other 5%.

—JT

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