The 11th Deadly Sin of the Nursing Home Administrator

Mark Tuggle’s article, 10 Deadly Sins of the Nursing Home Administrator, is a must-read. His commentary is broad-based, ranging from marketing to financial management to personal emotional reactions and the challenge of “managing friends.”  Let me propose, however, the Eleventh Deadly Sin: 

Failure to see quality as a compliance issue.

Long-term care administrators are, too often, fire fighters. Responding reactively to one problem after another day after day, they see no opportunity to manage differently because they're too busy putting out fires. While it's true that there's an aspect of reactivity built into our industry as the external environment of regulators and customers who “drop in” with ever-increasing demands, the frequency of fire fighting is also contingent upon our willingness to accept them as the way we do business.

As Stephen Covey says, when we say “yes” to one thing, we are de-facto saying “no” to another because there is only so much time and energy to spread around. So, for Long-Term Care Administrator to continually say “yes” to spending time managing crises, means they are continually saying “no” to investing time on organizational performance improvement.  This gives rise to the deadly sin of failure to see quality as a compliance issue.

Another way to say it is that the administrator chases after regulations, regulators, and customers instead of stepping back and taking a broader view that would include capacity building, trending and tracking, critical analysis, and quality improvement action planning.

Let’s face it, the only answer to the ever growing demands upon leaders is to work smarter, not harder. And for nursing home administrators, this means making performance improvement a way of life. For those who have been engulfed in crisis management, it will mean doing both for a while. This requires effort above and beyond the ordinary day-to-day. But the payoff is huge—getting out ahead of crises, of regulators, of customers—and managing things instead of things managing you.

Wouldn’t that feel better?