In this Priorities, Plans & Perspectives interview, Skilled Nursing News sits down with Leigh Ann Barney, President and CEO at Trilogy Health Services, to learn about her full-transparency approach to goal setting and vision that transcends every level of the organization.
Read on to discover how Barney’s perspective has evolved over thirty years in the long term care industry, and how she leverages that to lead her team and company through uncertainty.
Skilled Nursing News: What was your first job title in health care or health care technology, and how has your perspective changed since your first day in the industry?
Leigh Ann Barney: Interestingly, my first health care job was in accounting. I started with a health care company, not planning to build a career in the long term care industry — I was just looking for accounting work. I didn’t have much interaction with people in the field or operations, but over the years, my career has taken me in different directions.
I moved more into field operations and gained a lot more insight into the people perspective of the business, which is what I love most about my job today. I have the privilege of taking care of our residents and employees, but I also have the accounting perspective. The finances are important to keep the company alive, but financial success will only come when I focus on the people side of business: our residents and employees.
SNN: Whom do you consider your greatest influencers in or outside the industry, in your perspective?
Barney: Randy Bufford is the founder of Trilogy and my predecessor as CEO. I worked for Randy prior to Trilogy, but I’ve also been here for 20 years and have seen the vision that Randy had for the company. I’ve been very blessed to be a part of that growth and vision. I look at him as my mentor. He has probably been the most profound influence on my career to this day.
A couple of my other favorites are Jim Collins and Dave Novak. I’ve read Jim’s books, Good to Great and Built to Last, which have been very instrumental in building our strategic vision at Trilogy. Dave has a connection to Louisville, where we’re based, with his background at Yum! Brands. He does some great podcasts on leadership, and I think he has interviews with some of the great leaders of our time. His personality is so positive and infectious around leadership.
SNN: How do you define and execute your professional priorities?
Barney: As a leadership team, we always have long and short term priorities. Rather than “retreats,” we conduct what we call “advances.” This is where we get together annually to set the vision we want to achieve in the long term. There, we create an outlook for the next three to five years and put some goals together to achieve that vision. The goals have to be cascaded down to all the levels, departments and campuses, so we have them set their own pillar goals as well.
We focus on our six pillars, publish the goals, and post them in all of our campuses so everyone knows where we want to go. From there, we take those shorter goals that are going to help us achieve that long term vision.
Our short term goals are set in six month increments, and that gives us enough time to accomplish something without losing focus. We also gather annually to look at where the vision is and what we should change based on industry or internal trends.
SNN: Can share some of those priorities?
Barney: Employment experience is No. 1 for us. Everybody talks about staffing as their No. 1 focus from a recruitment standpoint, but at Trilogy, we aren’t just focused on recruiting A-team members. We want to retain our employees by engaging them in our company’s mission and the employment advantages we provide. We’re focused on taking care of the employees who have been with us for a period of time, particularly through the year-and-a-half of COVID, to recognize what they’ve done and been through and keep them in the business.
Second is incentives growth, which was better than what we expected in 2021. Last year, our future for new business coming out of the pandemic was unclear. We weren’t sure how or if we would come back as an industry. A priority for us is to rebuild confidence in our services by focusing on our safety measures.
During the pandemic, we rolled out a cleanliness and safety program called SHIELD in partnership with 3M. We want our families and residents to know we’re creating a safe place for them to live when they come to a Trilogy campus, which will hopefully help our census rebound.
SNN: How do you look at planning when a large degree of uncertainty is involved?
Barney: I’ve been in the industry for almost 30 years. I would say we’ve always had various degrees of uncertainty in the long term care industry, whether that’s reimbursement, regulatory, environment or just general economics. I think we’ve become experts at adapting to uncertainty. The companies that understand this and have the ability to be nimble in their planning are the ones who tend to come out successful. We’ve built our business and our leadership expectations to know that this is normal, and I think it served us well when COVID happened.
We had to adapt to changes that were not just coming daily, but sometimes hourly. We don’t get married to our plans because anything can happen, and we need to be ready to adapt. If you put your head in the sand and you are not thinking about what might be coming, that’s when you’ll get blindsided., But if you fully expect a changing environment, then you’re ready to hit those things head on when they come forward, and I think that at Trilogy, we’ve proven that we can.
SNN: How do you keep track of your professional plans and progress?
Barney: We try to be very transparent at all levels of our company, and I’ve mentioned before our four goals. Then, we track our progress throughout those periods and share it with every level of the organization. That holds everybody accountable to what we’re doing. As I mentioned, we post our goals throughout our campuses, and I post updates as they come along.
Anyone can see what we’re working on, and, again, that helps with that accountability. We conduct a global company meeting with communications and updates of what we’ve accomplished.Then, we set our goals for the future as a team. If we didn’t accomplish something, we’re very open and honest about that as well, and we try to reset so we can move forward into the next fall period.
SNN: What do you do when something does not go according to plan?
Barney: I mentioned earlier that the books by Jim Collins have been very instrumental to us. One thing we learned from Collins’ books is a concept called “Confront the Brutal Reality.” The idea is that you have to reflect and be brutally honest when things aren’t working the right way. Then, we can adjust, and reset our goals and plans to avoid repeating those mistakes.
SNN: Leaders need time to process and gain perspective. What do you listen to, read, or watch to gain that perspective?
Barney: I’m fortunate that Trilogy’s campuses are clustered in the Midwest, and I spend a lot of time in my car traveling to our campuses. Audio books and podcasts are a diversion on my travels and I can name all of them that I listen to.
Dave Novak has a podcast on leadership, which I think is great. Most recently, a couple of audio books I listened to were The Power of Moments and another one called Off Balance on Purpose. We’ll use some of the ideas from those books in upcoming meetings in the company and share those insights. I think they are great principals for us to use as leaders at Trilogy, but I’ve found they also help me, personally, as a leader.
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