Senior Living Operators Embrace Player-coach Leadership Models As Industry Grows More Complicated

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The next generation of senior living leaders is emerging with extensive experience at the community level, commitments to wellness and a willingness to embrace new technology.

Recent leadership changes at Civitas Senior Living and Harmony Senior Services show how companies are redefining the CEO role to meet the demands of an evolving senior living environment hinging on wellness and lifestyle operations, the growing sophistication of the senior living consumer base and infusing technology to support staff and improve service delivery.

Cooper Vittitow is stepping into the CEO role at Civitas having worked with the same ownership group and leadership team for nearly two decades, as his transition to top leader was part of a long-planned succession process at the Texas-based senior living operator.

Harmony Senior Services selected former Sodalis Senior Living President Traci Taylor-Roberts as the next CEO of the Charleston, South Carolina-based operator after a career spanning multiple roles including executive director, sales, operations and regional roles across multiple companies.

While they took different paths in rising to the top of the respective organizations they now lead, both Vittitow’s and Taylor-Roberts, I think both hirings represent where the industry is headed in 2025 and into the new year. 

More specifically, I believe their hirings signal that companies, regardless of size, are looking for someone who knows the daily rhythm of community life with an openness to test new technologies that lead to a senior living experience centered on wellness and lifestyle.

Taking inspiration from Vittitow’s baseball roots, I see a new kind of operator leader emerging in senior living: the player-coach. These leaders are adept in operations and can lead the charge on the ground, but they also can call strategic shots without getting too caught up in the blur of daily life in senior living. In other words, they can see the field from both the eyes of someone standing on it as well as a coach with a bird’s eye view from the booth.

While this isn’t a radical departure from ongoing industry trends, I think it is yet another example of senior living operators enlisting leaders who will push their operating models into their next iterations.

In this week’s exclusive, members-only SHN+ Update, I examine how new hires at Civitas and Harmony exemplify the next wave of senior living leadership and offer the following takeaways:

-Why new CEOs at Civitas and Harmony embody a player-coach leadership prototype

-How both Civitas and Harmony are redefining wellness as a core competency in operations

-What their technology and AI priorities reveal about new leadership in senior living

Data on senior living leaders in 2025

This year, the nation’s largest senior living operator, Brookdale Senior Living (NYSE: BKD) named Nick Stengle as its new CEO. Other organizations with new leaders at the helm also include Ascension Living, Covenant Living, Ebenezer and WesleyLife.

Researchers with Chicago-based investment bank Ziegler in a recent analysis found 12 female and 38 male CEOs among senior living providers in the most recent LZ-200 list of largest U.S. senior living nonprofits, compared with two female and 23 male CEOs in the most recent Fortune 500 list. More than 60% of LZ 200 CEO transitions still moved from male to male leaders, with only a small share shifting from male to female or maintaining a female CEO, the researchers found.

More senior living companies have embraced co-leadership models this year, with organizations like LTC Properties (NYSE: LTC) naming co-CEOs, Welltower (NYSE: WELL) naming co-presidents and operators taking similar structures at Pegasus Senior Living, Gardant Management Solutions, New Perspective and Savant Senior Living.

In 2024, there were over 2,221 CEO exits across multiple industries, a 19% increase from 2023, the highest level since tracking began by Chicago-based outplacement and career transition firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas in 2002.

This year, the firm wrote that 2025 has seen “record turnover,” rising 19% from 123 departures in July 2025 to 146 departures in August 2025. Since August, 1,504 CEOs have exited their positions, the highest number on record since tracking began and an increase of 4% from 1,450 CEO exits witnessed in the first eight months of 2024, according to CGC.

How the “player-coach” prototype is shaping future leadership in senior living

In naming leaders with extensive operations-level experience who can navigate wellness efforts, workforce challenges, technology rollouts and chart new growth simultaneously, I see senior living operators embracing what I think of as the “player-coach” model.

In professional sports lexicon, a “player-coach” is a team leader in a locker room that has extensive past experience playing the sport that they then coach, often with high accolades from their time as a player. I look at current National Football League (NFL) coach Mike Vrabel, who played 14 seasons with the New England Patriots, winning three Super Bowl rings, or Major League Baseball (MLB) manager Dave Roberts, who won the 2004 World Series as a player with the Boston Red Sox and three championships since 2020 as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.

Vrabel and Roberts were both respected players in their locker rooms when they played, and this experience has helped them win the trust of their current organizations.

I believe that both Vittitow and Taylor-Roberts exemplify a similar mindset in senior living. Despite their different career paths, both newly appointed CEOs reflect this “player-coach” prototype: long tenures in community roles, a willingness to spur mentorship and accountability with a sensitivity for understanding how corporate decisions can impact staff at the community level.

Internal leadership development that brings high-performing personnel to the top, giving them career paths to succeed existing leaders when the time is right, is a strategy I think more operators will take in the future given the increasing complexities – not to mention resident acuity – involved with running a community.

Vittitow is a former collegiate baseball coach and professional player in the Frontier League, and he started as an intern at the first Civitas community founded by Civitas co-founders Wayne and Misti Powell in Fort Worth, Texas. While there, Vittitow rotated through nearly every department.

“If we didn’t know what to do, we researched it,” Vittitow told me of his first days in the industry.

He eventually moved up the ranks to executive director before being named vice president and later senior vice president. Vittitow said that he had a “hands-on role” in building the original programming that later scaled into Civitas’ standard operating model for all communities.

Vittitow sees direct parallels between his time on the baseball diamond and in senior living, noting that “high-performing teams hold each other accountable” and stressing the importance of creating a roster of “generalists” on staff that can easily transition between roles at the community level where needs arise on a given day, spanning sales, operations, dining and programming.

I think this is analogous to how a versatile baseball player can field multiple positions or bat at different spots in the lineup and still have an out-sized impact on the outcome of a game.

Roberts, meanwhile, “grew up in the industry,” serving as executive director, salesperson, regional operations director and regional sales leader with roles at major operators including Emeritus, American House, Pegasus Senior Living and Sodalis Senior Living before joining Harmony. Through her extensive experience in multiple firms, she said she developed a “deep empathy” for executive directors’ daily experiences.

“In my role now, I want to be able to support our EDs and give them time to spend with their residents,” Taylor-Roberts told me. “You can’t help anybody or develop a really good plan until you actually know what the needs are.”

In making future decisions on company rollouts and initiatives, Taylor-Roberts told me her past experience tells her to pace these new initiatives to make any changes more palatable at the community level, rather than spurring employee burnout. In her first 90 to 180 days on the job as Harmony’s top leader, Taylor-Roberts said she is “seeking to understand” corporate and community needs through listening to key leaders. From that, she said she will establish priorities spanning expanded training for staff or hiring key positions like corporate director of sales or wellness directors.

I think senior living operators will place a high value on these kinds of leaders going forward. From sales and marketing to care, the services that operators provide are not getting easier. It makes sense to me that operators will look for in-the-field acumen, especially as they grow by taking on turnaround opportunities while development is slow.

How new leaders at Civitas, Harmony prioritize wellness, new senior living model

Wellness and lifestyle are core requirements for today’s senior living operators looking to win the hearts and minds of today’s older adults.

Both Vittitow and Taylor-Roberts are reframing wellness as a core principle to their company’s operating models by integrating clinical, social and emotional outcomes into their thinking on corporate strategy. Vittitow told me in his new role he wants to position Civitas regional and community leaders to “thrive, not just comply” with regulatory backdrops in the states they operate in, retooling staff priorities in order to achieve those wellness-first goals.

The company formed a business intelligence team that pulls data from multiple systems to track the daily lived experience of older adults in Civitas communities, expanding beyond assessments and medication records to understand how communities provide a wellness-focused senior living experience. This includes monitoring activity participation, frequency of family or friend visits and dining participation with the end goal of using data to “proactively address loneliness, social isolation and wellness,” Vittitow told me. An example of this shift already underway for Civitas is the company’s “My Special Friend” program that has community department heads intentionally visiting residents who rarely leave their apartments and will eventually be tracked through a “loneliness meter” that is currently in development to spur social connections between staff and residents.

This commitment by Vittitow to understand staff needs and prioritize community wellness dovetails seamlessly with this “player-coach” prototype I am seeing emerge across the industry as a versatile leader able to understand all levels of a company’s organizational chart.

For Taylor-Roberts, the wellness and well-being of Harmony residents is a “purpose, not just a clinical status,” and she aims to help residents “thrive, not just exist” while they live in Harmony communities. Her experiences at the community level were shaped by community leaders who were intentional about the time they spent with residents to make their experiences more meaningful.

Taylor-Roberts told me she is proud of Harmony’s deep partnerships with home health, hospice, pharmacy and ties to physician groups that meet biweekly to coordinate care plans so residents can age in place and have an improved quality of life.

These priorities seem like common sense, but they are harder to achieve than simply by speaking them into existence. If community teams feel valued and supported, they in turn will foster conditions for residents to thrive, and as Taylor-Roberts told me, well-being must start with staff support as much as it does with resident needs.

Being a wellness-first operator must be more than a sign in a staff break room and become an operating thesis that redefines what metrics matter and how CEOs spend their time creating plans that ease the burden on community-level leadership.

New leaders embrace technology and AI

Both Vittitow and Taylor-Roberts are bullish on technology, but both told me that these initiatives must free up time for community staff, not consume it, and these efforts must be rolled out with the community’s ability to make changes while still chasing improved margins and resident satisfaction.

At Civitas, Vittitow recalls the company’s early days of scrappy innovation, learning how to use systems on the fly and learning tactics as the company grew. Now the company prides itself on trending and tracking technology and innovation “very quickly,” Vittitow told me. That has translated into Civitas creating a business intelligence team that aggregates resident and operational data to support the company’s emphasis on its “thrive, don’t just comply” framework. Today the company is exploring tools across departments, from monitoring resident satisfaction to food and beverage innovations like multiple dining venues to add more choice into the daily experience of Civitas senior living residents.

This focus on innovation, Vittitow told me, is to allow communities and departments to “understand each other’s needs,” which allows Civitas to implement technology faster and in a more targeted manner than in the past.

Taylor-Roberts said her first task before signing up for new tech initiatives is to ensure communities are using “all the bells and whistles” of existing systems before adding more. She sees promise in the future of virtual reality (VR) headsets to allow enrichment and programming in assisted living and memory care to help residents achieve bucket list experiences later in life. Taylor-Roberts said she sees the need for operators to “gamify performance” with a points-based system with rewards that ultimately lead to more staff adopting new tools.

In 2026, CEOs in senior living will be judged less on whether they use AI and more so on whether they choose the right use cases, properly pace rollouts and tie technology adoption back to core goals of improving workforce challenges and supporting wellness.

To achieve these goals, I believe senior living companies must find their “player-coach” to understand frontline dynamics while making companywide decisions.

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