Accountability Without Leverage: Why Trust Is A Cornerstone Of Senior Living Turnarounds

This story is part of your SHN+ subscription

Many operators have tried, but not all have succeeded turning around communities. Companies taking on these deals in 2026 say they’re harder than they look.

A recent blog post from Nick Gesue, who was CEO of NewPoint Capital from 2024 until it changed hands for $425 million in 2025, laid out the big challenge at hand: New operators or owners turning around a business often have “responsibility without leverage.”

“You’re accountable for outcomes, but you don’t yet have the trust, the operational control, or the strategic buy-in to actually drive those outcomes,” he wrote. “The job, in those first weeks and months, is to build leverage as fast as possible. That’s the work. Everything else is downstream.”

To gain leverage, operators of these communities must first win trust, operational control and strategic buy-in, usually in that order, he wrote. But “most leaders get it backward.”

“They before they have the operational systems to execute it, or they try to change systems before they have the trust to make it stick,” he wrote.

While Gesue isn’t writing specifically about senior living turnarounds, his perspective no doubt will resonate — and holds valuable lessons — for leaders in the sector.

Turnarounds are on my mind in 2026, too. Earlier this year, I spoke with leaders of operators including 12 Oaks, Lifespark and Sunrise Senior Living, who echo Gesue’s sentiments. To those companies, a good turnaround hinges on communication and getting buy-in from staff – in other words, leaning on trust as a tool to make a turnaround “stick.”

The act of turning around a struggling community isn’t just on my mind, either. Across the senior living industry, operators are in 2026 – and often with larger partners – taking on communities that need at least some operational improvement. I agree with Gesue and the leaders of these operating companies that winning trust is the first step to a good turnaround. But winning trust is not easy, either. Senior living operators can’t just buy it, they must earn it.

In this members-only SHN+ Update, I analyze our recent coverage on turnaround strategies and share the following takeaways:

• Why winning trust should be any turnaround operator’s first goal
• What helps and hurts trust
• Current strategies of turnaround operators

How to earn trust and what ‘kills’ it

As Gesue wrote, trust should be the first goal of any company’s turnaround. He drew from his own experience to arrive at that conclusion. In 2024, he became CEO of NewPoint while it was still locked in a “challenging economic cycle.”

“I walked into the CEO role on a Monday in mid-2024. I had no relationships at the company,” he wrote. “The prior CEO had been abruptly let go just days before. There was no transition plan. No warm welcome. Just a mandate from the ownership group that hired me: turn this around.”

Gesue wrote he reduced the company’s headcount by 18% and rebuilt its executive team, in the process reviving morale.

“This experience crystallized something I’d been learning across 25 years of building, merging, and leading companies: there’s a pattern to how you gain traction fast in a new leadership role,” Gesue wrote.

An abrupt beginning with no warm welcome, a performance mandate from an owner, a need to quickly gain traction and show results – these are all themes that senior living operators involved in turnarounds know all too well.

Gesue imagines turnaround management as a “leverage sequence”: trust is the fulcrum, clarity extends the lever and setting clear expectations make the lever rigid.

“In practice, these three elements reinforce each other,” he wrote in another blog post. “Strong systems surface the data that enables clarity. A disciplined meeting cadence creates the forum where trust is built. Clear expectations make transparency possible.”

Translating that idea to senior living, a turnaround operator must get buy-in, share information and set clear expectations about what they expect from staff for a turnaround to be successful.

I think many senior living operators see it that way, too, at least based on my recent conversations with them. 12 Oaks, Sunrise and Lifespark all consider winning trust of frontline workers to be a critical goal to any turnaround. All three operators solicit feedback from their new workers and residents through surveys and town halls in an effort to trim turnover of employees during the early days of a turnaround.

If trust and transparency are so important, why do so many operators get it wrong? In his recent book on turnarounds, Onelife Senior Living CEO Dan Williams wrote that operators must “actually act on the feedback” they receive, not just pay lip service.

“Nothing kills trust faster than asking for input and doing nothing with it,” Williams wrote.

Gesue also wrote operators must “live” what they say.

“If your actions contradict the priorities, no amount of repetition will make them stick and trust erodes,” he wrote. “But when what you do and what you say are consistent, people notice. They follow.”

Williams wrote that a successful turnaround in senior living also hinges on transparency and acknowledging current reality – “not where you were five years ago when you had a waiting list, not where you wish you were in some parallel universe where staffing is easy and families aren’t on Google.”

“Building a plan that fixes your specific problems while positioning you for growth requires dealing with actual reality, not the version that makes you feel better,” Williams wrote.

Senior living operators might assume that higher pay is a cornerstone of reducing turnover and gaining buy-in from employees – not so, Williams said. In fact, “the communities winning the talent war aren’t always the ones paying the most. They’re the ones creating places people actually want to work,” he wrote.

“The truth is: good pay gets people in the door. What keeps them is meaningful work, supportive leadership, room to grow, and knowing they matter,” Williams wrote.

Operators embrace communication

In recent conversations with leaders of senior living operators, I learned that many are using communication and transparency as tools in turnarounds.

For instance, “listening and responsiveness are embedded throughout the transition process” for Sunrise Senior Living.

“Early town halls and small-group discussions create space for open dialogue, while ongoing engagement tools and data-driven insights allow leaders to identify issues quickly and course-correct in real time,” Adam Heffron, vice president of field operations at Sunrise, told me.

Likewise, 12 Oaks Senior Living CEO Greg Puklicz takes a personal role in turnarounds by holding meetings and informing staff what the road ahead will entail.

When senior living operator Lifespark comes into a new community, it interviews the staff in order to rehire most, but not always all of them. By doing so, it ensures there is “strong leadership that is bought into doing it differently and better,” according to Chief Operating Officer Matt Kinne.

From these and multiple other examples, it’s clear that operators believe trust and communication is key to successful turnarounds. To me, that bodes well for the future of senior living as owners rearrange portfolios into regional platforms with specialized operators.

Some communities have passed from operator to operator while struggling for years. The senior living industry’s current level of demand means that turnaround operators have a new chance to get those communities into good shape, but clearly not without the trust and buy-in of the people actually doing the work day in and day out.

The post Accountability Without Leverage: Why Trust is a Cornerstone of Senior Living Turnarounds appeared first on Senior Housing News.