Future Leader: Madisen Medley, Vice President Of Business Development, Merrill Gardens

Madisen Medley, Vice President of Business Development at Merrill Gardens, has been named to the Future Leaders Class of 2026 by Senior Housing News.

To become a Future Leader, an individual is nominated by their peers. The candidate must be a high-performing employee who is 40 years of age or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for older adults and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.

Medley sat down with Senior Housing News to share what drew her to the senior housing & senior living industry, the biggest leadership lessons she has learned, her thoughts on the future of senior housing & senior living, and much more. To learn more about the Future Leaders Awards program, visit https://futureleaders.wtwhmedia.com/.

SHN: What drew you to the senior housing & senior living industry?

Medley: My first real introduction to senior housing happened in high school through a volunteer program called Social Involvement Through Education and Service (SITES). Twice a week, I volunteered at an adult day care that specialized in dementia care. At 17, it was honestly intimidating. I was working with people who didn’t know who I was from one visit to the next. My grandparents were in great health, so I had very little frame of reference for what I was walking into.

But I have such vivid memories from my time with the residents. One day, someone put on a record, old music playing in the room, and a resident, who moments before had seemed so distant, was suddenly present. This woman was singing along, word for word. I remember going over to her and asking her, “Do you know this song?” She looked at me and said, “Honey, everybody knows this song.”

It sounds simple, but that moment has stayed with me. The connection between music and memory, between something I experience every day and a disease I barely understood. I’ve talked about it in graduate school applications as well as industry conversations. And honestly, it still makes me emotional.

From there, I went all in. I graduated with a double major in long-term care and healthcare administration, a minor in business, and a certificate in gerontology. I did multiple internships in rural geriatric services and SNFs, and I kept coming back to this space. After college, I worked briefly at the Cleveland Clinic and realized quickly that I missed the direct line to the people being served.

A neighbor of mine knew someone in senior housing based in Seattle, a gentleman overseeing the international division of Leisure Care, which was launching a new division and had an analyst role open. I interviewed, they took a chance on me, I moved across the country, and started a career I’ve never looked back on.

What surprised me most was discovering the private pay senior living world. Everything I had studied was rooted in the public side: skilled nursing, state regulations, Medicare, and Medicaid. Private pay senior living wasn’t even a concept that came up in my formal education. And what I found was a world where people opted in. They were choosing a lifestyle of engagement, community, and connection. Not a place they were resigned to, but a place they wanted to be. That distinction, between a place where you go to decline and a place where you go to thrive, is at the heart of what I believe our industry is really about. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve stayed.

SHN: How would you describe your leadership style, and how has it changed over time?

Medley: If you had asked me this question earlier in my career, I’m not sure I would have had a very good answer.

When I started out, I had just graduated and was trying to find my footing in an industry I had studied but didn’t yet fully understand. I was a hard worker, that’s always been true, but my thinking was more singular. I believed there was usually one right way to approach a problem, and I leaned into that pretty hard. What I’ve learned over time is that the most important skill in this industry is learning how to hold multiple perspectives at once and find the path forward through them, not around them.

I recently asked a colleague how she would describe my leadership style, because I think it’s always more honest coming from someone who works with you than from yourself. She said: direct, adaptable, hands-on but not a micromanager, and very aware, meaning I stay connected across different parts of an organization rather than operating in a silo. That resonated with me. 

I do take a 360-degree view. I try to understand a problem or opportunity from every angle before I move, and my role demands that, because on any given day I might be working with C-suite executives, general managers, sales directors, and construction teams. That range is actually my favorite thing about what I do.

The deeper evolution, though, has been about learning from the leaders around me. Over the course of my career, there have been people I wanted to grow up and become, people I’ve watched closely and learned from by observation, and people who have coached me directly. You take the pieces that resonate with you and build your own approach from there. I’m still building.

SHN: What is the biggest leadership lesson you’ve learned while serving the senior housing & senior living industry?

Medley: Professional vulnerability.

It sounds counterintuitive, especially as you advance in your career and people start to look to you as an expert, but I’ve come to believe it’s one of the most important skills a leader can develop, and this industry, maybe more than any other, has taught me that.

Senior housing sits at the intersection of real estate, healthcare, operations, hospitality, capital markets, policy, and technology. No one is a complete expert across all of it. And the way our industry is structured, with owners, operators, investors, lenders, nonprofits, and vendors all at the table, we have to work symbiotically. The best outcomes don’t come from the person in the room who has all the answers. They come from the person who knows how to ask the right questions and bring the right people together.

What I’ve learned is how to be in a room where I’m still learning something, not by pretending to know more than I do, but by coming in with a foundation, asking questions with intention, and staying genuinely open. That’s a skill I first started developing in graduate school, where you’re constantly put in situations outside your area of expertise and expected to contribute anyway. It prepared me well. 

Being professionally vulnerable doesn’t mean being unprepared.  It means being honest about where your edge is and having the confidence to operate right at that edge anyway.

SHN: In one word, how would you describe the senior housing & senior living industry and why?

Medley: Energizing.

I was actually asked a version of this question recently, but with three words instead of one. I chose ever-changing, energizing, and intuition. But if I have to pick just one, it’s energizing, because it captures both the industry and my relationship with it.

I chose this career early and deliberately, and after more than a decade, I’m still motivated by it every single day. Part of that comes from the people I work with across ownership groups, my company, operators, lenders, and vendors. There’s a genuine drive in this industry to get it right. Part of it comes from the scale of what’s ahead: the demographic tailwinds from the baby boomer generation represent one of the most significant opportunities in senior housing, and I feel fortunate to be building my career in the middle of that moment.

But honestly, the thing that energizes me most is the residents themselves. Anytime I get back into a community, which is never as often as I’d like given the nature of my role, it reminds me of why all of it matters. Every time I’m with a resident, I learn something new about how they engage with the environment we’re building for them, the programs we’re creating, and the community we’re trying to foster. That never gets old. And it keeps me honest about what we’re actually here to do.

SHN: What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges currently facing the senior housing & senior living industry?

Medley: I’d say the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity are actually the same thing: serving the future resident.

On the challenge side, cost is real and it’s pressing, not just for residents and their families, but for operators trying to run sustainable businesses. As Medicaid and Social Security face continued pressure, and as the cost of staffing and delivering high-quality care continues to rise, we know that the people who need senior housing most may be the ones least able to afford it. And in private pay senior living, while we’re very much in a hospitality-oriented space, we are also care providers. The expectation for high-touch, high-quality care is only going to grow. Balancing that with financial sustainability is one of the defining challenges of our time.

But looking further out, beyond the tailwinds of the baby boomer generation, which are real and significant, I find myself asking what comes next. The demographic wave will crest. What does our industry look like on the other side of it? That’s a question I’m starting to think about more seriously, and it shapes how I think about what we’re building today.

The opportunity, though, is just as significant. The future resident is still figuring out what they want. This is a generation that has Amazon Prime delivering in three hours, with AI at their fingertips, and with more access to information and convenience than any generation before them. Will they want technology woven into every part of their living experience? Or will they crave something simpler?

My instinct, informed by watching what happened during COVID, when people moved to be closer to nature and closer to family and craved the human connection that was suddenly taken away, is that the future resident is going to want community above all else. The pandemic reminded us that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. 

So the opportunity for our industry is to be ready for that. Not just with the right physical environments, but with the right programming, the right staffing models, and the right approach to meeting people where they are, whether that’s in a senior living community or in the home they’re choosing to stay in. Technology may be how we deliver it, but human connection will be what we deliver.

SHN: If you had a crystal ball, what do you think will impact the senior housing & senior living industry over the next 5-10 years?

Medley: I think the most honest and obvious answer is that the decisions we’re making today will shape the next decade more than anything else.

Right now, we’re putting shovels in the ground on projects with three-year construction timelines. We’re building operational platforms and capital structures for a resident profile that is still evolving. That requires a kind of disciplined flexibility that our industry doesn’t always talk about, building for what we know is coming while staying adaptive enough to respond to what we can’t fully predict yet.

The baby boomer wave is undeniable. Virtually every major decision in senior housing right now, how we build, how we staff, what technology we invest in, and what programming looks like, is shaped by that demographic reality. And the tailwinds are real. But I’m also starting to think about what happens after the peak. Will we face oversupply? What does the cohort behind the boomers look like, and will they want the same things? These are questions worth asking.

On the operator side, I think about sustainability a lot. Capital is entering our space at a pace we haven’t seen before, which is exciting, but operators are in shorter supply. The ones who are successful know why: they stick with what they know and do it exceptionally well. As the customer evolves, operators will have to evolve too, and that balance between staying true to your core competency and adapting to a new customer is going to be a tension point.

What gives me the most hope is the level of collaboration I’m seeing across stakeholder groups, including owners, operators, lenders, vendors, nonprofits, and policymakers. More than ever before, there are people across every part of this ecosystem genuinely trying to solve the hard problems together.

SHN: In your opinion, what qualities must all Future Leaders possess?

Medley: First, a commitment to continuous learning, and I mean that in the broadest possible sense. I mean a genuine posture of curiosity that you carry into every room you enter.

This industry rewards people who keep asking questions, who seek out perspectives outside their own expertise, and who are willing to step into unfamiliar territory and do the work. I’ve seen this be the differentiating quality in the leaders I most admire. The ones who are still growing, still learning, and still curious are the ones driving this industry forward.

The second quality is a sense of levity. The ability to stay solution-focused when things go wrong, to not take yourself so seriously that you can’t adapt, and to bring some lightness to a room that keeps people moving forward. 

In an industry that deals with some of the most real human experiences, aging, memory loss, and the end of life, the leaders who can hold both the hardship and the humor of our work are the ones people want to follow. They’re the ones who build teams that last.

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