Industry Not Getting Smaller: How Senior Living Operators Build Leadership Teams For The Future

As a new generation of older adults entering the senior living market, operators are cultivating a new generation of leaders to serve them.

For years, senior living operators have sought to turn current workers into tomorrow’s leaders. That effort continues in 2026 as staffing remains among the toughest, and also most important, parts of senior living operations.

“We have been very focused on trying to find our next group of leaders, whether it’s internal department heads or regional staff,” Frontier CEO Greg Roderick told Senior Housing News. “We really try to look internally, if at all possible.”

Leadership training is in demand among staff at Vancouver, British Columbia-based Optima Living and frontline staff are looking to advance through community leadership all the way up to regional and executive leadership roles. The company also has created a mentoring program for staff who want to change the direction of their careers, such as a frontline caregiver wanting to shift their role into sales.

The strategy is referred to as “Optima waybound,” and includes a series of initiatives meant to meet recognition and professional development from the frontline all the way to senior leadership. It also looks at success stories from outside the senior living industry, such as meeting with Amazon product managers to learn new ways of recognizing and approving company-wide initiatives.

Louisville, Kentucky-based Atria Senior Living is taking a “hire to retire” mentality with its staff, according to Meg Pletcher, senior vice president of human resources. The company has spent the last four years developing a variety of leadership training programs across all staffing levels, and is about to roll out a new one, internally referred to as “Lead.” The program centers on succession planning for when the operator’s current generation of executives retire.

While operators prefer training up from within, they still must hire from outside their organizations to fill positions across the spectrum of positions available. According to Roderick, around half the total positions filled across Frontier’s 32 communities come from outside of the company, and two full-time recruiters work to fill the openings.

And there is always a risk of staff leaving after going through leadership development. To Roderick, however, when that happens it only benefits the industry at large.

“I have several past executive directors and regionals who have today become presidents and CEOs and owners of their own companies,” he said. “It’s been an absolute pleasure watching people grow, expand and move up.”

What it takes to lead

Optima has taken a rapid approach to leadership development in order to keep up with the needs of the company, which has acquired communities and grown at a rate of roughly 50% per year. That rate of growth reinforces the need for training and leadership hires.

“There’s a ton of new blood that’s always coming into the organization that allows us to avoid a sense of being stagnant,” Kassam said. “It enables that flow of human capacity and thinking to really come into the organization.”

Optima breaks down its waybound initiatives into three tracks to recognize and develop staff. For frontline staff and caretakers, the operator offers “Shining Star,” an initiative that recognizes an individual once a month in each community that’s gone above and beyond and encourages peer to peer efforts.

There is also the “Rising Star” program, dedicated more for the middle management level, which acts as an in-house professional development program. The 12-month program puts mid-level employees on the track to hone their skills and become either a general manager or the executive director of a community. Sessions last around two hours per week and have a total of 18 required sessions to attend.

Across Optima’s 40 communities, around 250 staff are eligible for the program. On its initial launch, there were around 150 applicants, with up to 15 selected to participate.

The third waybound initiative, “Illuminate,” focuses on peer to peer mentorship. Staff can submit requests to leadership about where they would like to receive training, and are paired with an appropriate coworker.

“This allows us to retain good quality people, but do it under mentorship or coaching,” Kassam said.

Dallas-based Sonida Senior Living focuses on building up executive directors across the company, particularly within the first 90 days of their tenure. The operator has developed a “more structured onboarding experience that provides clarity, consistency and support from day one,” according to CEO Brandon Ribar.

That approach includes a sequenced onboarding roadmap, combining online learning, mentor support, in-person training and an executive director training conference. Mentor support has experienced leaders across Sonida’s company provide guidance and support for those in training, and those receiving training receive audit scores throughout the process to better target training where it is needed, Ribar said.

“Overall, the focus is on practical, applied learning and support, not just completing training, but building confidence and capability,” Ribar told SHN.

Atria’s approach revolves around constant training, particularly for those who are serious about taking on leadership roles, with different programming levels catered to increasing requirements as staff climb the ranks. The company’s “Rising Leaders” program is open to anybody in the company that is interested in taking on a leadership role or change career paths; “Rise” is for a select, smaller cohort ranging from 12-20 people who spend a full day per month for seven months focusing on leadership competencies; and the new “Lead” program, set to roll out in the coming months, will be a year-long program with a capstone project meant to solve “a real business problem that Atria has identified,” according to Pletcher.

“Those are people that we have said, like, ‘Hey, when the rest of us retire, this is who’s going to be running this company.’ So we need to start prepping them now and getting them very highly skilled in the competencies that we see in some of those higher level positions,” Pletcher said.

Frontier uses its professional development as an additional incentive to retain staff, and conducts regular training sessions throughout the year. In 2025, the company hosted 371 training sessions in its Dallas corporate office for just about every department. According to Roderick, Frontier also encourages frontline staff to get licensed and attend the training sessions. Staff are regularly encouraged to get involved in smaller leadership roles by joining committees within their communities.

Not only does the process prepare staff for taking on more roles, it also helps with retention.

“If they get an offer for, you know, 50 cents an hour or so more, and move to another building blocks away, it does make them hesitate for a second to think … I’m actually part of something a little bit bigger,” Roderick said.

Building from within, benefitting the industry

Both Optima and Frontier believe that building leaders up from within is preferred to hiring from outside of the company, even when it is deemed necessary to keep up with the company’s rate of growth.

However, there will still be times when trained leaders will still leave the company. Despite the time, energy and resources dedicated to their development, these companies don’t see it as a negative, it can only benefit the industry as a whole.

“If you take a look at hospitality or tech, people say that about McDonald’s. They say it about Amazon, Apple and Microsoft,” Kassam said. “We take the same lens that if at the end of the day, they start to talk about the fact that if you’re an Optima leader, then you don’t need much training, you’re coming in with a real strong aptitude and way of doing things.”

When Atria hires from outside the company, it’s usually for upper level leadership roles. When that happens, it’s beneficial to get a fresh perspective.

“Our preference would be to hire from within if we’ve got the talent, and that’s the point of building these folks out and making sure that they’ve got some skill level in the competencies that we have identified as being necessary,” Pletcher said.

Sonida takes a similar approach, according to Ribar, which focuses on balance. While internal development creates stability and continuity, external talent can introduce innovation and fresh thinking, he said.

The resources put into leadership development also have a side effect helping with reputation building amongst peers, Kassam added, resulting in drawing in both better potential candidates and residents.

Given the time and resources spent building up leaders, operators see it as beneficial to the industry at large, with Ribar stating better trained leaders create more consistent operations, stronger teams, and improved resident outcomes, which ultimately raises expectations across the board.

Realistically, according to Pletcher, the higher up an employee goes, the fewer spots for advancement there are.

“You have to get comfortable with doing good work that benefits everyone in senior living, because you are equipping that person who may go elsewhere with it,” Pletcher said. “Taking all of that experience and training to their next gig is going to benefit that organization. At the end of the day, good comes to good.”

Roderick added it becomes a point of pride seeing former leaders at Frontier take what they learned at the company and continue to grow, and the industry is going to need more new leaders than ever before.

“This industry is not going to get smaller, it’s only going to get bigger. So we need more leaders. We need more ambition,” Roderick said. “We need more people that have really caught the bug of wanting to see this industry expand, grow and serve more seniors, because there’s going to be a massive number of people coming in to live in these buildings.”

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