Looking back on their careers, home-based care leaders find the most important lessons involve a personal touch.
Five industry leaders described to Home Health Care News the key lessons they wish they could impart to their younger selves before stepping into senior leadership. Prioritizing the company’s people and culture emerged as a common theme, though other advice included being more flexible with people, acknowledging the roles of compassion and accountability and connecting with team members to help align better with the company’s mission.
For instance, company culture matters more than compensation, said Monica Cutia, vice president of clinical operations at HealthView.
“Something else I would tell myself is: don’t chase the money,” Cutia told HHCN.
Cutia joined HealthView in 2022 after previously serving as a nurse herself. Nurses are nomadic, she said, and will often pursue opportunities based on what pays better.
“We could all probably go somewhere else, make way more money,” Cutia told HHCN. ‘But would we have the same culture? Would we have the same feeling of growth? 100% we would not.”
What matters more than money is the people within an organization that urge you to become better, she said. Part of that means urging others to become better as well, which requires entangling compassion with accountability.
“You can care about somebody, you can want the best for them, but you still have to hold them accountable to certain requirements or goals,” Cutia said. “If they can’t meet that either clinically or leadership-wise, there has to be some action.”
HealthView provides home health, palliative and hospice services in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties in southern California.
Sometimes the most valuable education happens in the field. Looking back, LiveWell Partners founder and Chief Development Officer Jason Growe would urge his younger self to prioritize frontline ride-alongs.
“I’ve always enjoyed getting in the car with a clinician for a half-day or a day and riding along and seeing the patients, going out with someone who’s on our sales team and seeing some of their accounts that they call on,” Growe told HHCN.
Growe said he learns from everyone he rides along with, whether they’re team members, clinicians, account executives or referral partners. The trips also help him realign with the company’s goals.
“It also just helps me reconnect to the mission of what we’re doing,” Growe said. “The work is always fun if you’re showing up every day and working with a company whose mission you believe in.”
LiveWell Partners, based in St. Louis, Missouri, is a network of home healthcare providers offering services in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas and Michigan.
Working with people better comprised another key lesson for senior leadership from Bryan Dylewski. He is the founder and CEO of Solenvia, a non-medical home care agency serving older adults in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
“A lot of business is a people relationship, and so having good people is something that’s real important. Businesses have processes, and we train people to process. But I think I would be more open to the idea that maybe there’s more ways of doing things than the way I do it.”
Dylewski had to learn to give people more flexibility and, if a business model is working, to let it work.
“I understand the model, the concept, the process,” Dylewski told HHCN. “Communicate that to your staff, and just let them implement that.”
Setting expectations and hiring the right team
While communication is key to Dylewski’s management structure, receiving feedback, especially harsher feedback, was something HealthView’s CEO Steven Gonzalez had to adjust to. He told HHCN that senior leadership is much harder and lonelier than it looks.
“If I was to tell my younger self, I would probably just prepare him for that,” he told HHCN. “You’re going to be let down.”
Gonzalez learned that a leader must extend trust first if they expect to receive it in return. He also learned to keep expectations of others reasonable, so that they can more easily surpass them.
For Kimberly Greenberg, director of rehabilitation and home health agencies at Innovive Health, surrounding herself with the right people shapes not only the organization’s culture, but her own ability to lead.
“It’s really the people that you surround yourself with and the people that work with you and work for you that really are the ones that make you able to be the type of leader that you are,” Greenberg said.
Medford, Massachusetts-based Innovive Health provides home health care for individuals with complex behavioral conditions in Massachusetts, Colorado and Iowa.
Greenberg said that her philosophy is to emphasize that everyone in her organization, whether they are a vice president or an entry-level worker, provides important contributions.
“When employees know that the work that they’re doing is good work and how they’re helping the greater team, it really just brings so much intrinsic motivation for the work, and it makes my job as a leader very easy,” Greenberg said.