Legend Senior Living is dedicated to providing the highest standards of quality of service, environment, and care to residents and their families, while providing value and accountability to all of our stakeholders.We work to serve the needs of the whole person, physical, mental, and spiritual. We are committed to providing a positive, reinforcing work environment that recognizes the value of all staff, and fosters individual growth and improvement.
This mission statement has been pounded into my head since I started working for Legend Senior Living. I’m often regaled with tales of the times when Mr. Tim Buchanan, founder and CEO of LSL, has given away crisp $100 bills to associates who could recite it. I’ve heard often that there is no excuse for a management team member to be unable to recite the Mission Statement from memory.
It’s been my experience with most companies that the mission statement is given some lip service during a short orientation, then largelyforgotten when real life starts. I thought this might be different at LSL. Sadly, no.
“Legend Senior Living is dedicated to providing the highest standards of quality of service, environment, and care to residents and their families, while providing value and accountability to all of our stakeholders.”
- This is interesting. You’d think with such acommitment to providing the highest standards of service, that LSL would be ready and willing to ensure the best service-givers are in LSL communities.Yet, when the company barely pays a living wage and offers the most meager of associate benefits, how can they be expected to attract talent and passion in acompetitive marketplace?
- Quality of environment is a lovely thought, and certainly LSL has lovely communities. Yet, responses from the home office on capital expenditures are slow and confusing. There is no definitive chain of commandfor requests, leaving directors at a loss about who to ask for particular needs, and often, the responsibility for fulfillment is passed from one head to another. Simple decisions are taken out of the hands of directors, yet, when the need for accountability come for a project not being completed timely, the director is most often left holding the bag.
- Value and accountability to our stakeholders – it’s hard to understand what this means to LSL. Who are the stakeholders? Certainly not the associates, because there is no accountability for the front line staff as to the decisions being made that affect their lives. Could the stakeholders be the management teams then? No, accountability only goes onedirection for those about the business of running the LSL communities every day – when things are good, do more; when things are bad, you’re failing. Certainly then, the stakeholders must be counted among the residents and families who pay to live at LSL communities – how then, can it be explained that rent increases every single year by hundreds of dollars, yet the adjustments to things like food cost, maintenance and repairs, and staffing wages are incremental and marginal? You’d think in their desire for accountability that LSL would be glad to explain these disparate accountings to their customers, however, it’s left to the directors and management teams to field these questions and concerns.
“We work to serve the needs of the whole person, physical,mental, spiritual.”
- The front line staff at LSL communities are among the best in the business. They work tirelessly every day with endless passion to serve the needs of their residents. It is sad, therefore, to see them underpaid and bereft of simple, affordable healthcare benefits when the company continuously turns huge profits and boasts incredible margins.
Which brings me to the last piece of the LSL MissionStatement:
“We are committed to providing a positive, reinforcing work environment that recognizes the value of all staff and fosters individual growth and improvement.”
- A positive, reinforcing work environment seems like a straightforward concept, doesn’t it? Yet, consistently, divisional team members can be overheard demeaning community leadership to other associates, openly discussing their disapproval of leadership in other communities, and jumping over the heads of community leadership to correct and coach front line associates in front of their supervisors.
- Rather than jumping at opportunities to praise and congratulate successful community leadership, divisional and home office leadership instead seek out opportunities to point out mistakes, make assumptions without gathering sufficient facts, and fail to support ongoing efforts to improve and succeed.
- Every company likes to boast about their desire to “promote from within”, and you’d think that a relatively small organization like Legend Senior Living would be eager to live out this mantra, especially when placing it so prominently in their mission statement. However, they consistently show patterns of hiring from outside, bypassing successful and qualified internal candidates. They fail in every way to provide ongoing education and professional growth opportunities for their community management teams. Instead of providing actual professional development, they substitute their own opinions at regional conferences under the guise of “motivation”. They show themselves too paranoid and insecure when presented by ideas from others that contradict their way of doing things, and when they do see an idea that they think has merit, they have no problem in presenting it as their own.
Legend Senior Living is a successful, growing company that fuels itself with the effort, compassion, and dedication of those doing the work on the ground for its own gain and greedy ends. Their Mission Statement is sound, well-intentioned, and well-written. It’s just a shame that they do sucha horrible job of living it out.
