You don’t own the community you lead
I took a call late one evening this week. Morning in the UK, dark outside my window in Brisbane. Suzanne is the marketing lead for a new seniors living community over there. Show homes don't open until spring next year. The village doesn't exist yet. She'd booked a demo, and for the first twenty minutes that's what we did. Branding, app views, whether we could put prospects on the app once they've paid a deposit. Then she stopped asking about features. How do you set the tone of a community before a single person has moved in? How do you stop it going cliquey? She's seen that happen in other villages and she doesn't want to end up dealing with it here.
Then she told me why she cares. Alongside the marketing role, she's a bereavement counsellor. She sits with people who've lost partners and friends. She talked about how badly that part of life gets handled, and the question she hears underneath it. What have you actually got to look forward to?
Then she caught herself and said it probably sounds a bit fluffy. It's not fluffy. It's the whole thing. And I realised I was talking to somebody whose reasons for being in this sector were as personal as mine. So let me tell you where mine came from, because it took me twenty years and two wrong turns to work out what I actually believe.
What I thought my job was
My first job was as a PE teacher at a Catholic school in Charters Towers, in North Queensland. Half of it was boarding duties. When it was my turn I put fifty grade eight to ten boys to bed. One big open dorm, four boys to a quadrant of bunks, and the walls between each section didn't go all the way to the roof. If one kid was talking at one end of the building you could hear him at the other. That was the job.
One afternoon after a game of rugby, as you do, I was sitting out on the oval with a few of them and they started talking. Really talking. What was going on at home, what they were worried about, the stuff they couldn't say to their parents. I listened, said what I could, and watched them lift. You could see it happen in front of you.
I walked back to the staff house that night, the one on site for the boarding staff, having decided something. I'd rather be the person having that conversation than the person teaching a kid to throw a ball. So I left teaching and became a youth worker.
That decision was right. My reason for it was only half right, and it took me years to notice.
Because what I thought I'd learned on that oval was that my job was to give young people something they didn't have. Attention, encouragement, a bit of hard-won advice. All of it running one way, from me to them.
What I got wrong
In my late twenties I had an idea I couldn't shake. Data projectors were just starting to turn up in schools and churches, and the stories I cared about weren't reaching a generation that was growing up on screens. So I decided to bring them to life as short animated clips, two for every week of the lectionary.
I had very little idea how to do any of that.
So I gathered up a group of young people and young adults, and to kick things off we all went and stayed at a house together for a weekend. I laid out the vision, what these stories could look like if somebody actually brought them to life, and then I told them the truth. I couldn't do it myself.
That weekend is when it started to move, and it moved because they picked up the parts they were good at. The ones who were into music took the audio. The artistic ones started on the graphics. The writers and storytellers went at the scripts. Somebody who was good at organising built the project plan. We all pitched in to cook.
Nobody handed those jobs out. They claimed them.
Over the next two years real skill and expertise came out of that group, which brought its own problems, because then we had to do the unglamorous part. Quality control. Giving each other feedback. Shaping it until it was good enough that somebody would actually want to use it. We road tested it on a friendly audience first. In the end we made 330 clips and they went out to around 300 schools and churches, and into five countries.
This is the point. Those young people didn't thrive because of a good conversation on an oval. They thrived because it was theirs. If they didn't turn up, their piece didn't get made, and everybody knew whose piece it was.
I'd spent years trying to give young people something. What actually changed them was being handed something that was theirs to carry.
And here's what I've only worked out much later. The same thing happened to me.
Part way into that second year we'd released the first product and schools and churches were buying it, but we were running out of money. I had no real experience in sales or marketing, I was well out of my depth, and I felt like a failure. I did have an idea, but it meant risking more money and I didn't feel like I had permission to. So I went to one of the leaders in the organisation and asked them, in effect, to hand the responsibility back to me and let me have a go at it.
They did. I met up with a youth worker mate of mine who introduced me to a regional Catholic education leader, we did a product demo, and that one introduction opened up Catholic schools up and down the east coast of Australia. Sales got back on track.
But the sale isn't what I took from that year. It's what being handed the responsibility did to me.
I was taking real risks by then with money I'd raised from people who believed in the vision. And I was carrying the hopes and the effort of a group of young people and young adults who'd poured themselves into something to tell stories that mattered to them. It had stopped being my idea a long time before that. It needed every ounce of me to have a chance, and there was no version of it where I let those people down with a half hearted go.
That's what owning something does to a person. It puts weight on you. And the weight is the point.
The woman on the sixth floor
Years later I was at Wesley Mission Queensland, which had built a retirement village that was basically a resort. Still is. I'd walk down from my end of the campus to grab a coffee from the cafe and there'd be residents swimming, playing bowls, at the pool table, line dancing, sitting around over morning tea having the best time. I remember thinking, well, this is fantastic. Sign me up.
But that's not the bit I still tell people about.
One of the residents up on the fifth or sixth floor, whenever she'd made too much dinner, would head off down the aisle to let people know she had extra if anyone wanted a meal. That was it. They looked out for each other like that.
Nobody scheduled it. It wasn't a program and no coordinator put it on a calendar, and no operator could have. She did it because those were her neighbours and that was her floor.
If you asked me today what a great village looks like, that's what I'd point at. Not the pool. A woman with leftovers, knocking on doors.
Helping out and owning the place aren't the same thing
Now, I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this argument is that our sector does everything for residents and leaves them sitting about like passengers. That's not what I see. I walk into plenty of villages where residents run the library, the men's shed, the gardening club, the Friday raffle, the welcome committee. Volunteering is alive and well and some operators are very good at organising it.
But helping out with a community and owning one are different things.
In most places, including a lot of the good ones, the organisation still holds the plan. We work out what the program is and residents fill the slots in it. They're contributing to our community. Ownership runs the other way. It's their community and we're the ones contributing to it.
So how do you tell which one you've got? Not by counting what residents do. A busy volunteer roster looks like ownership and often isn't. What separates the two is permission. A helper does the approved things. An owner does things nobody approved.
Three indicators I'd actually trust.
The first is what happens that nobody signed off on. Not how much residents do, but how much of it started with a resident deciding something rather than proposing it and waiting. If every new group and every new event has to be pitched and approved, you're running a permission economy, and everybody living in it knows the place isn't theirs.
The second is who deals with conflict, and this is the one I'd put money on. Where residents are helpers, they bring each other's behaviour to staff and expect staff to sort it out. Where they're owners, they deal with each other, sometimes badly, and the manager is the last resort rather than the first. It's also the honest answer to Suzanne's question about cliques, because a cliquey village is usually one where the staff have ended up as the police.
The third is who gets to a new arrival first. A welcome pack from the office, or a neighbour at the door with a meal. I've quoted a resident before who told me that when she moved in, somebody brought dinner over while the boxes were still going in, and that she does the same thing now for new people. That's ownership reproducing itself, which is about as strong as it gets.
If you want a number to watch, there is one. The share of what happens in your community that was started by a resident rather than by staff. Resident created posts, events and groups, against the total. I'd be careful about turning it into a KPI, because the moment you do, well meaning staff will start organising resident led activities, which is a contradiction in terms. But watched over a year it tells you a lot.
I hadn't put this together until I sat down to write this, but I look for exactly the same thing in my own business. When people on our team solve their own problems, take responsibility for making something better, fix the thing rather than flag it, we get stronger quickly. It's the difference between a business that improves itself and one that waits for me to improve it. I notice it as a feeling long before I can point at a number, and it's the same feeling I get walking into a village where the residents own the place.
None of this is a new idea. Jill Vitale-Aussem makes the case far better than I can in her book Disrupting the Status Quo of Senior Living, and reading it is what shifted residents from consumers to citizens in my own head years ago. I wrote about that here in 2023 and called it the future of aged care. What I'd add now is that citizenship isn't a status you grant somebody. It shows up in what they're allowed to decide.
The framework I keep coming back to on all of this is still McMillan and Chavis, back in 1986, who described a psychological sense of community as having four parts: membership, influence, integration and fulfilment of needs, and shared emotional connection.
The one I used to skate over is influence, and they're quite specific about it. It runs in both directions. The community shapes its members and the members shape the community, and it's that back and forth that tells people they matter to each other. Which means having a say in what the community does and how it runs isn't a nice extra you get to once the important things are sorted. It's structural.
I wrote a few years ago that in the best communities I visit, the people inside feel like they own the place, they're not passive, and their ideas and needs actually change things. I stand by every word of that. What I didn't say clearly enough is that you can't get there by handing out jobs. You get there by handing over decisions.
Being needed is what makes that ownership real rather than decorative. A say in things with nothing depending on you is a consultation. Something depending on you that you had no say in is a roster. It's the two together that makes somebody an owner.
Get that wrong and what you've built is a very nice hotel. Everything provided, nothing theirs.
The fair objection to all this is that people have worked their whole lives, they've earned a rest, and asking them to carry something is asking a lot. True. Some residents will want nothing to do with it, and nobody should be press ganged into running the book club. But if you build a community where carrying something isn't even on offer, you've made that decision on behalf of everybody, including the ones who would have said yes.
What handing over decisions costs you
In that 2023 article I used the word democracy. I still would. What I didn't do was price it.
Handing out jobs is cheap. Handing over decisions is the expensive one.
Democracies are slow. They're factional. Cliques form, and the loudest voices aren't always the ones you'd have picked. Residents will decide things you wouldn't have decided and spend money on stuff that makes no sense to you. There'll be a menu nobody can get right and a maintenance job that took far too long and somebody who's decided the whole thing is your fault.
And the village manager absorbs all of that, keeps showing up, and still has to make the place feel warm. Then, on top of it, lead. I've said before that I don't know how the best of them do it. I really don't.
I live a much smaller version of it. Relationships in this sector, as a software provider, don't always go to plan. Sometimes I'm the one apologising because our support wasn't what somebody expected, or an update landed later than they needed it. Staying in the relationship is the job.
And what you get to be part of
Here's the part I didn't understand for years, and it's the reason I'd still argue for all of it.
When residents really do own their community, and you're the person leading it, you're in an unusual position. You're leading something that doesn't belong to you. Their friendships. Their falling out and making up. The traditions they've built that nobody wrote down. The way they close in around somebody whose husband has just died. None of that is yours, you didn't make it, and you couldn't have.
You're the person trusted with looking after the conditions it grows in.
I don't have a better word for that than precious. Sacred, almost, and I don't use that word lightly. I think the best village managers I know understand this in their bones, and I think it's why they stay in a job that would grind most people down.
Which is also why community doesn't just happen on its own. Put a group of people in a nice building and you've got a nice building. It takes real skill to build one, and what I've changed my mind about over the years is where the skill goes. It isn't in filling every gap. It's in working out which gaps to leave, and then holding your nerve whilst residents fill them.
Back to the village that doesn't exist yet
Suzanne's community has a founder who wants a low staffing model and a resident led culture, and she wants people on the app during the sales process so that by the time they move in they already know each other a bit. She said something I keep thinking about. It starts with how it makes people feel, and then it cascades.
She's right, and she's got a rare window. That first group into a community sets the ethos for the next ten or fifteen years, whether anybody plans it or not. How people speak to each other. Whether you say hello in the lift. Whether a new arrival gets a knock on the door.
And this is true of her village and every established one I walk into. These people have chosen to live in community. They didn't choose a block of flats and they didn't choose to stay home. They chose this. So the community they end up with is theirs to make, and our job is to make that possible rather than unnecessary.
I sell software for a living, so take this next bit with whatever pinch of salt you think it deserves. Technology's job here isn't to deliver community, and any vendor telling you their app will create one is selling you something that doesn't exist. What it can do is hand around the ability to make it. Residents starting their own groups, writing the post, running the event, with staff approving rather than producing all of it. A platform that only broadcasts outwards from head office is a very efficient way of keeping everybody a guest in their own home.
Which leaves me with the question I'll be putting to Suzanne's team, and I'd put it to anyone running a village.
Whose community is it? And would your residents give the same answer you would?
I'd love to hear how others are thinking about it.
Mike Jeffrey is CEO of Pluss Communities. He talked about the road from youth work to seniors living with Shaun Alexander on The Business of Ageing.
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