The Future Leaders Awards program is brought to you in partnership with PointClickCare. The program is designed to recognize up-and-coming industry members who are shaping the next decade of senior housing, skilled nursing, home health, and hospice care. To see this year’s Future Leaders, visit https://futureleaders.agingmedia.com/.
Max Winters, Senior Associate with Perkins Eastman, has been named a 2022 Future Leader 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-old or younger, a passionate worker who knows how to put vision into action, and an advocate for seniors, and the committed professionals who ensure their well-being.
Senior Housing News interviewed Winters to talk about his career trajectory and the ways he sees the industry evolving, including the need for finding solutions to some of the industry’s biggest questions, like who will best care for older adults and what that entails.
What drew you to the senior living industry?
When I was in architecture school, the program I was in focused really heavily on the experience of the user in a building or in a space. And when you’re 20, thinking about other people’s life experiences and life conditions can be a little hard. So the idea of who this user is was always a question that I was thinking about.
The other thing that was going on while I was in architecture school is that my grandparents were getting older and having experiences with senior living. That was kind of an aha moment of, ‘Oh, these are users of buildings and spaces.’ And the ability for design to have an impact on people’s experience of aging, wasn’t the result of cutting, kind of putting those two things together.
Since you’ve started working in this industry, what would you say is your biggest lesson that you have learned so far?
The biggest lesson I’ve had to learn since working in senior living is finding the right balance between exploring new and innovative ideas, and keeping the things about a particular community or a particular organization that make them special and unique. I think, especially when we’re stepping back and trying to look at the level of senior living as a whole industry, it’s easy to think, kind of homogeneously, to think that thing X, Y, or Z is the silver bullet, or the next best practice or whatever it is. But all of that stuff has to be kind of tempered and shaped by who you are as an organization or as a community, and what makes sense for you, given the time and the place that you’re serving people.
If you could change one thing within an eye toward the future of senior living what would it be, and why?
The one thing I would change, especially about environments where care is delivered, is the fundamental assumption that the role of an environment for those types of uses is to mitigate risk for the operator and to protect residents from themselves rather than foster a sense of purpose and improve quality of life.
Obviously, regulations and safety and security are an important part of designing these types of spaces. But that needs to be layered in afterward and problem solved creatively, rather than being kind of the primary and exclusive focus when we’re designing those types of environments.
What do you foresee as being different about the senior living industry as you look ahead to next year?
I think the biggest question, if you look holistically at the industry right now, is kind of this really nagging question of whose responsibility is it to provide care for older adults? And if you think back hundreds of years, and especially in the last century, our answer to that question has evolved from kind of like benevolent groups to the government to private companies and corporations.
We’re seeing this kind of moment where all three of those kinds of perspectives are still active in the industry and trying to answer this question of who’s responsible for caring for older adults. With the obvious demographic issues that we’re all aware of … that question is going to get answered for better or for worse. And I think that’s sort of the biggest thing on the horizon.
In a word, how would you describe the future of senior living?
Uncertain.
What quality must all future leaders possess?
For me, that’s empathy. And in our industry, that’s empathy for the people you’re serving, empathy for the people who do the serving, and empathy for the kind of the families and the people on the periphery. I think understanding the human aspect is absolutely crucial to all leadership, but especially to leadership in our industry.
If you could give yourself advice on your first day in the industry, what would it be and why?
Listen more and be slower to speak.
The post Future Leader: Max Winters, Perkins Eastman, Senior Associate appeared first on Senior Housing News.
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