By Steve Moran

You probably at least sort of know about this company, and maybe you are even slightly aware of their CEO. Somehow he has mostly stayed below the radar, compared to flashy leaders like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg.

Today, right now, Nvidia, led by CEO Jensen Huang, is the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world, slightly behind Apple (though on any given day they could trade places). Both are well ahead of Amazon and Google.

Worth Paying Attention To

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “The Secrets of the Man Who Made Nvidia the World’s Most Valuable Company,” he has a number of unique leadership traits that are worthy of exploration. One in particular could be transformative for senior living organizations.

T5T

He asks people who work for him — not just leaders but all 30,000 team members — to send him T5T, or top-five things, emails. These T5T emails are short, bullet pointed messages: the top five things people are working on or thinking about. They can even include non-work-related things like discovering a new restaurant.

Weak Signals

What is remarkable is that he reads them all. It is his way of staying in touch with what is going on at all levels of the company. These emails are not designed to justify what people are working or how valuable they are to the company, but rather to make sure he knows what is going on at all levels in the organization.

He is looking for weak signals that will help him cut through the hierarchy — that will help him understand where people are at, what is working and what isn’t.

Senior Living

Over the past six weeks of being a super frustrated senior living consumer, it has become clear to me that I am seeing many things that would be impossible for top leadership to see. Things that are really important. Things that have a massive impact on occupancy and profitability.

Senior leadership will ultimately get reports that will show occupancy, and in those reports my stepfather will be a move-in and a couple of months later a move-out. There might even be some kind of report that addresses why we had such a short stay, but I am quite sure it won’t say “because we did a poor job.”

What Gets Missed

What gets missed, though, is all the little stuff that is actually not working very well:

  • How the dining staff seem to simply be going through the motions; how they seem perpetually short-staffed.
  • How no one really cares whether visitors check in or check out.
  • How the activities are the same old thing day in and day out.
  • How, even though we were paying for assistance with showering, he went three weeks without a shower and with no one letting me know it was a problem.
  • That no one is working very hard to encourage him to go to activities or to build friendships.
  • How most of the time he ends up eating his meals alone in the dining room.

Team Members Know

I promise you that there are team members in that community who see this stuff going on and know that it could and should be better. They would love to have a way to communicate to top leadership, to skip local leadership and tell “the boss” what is really going on, talk about how it could be so much better.

Mostly, though, they give up, because they know they have no voice.

I can only imagine how much better things would be if senior living organizations were to start using T5T emails.

And with AI, it would be much easier to identify opportunities to make things better.