Carlton Senior Living earned recognition as a Best of the Best Program to Spotlight for its SET/Senior Executive in Training program. The award winning program prepares high performing employees for their future roles as executive directors.

Making an internal hire for executive director requires envisioning someone in a role that can be a significant step up. Carlton Senior Living’s Senior Executive in Training (SET) program was designed to prepare high-performing employees to fill that critical position.

“To be an executive director, there are eight to 12 different functions you have to understand well,” says Allen Nickerson, vice president of human resources. “The idea was to expose everyone to that information before they got into that situation.”

Rather than resort to a canned program, Carlton relied on its internal functional experts to create a rigorous training program covering 16 functional areas. Only two to four candidates are enrolled in the program at a time, and participants must master the expectations of each area before moving on to the next.

In the program’s first go-round last year, three high-performing employees signed on to undergo the training, including two resident services directors and a marketing director. “Their feedback was: ‘Wow, this is awesome. I didn’t know I needed to know this,’” says Nickerson. If and when they are hired to become executive directors, he adds, “they’re going to be a whole lot better equipped.”

The focus on internal hiring and reliance on in-house talent to create a curriculum speaks to the high value that Carlton places on maintaining a strong culture. “Fifty percent of the time, when we’ve hired an executive director from outside, they’ve either failed or taken a long time” to adjust to the culture and requirements at Carlton, says Nickerson.

However, the SET program can be modified to help outside hires adjust to the culture at Carlton. “The unlearning process usually takes three to six months,” says Nickerson. “This way, we figure we can eliminate it entirely.”

So far, the SET program is accomplishing what it set out to do, says Nickerson. While none of the candidates have been formally placed in an executive director position yet, one of them is running one of Carlton’s smaller buildings under decreasing supervision of a regional executive director and demonstrating skills in areas of the program that her new assignment requires. “These were skills she did not possess before, so the program appears to be yielding results earlier than expected,” says Nickerson.


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