Priorities, Plans & Perspectives: Travis Palmquist, VP & General Manager, LTPAC and Senior Living, PointClickCare

In this Priorities, Plans & Perspectives interview, Skilled Nursing News sits down with Travis Palmquist, VP & General Manager, LTPAC and Senior Living, PointClickCare, to learn about what inspires him to work in the senior care industry.

Read on to learn about how Palmquist approaches his professional priorities, what authors and figures he looks to for guidance, and why glancing — not staring — at past career successes can help leaders shape the future.

Skilled Nursing News: To start, can you tell me what your first job title in health care or the health care technology industry was?

Travis Palmquist: I answer that question twofold because I had two very different ways that I’ve served the senior care industry. One, I started on the health administration side as the administrator of a skilled nursing facility. The first decade of my professional life was spent on the health care operations side in a variety of roles, and then I transitioned over to an EHR senior care tech company. Both were very strongly connected, and any success I had in the latter was largely driven by experiences I had in the prior.

SNN: Whom do you consider your greatest influencers in or outside the industry?

Palmquist: On the operations side, and that came first for me, coming out of college and getting my first “real job,” those were certainly some very formative years. I was blessed to have some strong leaders and people who were in senior care for all the right reasons. One of the names that jumps out at me was my very first Director of Operations that I actually did my internship under, Brad Molgard. He worked in senior care operations for a number of years and was a really dedicated guy who had a deep understanding of what it really took to effectively meet the needs of seniors and those who dedicated their lives to caring for them.

A couple others are Bill Mathias, from an executive multi-facility operator perspective, who is a super energetic guy and who passionately articulated vision and cut through the noise to drive strong operational results; and Daly Goblirsh, another strong operator. And there are many more. I think back to Brad and what he taught me early on, that it starts with the people and if you don’t have happy people who work for you, you’re not going to have happy customers or happy residents. If you don’t have happy staff, you’re going to have a hard time operating a successful business. Beyond that, if we get outside of the senior care market, there are people like Steven Covey, who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Fortunately, the organizations that I worked for early on embraced the 7 Habits in a very material way. Stephen Covey presented to us personally during those early years, and it had a huge impact on the way I looked at running my professional life and how I lead. As we transition over to the tech side, the three names that come to mind are, Mike Wessinger, co-founder and Executive Chair of the Board of Directors at PointClickCare, and his brother Dave Wessinger, co-founder and CEO of PointClickCare. They are in it for the right reasons — both passionate, committed visionaries who don’t allow limits to be placed upon their thinking. Mike is centered by a strong sense of purpose and responsibility that goes beyond running a successful enterprise and really improves the lives of seniors. Dave embraces the challenges the industry faces and believes down to his core that we are responsible for and capable of solving many of those challenges.

Mike and Dave both put their employees at the very top of any priority list they have. They put our customers right up there with them and the rest falls in line after that. Then from a wisdom and business modeling perspective, Geoffrey Moore is another great author. For people who are in the tech SaaS business, that’s not a new name to them. From Crossing the Chasm to Inside the Tornado and Zone to Win, all his books were very applicable to what we’ve been trying to accomplish on the tech side, and we learned a lot from him.

SNN: How do you define and execute your professional priorities?

Palmquist: I think the first and most basic question that most of us ask ourselves is, “Are we excited to get after it when we get out of bed in the morning? Is the work I am doing meaningful?” Meaningful can be measured in a number of different ways, but is this having an impact in the world? Is it having an impact on people? Is it having an impact on my family? I think all of those things come to mind, and if you prioritize your work with that foundation, you’re going to get further into it. What does success look like? What do I have in my skill set? In my background? In my experiences?

What can I tap into that is the best support that accepts success? Then ask, do I have what I need to drive this success? I think those are just some basic things that you want — to be very goal-oriented, very success-oriented and to have purpose.

We all want to be able to look back at what we’ve done and feel a sense of accomplishment, whether it’s over the last 5 years, 10 years or over a career. My rule is to look back and glance, not stare. That’s a nuance there: glance but not stare.

You want to be able to identify the impact you have and learn from that so you can apply it going forward, but also have that sense of achievement. At the highest level, those are my professional priorities. I think if you can’t have passion around what you’re doing, you’re never going to reach your potential, and you certainly aren’t going to optimize the impact you’re having on whatever entity you’re serving, whether it be your employer, or the customers you serve.

In our case, those of us who work in senior care have an unbelievably phenomenal mission. We’re not trying to set records on the number of sodas that we sell, we’re impacting people’s lives. We’re impacting people’s lives who made it their life’s mission to serve others — in other words, the caregivers. These are the people who come into the office every day to serve and to deliver innovative ideas. I feel very fortunate to have had the right guidance to pick this as my career.

SNN: Can you name three priorities?

  1. Positively impact the potential of those I work with. I don’t know if there’s a greater reward than being able to look back and say: “You know what? I might have had a positive impact on somebody’s career.” I can look back now because I’m getting older, and I look at people that I had the privilege to work closely with or in a leadership capacity, and I see them taking up senior roles in organizations. That feels awesome and I wear that as a badge of honor.
  2. Positively impact those we serve. That is part of my DNA. My mom was a nurse. I had grandparents who worked in senior care facilities. Both grandmothers worked in laundry departments. My grandfather was a maintenance director. I came into the industry eyes wide open. I probably had more time within the walls of the skilled nursing facility than most as a kid, so I knew what it was, but the fact that it turned into the career I have today — I could have never imagined.
  3. You’ve got to have an accountability component if you’re talking about priorities. Am I doing what I need to do to be successful with my current responsibilities?

SNN: How do you look at planning when a large degree of uncertainty is involved? We’ve all had to do a lot of that lately, specifically in senior care.

Palmquist: The principle I try to apply in those scenarios is you don’t have to be great to get started, but you absolutely must get started to be great. It does us no good to sit in our hands and get paralyzed by uncertainty, or live in fear or desperation, or not think that there’s something we can go out and control to positively move the needle. In order to pull that off, you need brilliant people around you. You need innovative and energetic problem-solvers who — even in the darkest of days — can pick each other up. We’re all going to need that from time to time.

I think you need to iterate in that planning process over and over again. Plans get better, the more eyes that look at them and the more times that you iterate, there’s just no question about it. You need absolute clarity, and it might be clear to those of you who put together the plan, but when you start to broadcast that plan to everybody, it must be clear to them as well.

Depending upon the size of the organization you’re in, relentless pursuit of alignment across the organization in order to pull those things off is important.

SNN: How do you keep track of your professional plans and progress?

Palmquist: First of all, it’s a bit tongue in cheek that a really, really good executive assistant doesn’t hurt [laughs]. I think anybody who is fortunate enough to have one knows how absolutely critical they are to keeping things on track, but that’s probably not the answer you’re looking for. When I think about it, simple is always best; plan your work; work your plan; check your work. Design accountability into your planning process.

Currently at PointClickCare, we’ve got a framework around measuring what matters, objectives, and key results. We put a lot of time and effort into the planning process of not just stopping at the objective phase of planning and what we want to accomplish, but also how we’re going to hold ourselves accountable throughout the year and beyond. At the end of the day the accountability factor, the visibility, the transparency in order to really move a company and to move large numbers of people, is necessary.

SNN: What do you do when something does not go according to plan?

Palmquist: You take accountability, you are transparent and you don’t try to put your head in the sand. Acknowledge it, own it. You’re not going to solve it or get around it if you don’t have that. From there, you go back to that team I talked about earlier and get the right people involved.

You probably do a bit of a post-mortem and try to put your finger on exactly what went wrong. In order to move at the speed of which today’s business world demands, especially in a tech company, you can’t expect to be perfect because you’ll go too slow, but you can expect to learn from your mistakes, not repeat them and soldier on, so to speak.

SNN: Leaders need time to process and gain perspective. What do you listen to? What do you like to read to gain that perspective?

Palmquist: I wonder how many leaders are disciplined enough to make sure they take the time to do this on a consistent basis.

We certainly have leadership who recognize the importance of this. If we’re not disciplined and smart enough to do it on our own, they help us do that as­ a team through offsite strategy retreats and those types of things.

Personally, I try to learn what I can from really extraordinary people. Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, people that have accomplished incredible things. Malcolm Gladwell is a favorite author, I love his writing around outliers. I also love the documentary “In Search of Greatness.” There a lot of insights that can be gleaned from it.

To have a glimpse inside the minds of people like Bill Gates who have achieved unparalleled success and see how they think, and what drove them to be successful is what I enjoy. I probably enjoy that a little bit more than getting deep on a technical business book. It’s about trying to learn from other people that have accomplished rare feats in this world.

Companies featured in this article: