Be kind to yourself, and other life lessons from this CEO
Kevin Norquay is meeting CEOs all over the country, getting their stories. This week he talks to Cheyne Chalmers of Ryman.
Cheyne Chalmers is the ultimate protector of 12,000 older residents of Ryman retirement villages, her fire for the role going back to personal heartbreak as a child.
‘‘Even to this day, it’s really hard,’’ she tells the Sunday StarTimes, talking of the early onset Alzheimer’s that enveloped the mind of her paternal grandmother.
A brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, the disease removed her from family life, putting her for 20 years in Tokanui Psychiatric Hospital near Te Awamutu.
If her mental cloud had any silver lining, it was putting the young Chalmers on a determined route to become a nurse, a helper, a force for good. Now, she oversees 38 retirement villages, with another nine planned, yet those elements remain at her core.
Her Nana started showing signs of Alzheimer’s in her late 40s, when Chalmers was a child, then she deteriorated over 30 years until her death.
‘‘That was very much for me a key, a fire in my belly,’’ Chalmers says. ‘‘It was part of that ambition of wanting to make the world a better place.
‘‘Visiting her and seeing her was just heartbreaking, really heartbreaking, you can’t describe it more than that. There isn’t a cure around the corner … we can really help with the environment, with how we communicate with people. We understand all that a lot better now.’’
Chalmers, CEO of the New Zealand arm of the Australasian retirement village operator, always wanted to be a nurse. As she grew up in Auckland under the guidance of educationoriented parents – her father a pulp and paper scientist – her sister’s teddy bears came under her constant ‘‘intensive care’’.
She was a Brownie, a Girl Guide then a Ranger, doing home nursing, and leadership programs. ‘‘I very much was always heading in that [nursing] direction. I wanted to make a difference and care for people, it was very much caring.’’
When she emerged from her broad nursing training, she headed into mental health working at the now-closed Kingseat and Oakley residential mental health facilities in Auckland.
‘‘There was a bit of a consciousness around that decision as well. I always believed understanding people’s psyche and communication were pivotal to caring, so I was really happy to go into mental health.’’
Working in mental health in the 1980s turned out to be ‘‘pretty confronting’’. As well as the patients, the other nurses were ‘‘really challenging, almost hostile’’.
When Chalmers married another mental health nurse, it got even more confronting – after five years they divorced, her exhusband moved to Australia, leaving her a solo mother.
Her response was to study. With a little help from her friends she went to night school, then chased a Masters in Management, which led her into management jobs.
‘‘I’m a very optimistic person. Even when things are bad, there’s always a silver lining. There was probably a year or two where it was pretty hard, but I was really fortunate. I had great friends and support.
‘‘So for me, I was very much about ‘I’m in control of my life and my destiny’. I knew I was going to have to find a way to support my child. I started to drive my career, because I could see that I could bring a different perspective, to nursing, to healthcare.’’
She was director of nursing at Greenlane at the time the cardiac unit closed in December 2003, helping oversee a shift to Auckland. She was director of nursing in Wellington at a tumultuous time, when there were three CEOs, and three board chairs. It was there she got it in the neck, fronting a high-profile failure.
‘‘I ended up on national television at seven o’clock, against Mark Sainsbury, being interviewed about a terrible situation where a patient had died – prior to my time I must add – but I ended up taking accountability for it.
‘‘It was the ultimate lesson. For me, when you’re in a leadership role, it’s all very well saying, ‘I’m the leader, I’m in charge’, but if you don’t take accountability for what happens, then you’re not a leader, really.
‘‘You are responsible for the outcomes for everything that happens. In order to step into that leadership role, you’ve got to have trust. You’ve got to have a really strong team, you’ve got to surround yourself with really clever people, people much smarter than you. And I’m really good at that. I’m good at building strong teams, I’m not one of these people that tries to control.’’
And so it is at Ryman where Chalmers found herself mucking in soon after taking up her leadership role in January 2020, two months before Covid arrived.
She came from Melbourne, where she had been executive director and chief nurse for Monash Health Service, so news of Covid overseas rang alarm bells.
‘‘I’d come from a role where I’d had the infection control experts reporting to me, so I knew really, really well what was coming,’’ she says. ‘‘I was thrown right in at the deep end, and was in charge of running operations. So I had to build relationships over Zoom, like immediately. And it was really hard. There were long days and it was really stressful.
‘‘But I loved the challenge of it. I was so grateful that I had the support of my colleagues and the board, and the organisation was committed to doing the right thing.
‘‘We were right in there straight away, doing what we needed to do. Every day we made decisions – sometimes we didn’t make the right ones – and we’d correct them the next day, but we managed to keep our residents safe for over two years.’’
Leadership is about making decisions, of course. When they involve the well-being of thousands of vulnerable people and doing the right thing for them, that is surely stressful and agonising?
‘‘The first thing is you don’t beat yourself up. So if something happens, and it doesn’t go as planned, you take stock, and you move on,’’ she says.
‘‘Allowing yourself that opportunity to pause and reflect, that’s really important. Finding a way to keep moving forward, having some momentum.
‘‘One of the things that the next generation talk about is being stuck or trapped … find a way to keep moving forward. Whether it’s learning a new skill or learning a new language, step outside your comfort zone and have a commitment.
‘‘It’s what we do consistently that counts. I have a little goal. I have a personal trainer once a week, I try to do my steps. If you go off the rails, you come back, get back on the wagon, off you go again. The most important thing for me is being present in life and relationships, and people being able to impact on my life, and then they’ve been able to impact their lives.’’
It is an interesting time for retirement villages. The post World War II baby boomers are reaching retirement age, putting pressure on facilities and prompting a push to build more villages. House prices have soared, so retirement nest eggs are being eroded. Not every retiree will be able to afford to move into a village, and the cost of doing so is under scrutiny.
Chalmers is remaining centralised on her core beliefs; optimism, making things better, and paying tribute to the lessons Nana taught her decades ago.
‘‘We’ve got a big focus on dementia care. So we’re looking at that. There’s going to be more people than ever in history who are over 80.
‘‘Everyone is looking at what the future holds, who’s going to look after us?
‘‘We’re positioning Ryman to be able to respond to that challenge and continue to be leading. Over the last 20 years, we have been able to ratchet the standard up so that when you walk into one of our facilities, you’re walking into an amazing standard that wasn’t there 30 or 40 years ago. So we have a responsibility to carry that forward.’’
‘‘It’s all very well saying, ‘I’m the leader, I’m in charge’, but if you don’t take accountability for what happens, then you’re not a leader, really.’’
Cheyne Chalmers