Building Brilliant Care Home Teams

12/09/2026

Building Brilliant Care Home Teams (Without the Baggage.)

Care home teams can be full of capable, committed people and still be harder to lead than anyone expected. If you’re responsible for a group of care homes, the list of things keeping you awake at night is unlikely to be short.

Somewhere amongst all of that, a question that’s been put to us over the last year of working with care companies also enters the fray: why, with so many good people in the organisation, does so much still seem to come back to me?

We’ve spent a lot of time working with people in care organisations, and one of the things that never fails to strike us is just how much dedication there is. The stories of extraordinary compassion, commitment and resilience are genuinely humbling. We’ve also seen how the same organisations can find themselves with overwhelmed managers, teams seemingly reluctant to take responsibility and individual homes operating almost as though they’re entirely separate businesses.

It’s virtually never because the people involved don’t care. More often, it’s because caring for people and leading people are two incredibly different things.

Which in turn raises a slightly uncomfortable possibility. What if the problems you’re seeing across your homes aren’t primarily problems with the people you’ve recruited? What if they’re the result of how those people have learnt to work together?

 

What gets in the way of brilliant care home teams?

There’s a perfectly understandable logic to the way managers are promoted in care, and it’s the same across other sectors too.. Someone is reliable, trusted, technically excellent, brilliant with residents and respected by colleagues. They know the home, its people, its standards and the thousand daily pressures that come with running it. So when a deputy manager or registered manager role becomes available, they’re the natural choice.

Then, almost overnight, success is measured differently.

Rather than being the person who fixes things, they need to create a team that can fix things. Rather than stepping in whenever a shift gets difficult, they need to help others exercise good judgement. They must give feedback, manage tensions, challenge behaviour, make difficult decisions and create an environment where people take responsibility without constantly looking upwards for permission.

Experience in care is an enormous asset, yet doesn’t automatically teach any of that.

As one home manager told us during a leadership development experience:

“I’ve realised that being a manager is about maintaining the day-to-day, whereas being a leader is about fostering growth, development, and progression of our care homes.”

It’s a deceptively simple distinction, and one that explains an enormous amount of what we see happening in care organisations. People who have spent years being rewarded for their individual competence are suddenly expected to develop competence in others, often with very little support in making that transition.

Your homes might be performing. Your teams might not be.

There’s a particular kind of problem that doesn’t always trigger a crisis meeting, largely because the home is still functioning. Rotas are filled somehow, residents are cared for, inspections are prepared for and the day-to-day operation continues.

Yet look a little closer and you might find a manager who’s constantly rescuing their team, a deputy who won’t make a decision without permission, two colleagues who’ve spent years working around each other rather than together, or the same handful of reliable people being called upon whenever something gets difficult.

And eventually, it all lands on the desk of someone more senior.

From above, these can look like communication problems, accountability problems or simply the consequences of difficult recruitment conditions. Sometimes they are. Yet the obvious team problem is rarely the whole story.

Perhaps people have learnt that taking initiative gets them criticised, or maybe there’s a difficult conversation that’s been avoided for so long that everyone now treats the problem as normal. Perhaps a manager is reluctant to challenge poor behaviour because they’re terrified of losing another member of staff. Or perhaps the team has simply never developed a shared understanding of what ownership, autonomy and good leadership actually look like.

These are the things that rarely appear in a management report, yet they can have an extraordinary influence on how a home operates.

And in care, the stakes are particularly high. When people are reluctant to speak up, where decisions travel unnecessarily slowly, or where managers are too overwhelmed to notice what’s happening within their teams, the consequences can reach well beyond morale and productivity.

Staffing shortages, funding pressures and regulatory complexity are real challenges that no amount of team development can magically remove. The way people work together, however, has a huge influence on how effectively they respond to them.

One care group. Several completely different cultures.

One of the most striking things we’ve discovered is how isolated care home leaders can become, even when they’re part of the same organisation and their homes are geographically close.

Each home can develop its own habits, relationships, unwritten rules and ways of dealing with problems. One might have a wonderfully supportive culture where people confidently take responsibility. Another, operating under exactly the same organisational values and policies, might be dominated by micromanagement, unresolved tensions and a reluctance to make decisions.

Same organisation. Same values. Entirely different experience of working there.

And the longer these ways of working continue without being challenged, the more normal they become.

“Some of our managers have been here twenty years, though.”

We hear this quite often, usually with an implied concern that established managers might be resistant to doing things differently.

We see it rather differently. Twenty years in a care organisation represents an extraordinary amount of experience, knowledge and understanding, not to mention dedication. The question is whether that experience is being connected with the experience of other leaders, whether assumptions are being challenged and whether people have ever really been invited to explore a different way of working.

Bringing leaders together isn’t simply about sharing best practice. It’s about helping them feel part of something bigger, understand each other’s challenges, have honest conversations and develop a common approach to leadership that can actually be felt across the organisation.

After all, if your managers never really operate as a team, why would you expect their homes to?

“We just can’t get them to…”

…buy into the values.

…take ownership.

…think beyond their own home.

…have difficult conversations.

…understand the commercial realities of running a care business.

We hear variations of this regularly from senior leaders who are, quite understandably, frustrated. They’ve communicated the expectations, explained the strategy and invested considerable time trying to get everyone moving in the same direction. Yet somehow the same issues keep coming back.

It’s tempting to conclude that the missing ingredient is motivation, commitment or capability.

There’s another question worth asking first, though. What’s happening within the organisation that makes the behaviours you’re asking for difficult, uncomfortable or even risky?

If managers are encouraged to take initiative and then routinely second-guessed, they’ll learn to seek permission. If honest conversations are encouraged until someone challenges a senior leader, people will learn to keep quiet. If the organisation talks about collaboration while celebrating individual homes that protect their own interests, people will behave accordingly.

The red thread running through effective care organisations isn’t simply that everyone understands the values. It’s that people experience them in how they’re led, how decisions are made, how difficult conversations are handled and how leaders behave when things go wrong.

And that includes the board and senior leadership team.

This isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about recognising that leadership behaviours travel through an organisation, whether we intend them to or not. Sometimes the thing we’re desperately trying to get people to do is the very thing our existing habits and systems make difficult.

So, do your managers actually need another leadership course?

Possibly. There are undoubtedly useful skills to learn, particularly for people making that transition from frontline care into leadership.

Yet a course on delegation won’t necessarily explain why one of your managers struggles to let go of control. A workshop on communication won’t resolve years of tension between colleagues. And a presentation about accountability isn’t going to change much if the people at the top aren’t demonstrating it themselves.

This is where our approach at Lead Happy Teams is different.

We don’t begin with a standard agenda or a list of leadership topics we think everyone ought to learn. We begin by understanding the people involved, what’s really happening between them and what needs to change. We look beneath the visible symptoms at the relationships, assumptions and conditions that are shaping how people behave.

From there, we design development experiences around the actual humans in the organisation. That might involve bringing home managers and deputies together to explore their individual and collective challenges through team development training, helping senior leaders understand the impact of their own behaviours, individual coaching, or creating opportunities for people to work through real problems together.

Crucially, the work doesn’t begin and end in a training room. The real test is what happens afterwards, when everyone returns to their homes, the pressures return and familiar habits begin to reappear.

Because an inspiring day means very little if, three weeks later, nobody is having different conversations, making different decisions or taking greater responsibility.

The real return on investing in your care teams

Of course, there’s a commercial reality to all of this. Care providers face significant costs associated with recruitment, turnover, absence and operational inefficiency. The time senior leaders spend resolving avoidable problems has a cost too, even if it rarely appears as a separate line in the accounts.

Then there are the less easily measured consequences. The experienced manager who eventually leaves because they’re exhausted. The promising deputy who never develops the confidence to progress. The good ideas that remain trapped within individual homes. The creeping frustration of a CEO or COO who can’t understand why an organisation full of capable people requires so much intervention.

These things matter, and they accumulate.

Investing in how leaders and teams work together isn’t a magic solution to every commercial or operational challenge. It is, however, a way of addressing some of the human conditions that influence retention, consistency, decision-making, resilience and ultimately the experience of the people receiving care.

One of our care clients, Anil Dhanani, CEO of Peverel Court Care, captured something particularly important when reflecting on our work with his leadership group:

“What has really surprised me is how helpful it has been for me personally, as the CEO of this business.”

And therein lies something that can get overlooked when we talk about leadership development.

It isn’t only about making individual managers better at their jobs. It’s about creating a leadership community that can genuinely share responsibility for the organisation, where people have the confidence to act, the relationships to challenge one another and the collective understanding to work towards the same goals.

For the people running care organisations, that can mean something rather valuable: less firefighting, fewer problems landing unnecessarily on their desks and greater confidence in the people they’ve entrusted to lead.

Care is already a demanding enough sector to lead in. Your teams should be making that job easier, not harder.

If you’re leading a care organisation and recognise some of these patterns, we’d love to have a conversation. At Lead Happy Teams, we help organisations understand what’s really getting in the way of their people working brilliantly together, and create the conditions for lasting change.

 

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