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A resident refuses care and snaps at the aide who offered it. Two department managers have quietly stopped speaking to each other. A family member arrives furious about a phone call that never came. Every senior living leader recognizes these moments, and most of us were trained to manage them, to smooth them over, work around them, get through the shift. Paige Hector, LMSW, is teaching something different: that these moments are information, and that responding to them well is a genuine skill that can be learned.

This month on the Senior Living Empower Hour, Rebecca Adelman, Esq. turns the hour over to Paige to talk about the work she has been building. A medical social worker by training and degree, Paige spent years in acute and post-acute care watching the kind of conflict that quietly dismantles good teams. In 2020 she went looking for a better answer than muddling through, and found it in Nonviolent Communication — completing a certification through the Center for Nonviolent Communication that she describes as equivalent to earning a master’s degree. What she brings back to senior living is not conflict avoidance and not conflict management as usual. It is a practical, teachable model for how to speak and listen without judgment, blame, or defensiveness, so that a team spends less of its finite energy on friction and more of it on the people it came to serve.

Paige will walk us through what that actually looks like on the floor: the pause and what a person is doing internally during it, the difference between a real request and a demand wearing a request’s clothes, and how a few deliberate words can turn a defensive standoff into a conversation with somewhere to go. She’ll share the paradigm shift at the heart of her work — the move from treating conflict as a problem to be endured toward treating it as a signal that something can be brought into better alignment.

And because this is the Convergence Era, Rebecca will draw out the connections that senior living leaders live with every day: how communication skill intersects with staff retention, family trust, survey readiness, and yes, the long quiet road that sometimes runs from an unaddressed conflict to a complaint or a claim. But that is the implication of Paige’s work, not the point of it. The point is that the way we talk to each other in hard moments is learnable, and Paige has built something to teach it.