By: Harvey Miller
The email arrived at 9:00 p.m.: shelter in place. Twenty-four hours later, a second message told a long-term care director in eastern North Carolina to evacuate to a sister facility. It did not say which one, when, or how.
That scene anchors a chapter of Purpose Before Position, the new leadership book by Dr. Vanessa Ervin, and it illustrates what she calls “voice over authority.” The storm hit in the fall of 2018.
In Ervin’s account, the director had no blueprint and no confirmed receiving site. Her residents ranged from independent walkers to bed-bound patients, and the local hospital was full. Corporate answers were not coming on time, so she acted. She mobilized more than thirty staff who chose to rise with her, rented vans and buses, stocked medical carts, and had medications and supplies packed and labeled for more than 125 patients, families, and staff. Her cell phone became the command center. Her vow: “No one will die on my watch.”
The convoy traveled roughly 3.5 hours and arrived in the middle of the night to a nearly empty parking lot and a lone third-shift nurse. In that lot, with no chairs and no table, the director gathered her team. “We are not sleeping on buses tonight,” she told them. She called in local EMS and the fire department, and assigned roles before anyone entered the building.
Then it got harder. The sister facility’s own executive director went on emergency leave the next day, leaving the evacuee in charge of both buildings: more than 200 residents and two staff teams. For seven days she rebuilt schedules, managed morale, and answered corporate demands, sleeping on a box spring in a bathroom or in her car to stay close to her people. When spirits sank on Day Four, staff turned a wireless speaker into a stage for a talent show.
Ervin draws a clear line between title and credibility. Authority “is the title, the directive that arrives by email, and the chain of command,” she writes. “Voice is the credibility you build with action, clarity, and honesty.”
From the episode, she distills five habits she calls “purpose-driven dialect”: name the purpose first, say what you know and what you don’t, offer a plan with contingencies, invite focused dissent, and close the loop. In practice, it can be as simple as a short morning huddle in which a leader names the non-negotiable and asks for objections.
No one died in the evacuation, and no one was left behind. “True leadership isn’t waiting for instructions from the top, necessarily; it’s recognizing when you are the voice people need to hear,” Ervin writes. Reflecting afterward, the director concluded: “Adversity doesn’t define you. It reveals you.”
