Through the decades, housing has benefitted from some extraordinary leaders. Now we are entering into a completely new era of leadership. Leadership is being redefined by experts and those in housing adaptable and flexible enough to reimagine their roles are paving new paths forward.
With challenges such as labor constraints, rising product costs, escalating land prices, pressures of more data and evolving technology, plus extreme weather events, those leading today and tomorrow will have their hands full. So, how can they manage and continue to manage? Some experts in business leadership who presented at the World Business Forum along with housing leaders who presented at the HIVE conference shared their thoughts.
1. Be humble. Leadership expert Jim Collins reminds us of the importance of humility. Make yourself subservient to the cause or company that you lead.
2. Don’t waste time motivating people. Collins says you need to lead in a way that does not demotivate. The right employees will be self-disciplined and focused, because you can’t motivate people into being the right people.
3. Take care of each other. Simon Sinek, author and leadership guru, points out that in today’s business environment there are lopsided incentive structures, which is a failure of leadership. Plus, many leaders only measure during their tenure, not taking into consideration what happens after they leave. Leadership is hard and thankless and lonely most of the time, so taking care of each other is the absolute single most important thing to do to play in the infinite game.
4. Build leaders. In business, we know how to train managers, but we do not know how to build leaders because of our hopelessly entangled administrative hierarchy and leadership, says Gary Hamel, academic and director for the Management Innovation eXchange. If the leadership team is referred to at an organization, it usually just refers to the people at the top. Learn from the military, one of the only organizations that has been able to successfully create leaders, and create a program that works.
Gary Hamel presents to a crowd of more than 2,000 executives from more than 40 countries.
Image courtesy of the World Business Forum.
5. Create relational capital. In our hyper mobile, digitally intermediated world, relationships are hard to come by, so it is critical to create a culture based on community. Gallup found only 2 of 10 employees have a close friend at work. Hamel says employees will never be engaged with the company if they are not engaged with each other. Plus, solving new unusual problems requires a lot of relational capital.
6. Change the way we think about work. From a macroeconomic per person viewpoint, productivity hasn’t budged since 1983. Management strategies that we have used in the past are no longer yielding productivity and engagement is just as low. Marcus Buckingham, author and expert on talent and strengths-based leadership, says it’s because our go to work method is assembly line style, dismissing the critical aspect of teams. Work should always be team work.
7. Get curious when things work well. Buckingham also advises not to stop at telling someone “good job” when they do something well. Probe them. Ask them how they accomplished what they did and how they can recreate it.
8. Bring mission and purpose into the team. People don’t care what company they work for, they care which team they are on. You join an industry, how long you stay and how productive you are depends on what team you are on, Buckingham says.
9. Leverage your best people. Collins also warns not to put your best people on the biggest problems, but to assign them to the biggest opportunities.
10. Don’t be isolated. Isolation is the enemy of innovation. We have set up systems to constantly receive passive data that we are basing strategic decisions on. But, really, leaders need to be put in uncomfortable positions. Collins suggests doing an audit to see when you were last uncomfortable—if it has been more than a week, then you are isolated.
11. Share. In 2015, Camden Property Trust, a large property management and investment firm, distributed a very special “Have FunD” bonus to every employee from a separate investment fund with a joint venture partner that started in 2008 and performed very well. With the idea that every employee made that performance possible, Camden spread the $10 million profit out to nearly 1,800 employees, regardless of their tenure. Ric Campo, Camden’s CEO, based this decision on the strong belief in the value of employee happiness. If employees are happy it will ultimately lead to happy shareholders and customers.
More than 85% of the Camden Property Trust fund went to employees in the field and on the team.
Camden Property Trust
12. Listen. Sue Ansel, president and CEO at property management firm Gables, has built a culture with an average tenure of more than 15 years, a number that is astronomically high in the industry. Ansel builds that culture by listening to associates and their feedback and empowering them to make decisions. She cautions, however, that it takes a lifetime to build a culture and it can be lost in a day.
13. Diversify. Gables C-suite is made up of four people, and three of them are women. Ansel admits that wasn’t by design, but by a thoughtful system of meritocracy. Those three women have been with the organization 25, 30 and 32 years.
14. Be honest. It’s hard to measure culture from outside an organization, but Gables realizes the importance of honesty to attract the right people. Most job seekers look around online to validate what the company and culture is all about. Ansel makes sure that the Gables culture supports that scrutiny, and having the diversity is part of it.
15. Be transparent. Laurie Baker, executive vice president of operations at Camden, says that one year the company reported that it made revenue goals by a mere $36.53. That was communicated across the company and celebrated because every employee had to save and create efficiencies in order to make it happen.
These tips and strategies are part of becoming a more resilient, adaptable organization – critical assets in today’s ever-changing environment. These business leaders know and understand that and share their insights to make sure that tomorrow can be even better than anything you have ever done before.