Next-Gen Leadership
Next-Gen Leadership
Everyone begins their career at an entry point. The particular point of entry varies considerably but it is safe to assume that only the true entrepreneur starts at the top (and many of them also start at the bottom as in they do every job in the business from clean-up to fundraising). In the multifamily industry, most property management professionals begin in an on-site position and learn the fundamentals of the business there.
A Common Path
The long-held multifamily career path goes something like this: leasing agent to assistant manager to property manager with a similar trajectory for service team members. Whatever your L&D program, most focus on the skills needed to attain proficiency in the processes, systems, and protocols required in each position.
Beyond those primary task-related skills, it is important to focus on the cultural blend of core values combined with the humanities – a vital starting point for the personal growth tool kit and one that ensures ongoing alignment with cultural values. There are many educational options in the marketplace that you can bolt onto your existing L&D program to craft a well-rounded management education package. And those management skills are highly important to an organization’s operational success.
Even so, there remains the possibility that you could be failing your next generation of leaders.
Captains & Stewards
Leaders set broad direction and coalesce influence and inspiration around common goals. They motivate, encourage, and edify. They help others become their best selves. They are stewards of the organization, its team members, and of themselves.
Humanity At The Helm
Leadership development is personal development. Leaders are people first, with all the fault lines that come with a lifetime of personal love, loss, failure, and trauma. As humans, when under stress we have a tendency to default to reactive behaviors that don’t always serve us well. Anger, defensiveness, retribution, guilt, and enabling are common to us all – and each is destructive to effective leadership. Decent administration and visionary direction will eventually be undone by someone who mistakes being in charge for being a leader.
I once heard someone say that they did not trust anyone in a leadership role who wasn’t engaged in personal therapy. That person recognized the simple truth that to hold the care of others in your hand requires deep character work. It is hard – personally hard – and it takes a lifetime of dedicated introspection to recognize, acknowledge, and work through your own internal junk so that you can see more clearly the humans in your care — and lead from there.
If you want to grow the next generation of leaders – I encourage you to train more than the tactical skills. Invest in the humanities and build out opportunities for team members to engage in personal development.
