About Mike Brewer
Speed Dating for Talent
Just over a decade ago, I wrote this post about the need for savvy operators to build brand loyalty with their residents because of the impact the great recession would have on apartment occupancy. Today’s battle for market share is all about talent. Companies are fighting to fill the holes in their teams with the best available people. Facing a tight employment market where recruiting is becoming more difficult, it is time to fine-tune your culture. When everything else is the same – wages, benefits, etc. – culture is the tiebreaker. Smart job seekers know this, and it is critical that your culture stands out. Be vigilant about course-correcting any cultural dissonance. Your existing team and your future team are holding you accountable for it.
Swipe Right for Culture
Now is the time for innovations in recruitment and hiring. Potential candidates speed date through the endless options for employment and if you want to be the company that causes them to swipe right, you need to think in terms of the team member experience and how you ensure that your company lives up to the hype.
Zero to Ten – Where is your pain level?
Every company has some form of financial review process. It is an important measure of business health. I encourage you to add a cultural review to your routine. Ask good questions. Listen thoughtfully to responses. What is the story behind the story? Where are the cultural pain points and what can you do to relieve them? What is the temperature of your current team members? How connected are they to your culture?
Gut Check
The current employment market is not a call to hire whoever you can get. Top talent is still available and those are the people you want to attract. Avoid the panic hire – the one that you knew in your gut wasn’t the right fit for the position or the company. That path leads to an inevitable painful exit which further tarnishes the opportunity for brand loyalty. It isn’t fair to anyone and shakes the confidence of your team.
Passion Play
I don’t have a magic wand to produce key talent in this unusual market. But I do know that it is my job to ensure that our culture is healthy. It is the sort of work that is harder to quantify but it pays the biggest dividends in the end. My parents’ generation favored the stability of lifelong careers at one company. Workers today are less afraid of uncertainty and want to do work that feeds their spirits and their bank accounts. Passion is the name of the game. You don’t have to change everything about your culture, but you do need your company to be who you say you are.
What are you doing to ensure your culture delivers on your brand promises?
The Downside of Advantage
In his Oscar acceptance speech for his role in The Gladiator, Russell Crowe famously said, “…dreams like this seemed vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable. For anybody who’s on the downside of advantage and relying purely on courage – it’s possible.” It is true that most of us won’t win an Academy Award. We are each one nonetheless capable of stretching towards a destination that seems impossibly out of reach. Somewhere between where you are today and your impossible dream lies a journey filled with incredible lessons and stories worth sharing around the firepit.
In the quest to achieve your ambition, I offer you a few nuggets to keep, use, or toss along the way.
Failure is Inevitable
You will fail. Not completely – failure is only complete when you decide it is. From a quiver full of arrows, only some will hit the mark. The rest could be called failures, but I prefer to think of them as practice shots.
BHAG
Set your Big-Hairy-Audacious-Goal. Then set some more – realistic near-term goals. If your goal is to win that Oscar, you can’t get there without attainable, actionable goals. I wrote about this topic ten years ago in this series. Even Russell Crowe had to start somewhere. Take an acting workshop or class. Volunteer at your community theater. In the world of multifamily, that could mean signing up for classes wherever you can find them – Internal L&D departments, LinkedIn Learning, or in any of the countless free webinars made widely available by vendors across the industry.
Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
Embrace nervous anxiety. Lean in to it. Greatness was never found hiding in the blanketed cocoon of comfort. Willingly put yourself into uncomfortable situations. Reach out to someone you don’t know to ask for a call or video chat to talk about your project. You may be surprised by how often people who have achieved success are willing to share their time and stories with others on the way up.
Be True to You
Be accountable – to yourself and to someone else. There is a reason people hire personal trainers or life coaches. It’s because those people hold you accountable to your commitments. It’s incredibly hard to duck out of a 6 am workout if you know your trainer got up early to meet you at the gym. Accountability is key.
Repetition Builds Muscle Memory
Put in the reps. It can feel boring or pointless at times but in every endeavor, practice the reps that build up your skill, strength, and confidence. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a teenager when he started lifting weights and learned the fundamentals of completing and marking the reps. From Mr. Universe to Governor of California, the practice of repetition served him well.
Measure Everything
Measure and acknowledge your progress. It feels like fuel in your tank to have reached even the incremental markers of progress towards your bigger goal. Dave Ramsey has a debt snowball philosophy that helps people get out of credit card debt that involves paying off the smallest balance first. It feels good and it frees up cash to put towards the other debt. Celebrate your progress. Tell the world. Share it on your stories. It’s powerful stuff.
Celebrate the Win
When you achieve your big goal – take it in. Breathe the moment of accomplishment. Then – set your next goal even as you turn around and help someone else who is just getting started on theirs. For every person who heard you out, cheered you on, and celebrated the markers with you, pay it forward.
Congratulations – you’ve reached the upside.
How To Build a World Famous Garden
Upon purchasing a winning lottery ticket, a fortunate man was made instantly a rich one. His new wealth enabled him to realize his dream of traveling the world. During a visit to Versailles, France, he became enamored with their world-famous gardens. When he returned home, he was determined to have gardens that would be the envy of all who visited. He hired a garden designer and instructed him to spare no expense in creating his personal Versailles of immaculately landscaped grounds.
The gardener laid out a beautiful and thoughtful design and set to work bringing the plan to life. He labored long over the installation of trees, flowers, ponds, hardscapes and wandering paths. When he finally completed his work, the garden was an idyllic escape. The man was overjoyed with the result and paid the garden designer handsomely.
Eager to show off his newly landscaped garden, the owner planned a lavish party in six months, by which time he expected to return home from yet another trip. He invited friends, family, and dignitaries to come and experience the beauty created at his request. On the day of the event, he walked to his gardens. With shock and dismay, he noted the condition of his once beautiful grounds. The flowers were dead, the grass overgrown, the new trees drooping, and the pond filled with algae. How could this have happened? His garden was once sheer perfection, and now it was in ruins.
In a furious rage, he called the garden designer and demanded an explanation! The gardener asked him, “What did you do to maintain the garden? Did you weed it? Fertilize it? Prune it? Water it? Did you hire someone to take continued and careful command of the daily work in the garden?” Sadly, he had done nothing to ensure the maintenance of his garden. He wanted all the beauty and glory but none of the labor. The most beautiful garden in the world is nothing more than a plan. It is the daily care and work that makes a garden a success.
It is the same with the people in our care. Attracting top talent is fundamentally a marketing tool — the very first steppingstone. As leaders, we must take care to nurture our team members, to engage, to course correct, to build up, and even to prune back – all of it done with a beautiful intentional human-centric approach. People are at the heart of leadership. The best marketing and onboarding experience quickly becomes like the dying garden when team members are left to fend for themselves in the absence of fully engaged leadership.
Have you tended your team lately? What steps are you taking to ensure that your people take root, blossom, and thrive in your organization’s garden? Are you doing the daily work to grow world class talent?
What are your thoughts on this topic? We love to hear you so please share your experiences below.
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Through the Looking Glass
Through the Looking Glass
In 2015 The Metropolitan Museum of Art was busy preparing for the Costume Institutes Spring Exhibit: “China: Through the Looking Glass”, a focus on Chinese imagery in art, film, and fashion. The annual Met Gala is known for its excess. Influential people with big smiles and bigger wallets clothed in couture gowns and designer suits are photographed and broadcast around the globe as attendees strive to outdo themselves and everyone else.
It takes months to put together each event. In the lead up to the 2015 gala every decision about the exhibit was parsed and examined. Where to put the vintage clothes on display? The artwork? Lighting? Seating? Guest List? Logistics? In the midst of this high dollar chaos, Wong Kar Wai, Exhibition Artistic Director for the MET, is quoted as saying, “Seeing too much is seeing nothing.” He’s not wrong.
I am certain that I will never attend the MET Gala, but we play out the theater of property management and leadership every day. Attended by an audience of thousands (of residents and team members), everything we do has significance. It’s not a stretch to say that poor performance in our industry is also photographed and broadcast worldwide.
I think it’s possible to get a little lost because we are seeing too much. Primarily, too much global information all the time. It’s distracting and not productive. We don’t see what’s right in front of us because the buzz, beep, and tune notifications call our attention away. In that moment of interruption lies the interrupted moments. We miss the chance to actually connect with our customers or to engage with our team members. We lose the opportunity to listen. I am not advocating that we force a cell phone bucket at the door policy and prohibit use of phones during the workday – that’s not practical for many reasons. But there are a couple of steps between everything and nothing that might serve us well.
The first one is easy and often causes alarm when I advocate for it, so brace yourself. Turn off all notifications. In every app. In a world addicted to Likes and Comments, this is a hard first step. It is also the most liberating. I find that people default to the worst-case scenario – but my child, my significant other, or parent might need me. But of the ten thousand clicks a day, how many are really for direct communication with your loved ones? Not shared memes or TikToks – but genuine, direct, person to person communication? Right. So – keep your phone. Turn off the notifications. Your loved ones can still leave a message or send a text. It’s possible that you may find that you lose some of the compulsion to check it every time you hear a buzz – because the buzz will be silenced.
The second step goes with the first. Set a calendar reminder to check your phone. Some of that anxiety related to FOMO can be assuaged by knowing you have an appointment to re-engage with your pocket tech. Take a few minutes, check on the family and even how many posts likes you have.
Then, set another calendar notification to put the phone back down. Seeing everything is seeing nothing.
What are your thoughts on this topic? We love to hear them so share your experiences below.
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Fishing Lessons – Caught v. Taught
A friend of mine shared a story from her youth. Her dad was not a fisherman, although he was known to fish from time to time. He taught her how to bait a hook, cast a rod, and reel in a fish. And though she landed a fish once in a great long while, no one would call her competent at fishing. She was taught to fish, but she rarely caught a thing. Listening to her story led me to think about the statement: “lessons are caught, not taught” and how that applies to the multifamily industry.
Every company I have ever known had some form of a mission statement and core values thoughtfully crafted and immortalized on websites and promotional presentations. These statements are foundational – the organizational DNA. They should be the touchstone of the human experience both within and outside the organization. But – often those lofty ideals were created by third-party marketing or PR firms who never worked inside the organization, never experienced the beating heart of what it felt like to labor amidst the internal workings and decision making. No – the wordsmiths crafted beautiful statements filled with noble intentions and once the committee hit the approve button – Bam! Mission and Core Values were established and they moved on to the next thing.
One such company listed integrity, respect, and urgency as their core values. A newly hired employee heard the mission and values during the orientation. One might say, they were even taught the mission and values. The new team member took a deep breath and whole-heartedly believed that they had found a place to work that aligned with their personal value system.
As time went by, the core values eroded. Bills went unpaid and vendors were cut off. Upper management were disrespectful to residents when they actually bothered to return their calls. Managers gossiped about other team members. Employee turnover was constant. However, there was one core value that was never disregarded. Urgency. Absolutely everything needed to be done faster than was possible. Corners were cut. Regulations ignored. Safety put at risk. Hours were extended and family time unraveled. All for the sake of finding a way to get it done immediately. One year, three properties and six managers later, that same team member who was excited to find a place that felt true to their values finally threw in the towel.
They had been taught one thing but caught the truth and the disconnect was too wide to be remedied. Well spun corporate stories and precious statements are never more honest than the lived experiences of the people in our care. At our company, we instituted a practice a few years ago. Impromptu opportunities for team members to quote the mission statement and core values. Those who accurately quoted it scored a crisp $100 bill. No one is penalized for failing but the goal is to make sure that everyone knows what we believe as an organization and to encourage our team members to hold us accountable to those ideals.
I encourage everyone who has the privilege of serving others to examine your heart. Are your actions in alignment with your core values? Do you invite your team members to let you know when they see something that isn’t in line with those important ideals? Do you thank them for bringing it to your attention?
Humanity. It always comes back to humanity. How are we serving the humans in our care?
Do you have a caught vs. taught story? We’d love to hear it. Please share it below.
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