Authentic
Embracing Radical Honesty
How transparency and clear communication reshape careers
As a leader in the multifamily industry, authentic relationships with team members, residents, clients, and vendor partners begin with radical honesty. By emphasizing truth, transparency, and open communication, radical honesty builds trust and fosters a more cohesive working environment. This approach has several challenges and benefits, and understanding them can redefine your leadership style.
Many multifamily leaders veer towards saying what people want to hear rather than what needs to be said. The fear of causing discomfort or dissatisfaction often leads to sugar-coated messages, obscuring the truth. This can create mistrust and confusion among residents and team members. Worse still, it can hinder progress and growth within the industry.
Embracing radical honesty fosters a bond of trust. Open and direct communication creates a clear understanding of expectations. The benefit is a transparent relationship where people feel more connected and respected.
Cultivating a transparent culture among team members by communicating openly and honestly promotes an environment where everyone feels safe to express their thoughts and ideas. This transparency builds confidence and engagement among your team, leading to more productive and satisfied team members.
Developing transparent and ethical communication practices in daily practice, training, and guidelines ensures that all team members understand and adhere to the principles of radical honesty. This leads to consistent communication across the board, fostering a culture of integrity and responsibility.
Measuring and acknowledging the impact of these practices demonstrates the positive effects of radical honesty on your company’s culture. We encourage you to recognize and celebrate the growth in trust and collaboration across your organization.
Authentic Apartment Marketing
Think of apartment seekers as consumers and your communication with them will be perceived as not authentic – think of them as people and you have a shot at creating conversation that speaks to fundamental human need(s), want(s) and desire(s). Think food, water and shelter. And, how do you become authentic as it relates to apartment marketing? You get an understanding.
Understand People and Their Behavior
Why would you want to understand people and their behaviors? The only way you change how people feel, think and behave is to understand them in a very authentic way? Only then will they respond to the power of your creative apartment marketing. Or, conversation and content marketing.
What can you do to understand people and their behaviors? First, you create an authentic and ceaseless urge to know more. You make it your daily quest to always know more about people. Always take notes. Take pictures. Record thoughts. Write a blog post or two or three to flesh out your thoughts. Make it your mission to understand what they think. What they prefer. What they dream. What they desire. And, what they need.
One item on note on understanding – what makes people people is always changing. And, if you are not leading that change in an authentic way then someone else will.
Your, highly interested in anthropology, multifamily maniac,
M
I don’t want people to know
I struggle with statements like this:
"The key is the taste," Tu said. "Ideally, I don’t want people to know what they are eating is vegetarian."
That was a quote from a fast vegetarian food restaurant owner. Now I understand from dollars and cents perspective why he would say that. He has the opportunity to attract both vegetarian’s and non-vegetarians or cannibalvegans, those who go back and forth. And furthermore he knows that the mass of citizens are already trained on taste by McDonalds, Burger King and to some degree Wendy’s.
But under the guise of being authentic why would you not shout from the rooftops that your product is what your product is? We can’t say it enough, consumers want authentic experiences and that includes the advertising that gets them and keeps them coming back. Why would you disassociate your great tasting vegetarian meal from being a vegetarian meal?
Do you think we do that in the apartment business when we market our respective communities. Do we disassociate from the very thing we should be creating connection with?
What do you think?
