Leadership
Changing Perspective
In March 2011, I wrote about changing up the way you think about prospects and residents. “Prospects and residents are human beings and or people first. Think of it this way, treat them as prospects or consumers and you are treating them according to your needs. Turn that around and treat them as people or humans and you are treating them according to their needs.”
Earlier this year the post Business is Personal, discussed being in service of the whole humans who work for and serve the business. On the surface, these two admonitions may appear to be in conflict, but I believe they are two sides of the same coin.
Hot Under The Collar
Many times, when a resident calls the home office, the caller is hot under the collar, feeling that their needs haven’t been met or that they have fundamentally been disrespected. The follow-up conversation with the site team often runs along the same lines – they feel that the resident violated policy, was rude, and want to know that the company ‘has their back’ in the conflict – often quoting some form of evidence that they were right, and the resident is wrong.
In this right vs. wrong mindset, there are no winners. Either/or is almost always a sucker’s choice and leaves at least one party feeling maligned and misunderstood.
Pressing Buttons
I know from personal experience that some residents seem to press all the buttons and when that happens, it is easy to get caught up in an emotional hailstorm. But when my buttons are pressed, it is MY responsibility. How I manage those feelings and how I respond are completely within my control. It isn’t the resident’s fault if I ‘lose it’. To paraphrase Viktor Frankl, there is power in the space between stimulus and response. We have the power to choose and, in our response lies the opportunity for growth.
When a business accepts the responsibility to act in service of its team members with a culture that actively removes barriers to healthy communication, it promotes a standard of psychological safety. In that climate, it becomes easier to engage in difficult conversations and team members learn how to resolve conflicts without defaulting to triggered emotional responses.
You Win – I Win – We Win
When the overall stated goal is to generate better outcomes for everyone instead of winning at all costs, it increases the likelihood that residents will feel heard, and their issues will be resolved in a way that benefits them.
Ultimately, the business wins when the team members do, and we all benefit when our customer wins.
What are you doing to create winning situations for your team members and customers? Share your stories with us!
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Episode 1180a | Judge The Questions
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Intuitive Leadership
I am not a teacher.
I have great admiration for teachers. They have the ability to take complex concepts and break them down into small components. Using those skills, they bring learners with varying levels of native proficiency to a place of understanding and application.
I have made a valiant effort, studying, preparing, and over-preparing for those times when it fell to me to teach, but it is not my natural skill. And that’s okay. Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Some of us are birds and others are fish.
I love the book The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life by Boyd Varty. In it there is a quote by fellow tracker Renias Mhlongo; “I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.” That statement comes much closer to describing my leadership style.
I fall into the category of the intuitive leader in that I may not be able to explain every step along the way but I am confident in how to get there. My belief does not lie in my own personal ability to execute every component of a goal because any business’s success is tied to the work of the many. My trust is in how I understand my personal true north and in the intentional practices and the pole-watchers that I keep in place.
Intuitive leadership starts with personal development. For me, that involves a host of personal practices, morning, and evening routines that center my thoughts, examine my emotions, and set my intentions. My personal faith grounds me. These practices help soften my heart, sharpen my sword and prepare me for the day ahead. The people closest to me hold me accountable.
Intuition without deep personal work can be catastrophic. Without constraints, intuition can easily devolve into ego. It can blur the lines and divert your focus. It is easy to get lost in understanding your authentic values – making money without making a difference, confusing pleasure with joy, and creating goals that aren’t tied to purpose.
Intuitive leadership is most effective when tied with personal values. People trust a leader who leads from the heart and the gut. One without the other misses the mark. Everyone finds their own path to connect their personal values to their leadership style but if you want to lead with intuition, start with deep, committed, personal work.
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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.
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Business is Personal
Photo by Bekir Dönmez on Unsplash
Business IS Personal
In The Godfather (1972) Michael Corleone infamously says, “It’s nothing personal, Sonny – It’s strictly business” when referring to the shooting of a colleague’s father. Far be it from me to tangle with a mob family but given the chance, I’d like to say, “You’re (dead) wrong.”
When team members come to work, either to the physical business center or through virtual/digital systems, they bring their whole selves with them. There is no imaginary coat hook by the door where the problems of real life are parked until the end of the business day only to be picked up and loaded on again before going home.
Businesses serve these whole humans. Pressures, which were mounting long before, have intensified over the past two years as team members’ personal and professional lives merged (and often cracked) under the pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic. The disruption of work-life balance, loss of workplace camaraderie, and lack of shared in-person experiences left many workers feeling disconnected from the business. Working parents experienced the additional burdens of juggling remote learning and feelings of constant guilt about not meeting the needs of either family or job.
As pandemic-related restrictions have eased and our lives returned to some new form of normalcy that never quite fit the original mold, businesses should be thoughtful about the path forward. Organizations better serve their people when they actively remove barriers to healthy, creative, mindful work including those physical, psychological, and cultural obstacles.
It is critically important to intentionally engage with team members and invite candid conversation. Develop an ear for what is not being said as much as what is. I encourage you to make it safe for team members to share pain points and develop strategies that adapt to meet the evolving needs of your teams.
Companies that invest in the true overall wellbeing of their workforce have better outcomes and higher retention. Team members feel the difference when the business views them holistically. In a time when talent is harder to source, companies have come to recognize the importance of working in service of the whole humans that make up their teams.
What are you doing to work in service of your team members and how has that changed in the past two years? Share your stories with us.
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