Multifamily leadership
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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Robert Turnbull | Collective Conversations
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Advertising & Authenticity
Who are we? What do we believe? What are we going to do about it?
Leo Burnett was an American advertising executive and the founder of Leo Burnett Company, Inc. He was responsible for creating some of advertising’s most well-known characters and campaigns of the 20th century, including Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger, United’s “Fly the Friendly Skies”, and Allstate’s “Good Hands”. In 1999, Burnett was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
I can’t take credit for the three leading questions above. Leo Burnett believed that every company should ask themselves those questions and they still apply today. The answers help businesses distill their understanding of identity, values, and intention – in other words, culture. Leo understood that “the work of [an advertising] agency is warmly and immediately human.” This human-centric statement resonates with me because I believe that there are few industries more engaged in the lifecycle of humanity than those in the multifamily industry.
The Impact of Culture
The Multifamily Collective is filled with content that credits culture as the most significant source of influence. The common language of shared culture is powerful. Entire countries, religions, and generations are grounded in shared beliefs, values, and practices which coalesce to form its culture. In business, a company’s culture is the most important factor in determining its long-term success. An organization that holds itself accountable to behaviors that are in genuine alignment with its published core values earns the trust and loyalty of its workforce.
Authenticity Matters
In all areas of life – personal, social, and professional – people are hungry for authenticity. Culture in word but not in deed is false and quickly fails the authenticity test. Depending on the source, reports show that consumers receive more than 5,000 attempts every day to influence their decisions. Targeted ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and even Waze recognize where you are and what your online behavior trends indicate then use that information to make suggestions for you. Paid. Targeted. “Suggestions”.
Influencers are engaged in the business of influencing. In 2020, successful influencers earned somewhere around $1,000 on average per post depending on their statistics – reach, engagement, etc. When a person on social media posts authentic content about their life, passions, creative work, family, travels, etc., followers find it engaging and believable, and they develop a relationship with the person behind the content. When that same person shares an ad as though it were a legitimate lifestyle post, the consumer senses the difference immediately. The change in tone is jarring and the content no longer feels honest. It weakens the relationship.
Differentiation
With all the digital noise and constant demand for attention – how does any company stand out from the clamor and earn the trust of their customers? Consumers are savvier than ever before. They are also more cynical. Trust isn’t given away easily and everything begins to feel like a negotiation. Consumers sense the ‘salesy’ stuff coming from a mile away.
Adam Grant offers a different perspective in this quote, “Negotiation is not a duel to win. It is a puzzle to solve together.” When you approach negotiation with a customer as an opportunity to bring different voices to the table to craft a more optimal solution, the outcomes are better for everyone. Trying to WIN forces the other participant to LOSE. And no person is eager to feel like a loser.
Currency of Trust
If authenticity is the real currency of trust, then transparency, thoughtful communication, and a commitment to work together for the benefit of everyone involved is a simple formula that, when applied internally and externally, just may differentiate you from the noise.
Authentic relationships require real work. Transactions may be more straightforward, but they lack the mutually beneficial connectivity found in human-to-human relationships and when it comes down to it, we are all human, afterall.
What are you doing to stand out from the crowd and create authentic connections? Share with us below!
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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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Episode 1165 | Do This To Make Things Worse
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