Change Begets Change

Change begets change. In the last twelve months, my management team has undergone a series of radical transformations. Two of my long standing sales directors have departed the firm, as has one of shorter duration. I have a new sales director for my new Upper West Side office. I had an ambassador without portfolio on my management team for many years who is dropping off at the end of the year to concentrate more fully on brokerage. I have an entirely new marketing team. My daughter has joined the firm to direct our strategic and marketing initiatives. As I look around our conference table during the weekly management meetings, half the faces were not there a year ago.

A year ago, I could not have imagined that the exciting and transformative changes in which our company is engaged were on the horizon. But change has also challenged my preconceptions about the company and forced me to contemplate what I really believe to be important. It is so easy to be swept along by the quotidian, to become immersed in the daily tasks which are always voluminous enough to prevent engagement with larger issues.

In Stephen Covey’s wonderful book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Covey creates what was for me a life-changing matrix around the words “urgent” and “important.” Clearly tasks which satisfy both criteria receive your immediate attention, and probably most tasks which satisfy neither never get attended to at all. The challenge is in how we divide our time between those tasks which seem urgent but are not important, and those which are important but not particularly urgent. In a real estate office, there are always enough urgent but not important mini-crises to fill up the day. Luckily, the important but not urgent issues have been much on my mind during the past twelve months. And what I have realized is that we are a company with moral authority, intellectual capital and deep experience, a terrific manager/agent ratio, and a strong belief in the power of technology to enable, not disable, our agents. But as the market has changed we have had to rethink and retool the descriptions for some key jobs: hence the new people sitting around my management table. Some of these changes I made, some were made for me, but the result is the same: we embark with the new team on the new adventure.

Finding the new team members has not been easy – as everyone who runs a company knows, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince or princess. My plans get interrupted by unexpected bumps; they need to be rewritten, or postponed, or scrapped. People don’t always make the best decisions or see that issues get resolved in a way which seems congruent with our culture. But in spite of everything, I find that as my vision for the future gets clearer, things fall into place. Mind you, I am not doing this alone. Today I have a team of really excellent people around me: smart, focused and creative. They not only have great ideas, they also free ME to have great ideas, to see the next exciting trend and embrace it, or to spin the wheel of the ship soon enough so it doesn’t actually HIT the iceberg. So I am stressed, I am busy from morning till night with both the urgent and the important things, and I am completely energized. That’s change: it keeps you moving forward. It keeps you young.