Real Estate Forum - October 2015

WHEN DIFFERENT GENERATIONS OF COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE LEADERSHIP MEET, THEY MAY FIND THAT EACH HAS MUCH TO LEARN FROM THE OTHER

Arecent Ernst & Young study of chal- lenges in the REIT sector identified succession planning as the leading concern among senior management, especially since the turnover rate in the CEO suite has increased lately as top leaders retire. “The complexity of the CEO role means that individuals need a wide array of skills, and these are best developed over time through an extensive talent management program,” the report states.

At the other end of the career spectrum, real estate professionals who may be years away from taking on a leadership role face their own uphill climb in developing those skills.

While networking and personal-enrich-ment programs abound for younger professionals, “there is a gap in the industry’s offerings for the younger generation and those aimed at seasoned leaders,” Josh Cox, development manager at Stirling Development, told GlobeSt.com, Real Estate Forum’s sister publication, this past August.

“Making the jump from ‘young leader’
to leader thus isn’t spelled out, which can
make the process fun, but also a bit con-
voluted,” said Cox, who received the
Emergent Leadership Award in
Development from the Urban Land
Institute this past summer. “Additionally,
managers are often too busy to train
younger employees, so we need to proac-
tively seek out one or two mentor rela-
tionships.”
Here, Forum presents four case studies
of one generation of commercial real
estate leadership meeting another. Each
story is different from the others, with one
thing in common: the sharing of knowl-
edge and insight across generations is a
two-way street.

MENTORING AND REVERSE
MENTORING

“To some extent, I’m carrying on my
father’s legacy,” Russ Parker, managing
director at Parker Properties, tells Forum.
His late father, John Parker, founded the
Aliso Viejo, CA-based development firm in
the 1970s, and also was instrumental in
establishing the NAIOP SoCal chapter’s
Young Professionals Group in 2004. The
program offers leadership training to a
class of 35 real estate professionals ages 22
to 35 each year.
In keeping with the younger Parker’s
motto that “I never turn down the opportu-
nity to speak and meet with young people
looking for career advice,” he co-chairs the
YPG program’s mentor initiative. Less for-
mally structured than the YPG curriculum,
to which it’s a follow-up, the mentor initia-
tive does come with the expectation that
each mentee will be “pretty aggressive”
about scheduling time with his or her men-
tor. “It gives mentees a chance to take a
breath and talk about where they want to
be in five years, what they like doing, what
they don’t like doing,” says Parker.
At present, Parker is serving as mentor
to Kurt Kaufman, a YPG alumnus and
CEO of Blue Sky Basin Realty Advisors,
which he founded in 2014 after departing
from the Abbey Co. as executive vice presi-
dent. As a mentor, he says, “I’m not sure it
goes like this with everybody, but what I’ve
found, and especially with Kurt Kaufman,
is that I get reverse-mentored. I’m an
office and mixed-use developer, so I love
to run my great theories of the next great
workplace by Kurt.”