It has become standard fair in real estate circles to talk about how the office is in competition with people’s homes. The thinking goes that if employees can either work from home or the office, then the office must be made more enticing to draw people toward that option. Unstated in this theory is the…
Empowerment means encouraging others to tell you no.
I love the idea of empowerment. Selfishly, it means that I get to use my own judgment to decide the best course of action in my own world. Terrifyingly, it means letting my team use their own judgment to decide the best course of action in their worlds. [As an aside, my team is fantastic…
I am terrible at disconnecting from work and taking real time away, but I am told practice makes perfect.
I am out of the office right now. [Note: this post was intentionally written before I left so I would not eat into my actual time away!] This is weird for me to say since I have been a full-time work-from-home person for over a decade now. Being out of the office is my default…
If you mandate 3 days a week in the office, you are not offering hybrid work opportunities.
Mandates are the rage yet again. We went through this in the middle of 2022 when COVID-19 restrictions first began disappearing. Then again at the end of 2022. Now again in early 2023. It is a never-ending hot topic for business leaders who have no clue how their employees worked before the pandemic, how they…
This is a message for all the mentors in this world who do not know that they are mentors.
I have been blessed in my career to have a number of managers and leaders that I have been able to look up to and learn from. Most of these individuals probably never even realized that I was learning from their actions and behaviors. Some of them may not even remember me at all. But…
Boosting office utilization should not be the goal of any workplace strategy.
I should not be surprised by the behavior, yet I still find myself astounded by the online commentary from “commercial real estate experts.” They seem to think the only goal businesses should have is to “boost office utilization.” Their fear, uncertainty, and doubt shine through when they opine on the latest company to either support…
The smartest person in the room is rarely the one that gets the job completed.
Let us start by saying I have a healthy ego. It has taken me years to reconcile the fact that being right about a question, subject, or topic does not equate to being effective. Interestingly, it is the smartest people in the room that are most likely to derail an otherwise effective meeting or project…
The future is going to show up for us no matter what we do or say. We may be able to influence it, but we definitely are not stopping it.
None of us are capable of holding back the tides of time. One way or another, we are all in a race to the future. As the line goes, “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” For better or worse, Corporate Real Estate is a world that solely focuses on the future….
Workplace design has never been more important, but overanalysis can be extremely dangerous.
The pandemic is over! The pandemic is over! I’ve heard the cries up and down the streets worldwide from individuals, colleagues, business leaders, and governments. The declaration of freedom has been loud and excited from all quarters. The theory seems to be that by saying it often enough will also mean that it never happened….