When I first saw Chantal Clavier’s research I was impressed by how comprehensive it was. As someone new to the real estate industry – I just passed my 1 year anniversary at Juniper Square – I wanted to understand what was top of mind for the leaders in the industry and found this study to be fascinating.
I recently had the chance to catch up with Chantal and discuss the project. Below is a summary of our conversation.
Tell us about what Heidrick & Struggles does
We’re a premium global provider for talent and leadership services. That means finding and developing people at a senior level, through our executive search and leadership advisory business.
More specifically, our leadership advisory offering includes assessing talent and teams and looking at organizational design, the purpose of a business and shaping its culture. There are a few hundred occupational psychologists within our business. We are a multifaceted solutions provider around talent and all it can mean.
In summary, we focus on helping find talent, keep, and develop it.
Tell us about your role and responsibilities
We have a global real estate business. I lead the business for real estate in EMEA but I also take on global mandates. In addition to that, I sit in our board and CEO practice across sectors. Thirdly, I sit within our global diversity and inclusion practice.
What prompted this research?
I’ve been in executive search now for nearly 20 years with a focus on the real estate sector. I started in the UK, spanned into Europe and then moved globally into real estate in terms of the mandates I was doing and the network I built up.
I love the sector. There’s so much to it. The people are pragmatic, commercial, social. The sector includes everything that’s in your daily life. You’re sitting in real estate most of the time. And it isn’t just your house, it’s your office, your shopping center, your parking, the public realm, student accommodation, life sciences, hospitals, restaurants – the list is endless. It’s absolutely everywhere and part of every waking and sleeping moment and not every sector can claim that.
As I’ve gone through the last 15 years in this asset class, I realise that the sector is behind the innovation curve compared to other sectors. That’s both good and bad.
An obvious upside is that you can be entrepreneurial. You can invent and create as you want and there are plenty of founders that do just that. However, real estate has institutionalized as a sector since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and become more sophisticated in its approach, more competitive, and more complex spanning into consumer and operational businesses.
People have also become a priority for leaders too. There is a broad and unanimous acknowledgement that people make the difference between a good and great organization.
I was thinking about all of the changes I’ve seen, and the way that real estate is going to have to change even more. We were talking about these changes way before COVID arrived in January 2020 – we’ve been talking about tech, sustainability, cultures and mindsets. We’ve been wondering when people will stop going to shops or what brings people into shopping centers. Or how offices need to be more holistic in their offering, it’s not just a place to sit at a desk.
This has all been going on over this decade and after the GFC there were a number of assets that were used differently (“change of use”). But the reality is that whilst there has been a lot of thinking, there has been far less action. Because many real estate businesses were making significant profits before the pandemic, there wasn’t a sense of urgency to change their strategy significantly. Therefore change has been really slow. and that’s part of the problem. COVID has shifted that incredibly. Change is no longer a choice. It will rip us apart somewhat as a sector before we are then re-shaped. But therein lies the opportunity again for the entrepreneurs and those who are on-trend and unafraid.
Why start this survey then? It was because nobody has ever really looked at the leadership within real estate, and measured it, evaluated it, and published it and compared it to a decade ago. Given the changes that we saw coming – it felt instinctively the right moment to do it.
I measure leadership within real estate all the time as part of my day job, but I have never written about it collectively and comparatively, globally. That was the really interesting angle and opportunity. Since I hadn’t done that, I wondered who had. As it turns out, nobody had. Every bookstore, every Amazon list is full of leadership books, but not leadership in real estate specifically.
I saw the opportunity to speak to what ended up being over 100 CEOs for a couple of hours each to understand this.
So I personally led the survey because there wasn’t anything written on the topic that I could find. And I did it because, as somebody who had been in the sector, I wanted to compare and look back to 2010 when we had last run a survey. That survey was a little different from this one, more simplistic in nature but we could still compare the quantitative results and then look to the decade ahead and make some assumptions for 2030.
Tell us about the question development process
This was actually quite difficult. Part of it was almost innate for me having accumulated knowledge of the sector over the years, but we created defined question sections based on trends we could see coming.
Take inclusivity, for example. That was a section on its own and that’s a really easy one to pull out. Technology was another easy one to highlight. So in creating these defined areas we could then start to formulate questions.
The next part was about reflecting on where we think the sector is at and what are businesses doing to drive change further?
For example, we opened the D&I (Diversity & Inclusion) section with, “To what extent do you see the D&I agenda as being a strategic importance?” There was a one to six tick box. The idea of having answers ranging from one to six is that actually it’s very difficult to find the middle. You’ve got to pick three or four if you’re going to go for the middle. And then that gives an indication of one way or the other.
Then the other questions become yes or no. For example, “Is your leadership team reflective of the gender balance of your investor base?” Yes or no. It’s not possible to answer “not sure,” because you have to know as the chief executive. “Is your leadership team reflective of the gender base of your tenant or client base?” Yes or no. So you’re asking simplistic questions and you’re leading them through.
Typically we established that the topic was of some strategic value to all the leaders so it was then quite natural to ask, “Does your organization measure, track and hold colleagues accountable for D&I to ensure that it’s a strategic priority?”
So two questions ago we asked “Is it a strategic priority?” And you said, “Yeah, somewhere in there it is.” Now we’re saying, “Well, do you actually measure it then if you think it’s strategic?” Which is a bit of a sticky question. And here we gave the leaders a sliding scale of between 1-6 encouraging them to really think through what they do today within their organisation. As discussed earlier, it’s hard to sit on the fence with such a scale.
Walk us through the data collection process
We sent the questionnaire ahead, so people had time to reflect on it. It was 10 pages for them to fill out, but we didn’t want them to fill it out on their own beforehand. We sent them the survey they could see the questions, they could think about and reflect on them. We then set up a 1-2 hour meeting with each CEO to walk through it. We would go through each question to get the quantitative data.
In doing it this way our participants had the opportunity to tell their story, and share their thoughts on what they thought was happening.
The quantitative aspect of that two hours typically took around 45 minutes. The remaining time was free flowing, dynamic conversation. They shared how they were seeing the world and what they thought was coming. It was this part of the conversation that was often the most interesting to me.
You don’t often get to sit with leaders and cover such a range of topics and in such depth across asset classes and globally. We opened the discussion with simple demographic questions like, “How long have you been in your job? How long have you been in the industry? How long have you been a CEO or in C-suite? What part of real estate do you sit in – investments, development, asset management?”
And then it moved on to, “Let’s give you some questions with some areas for you to prioritize. So, for example, assuming financial skills are a given, prioritize the following traits for a real estate CEO today. Rank them one to six.” And then we listed out traits and they had to put them in an order of which was the most important to the least.
We did this alongside asking questions with answers of “agree, disagree, not sure.” So, for example, “Would you agree or disagree with the statement, a CEO does not always need previous real estate experience to be effective in our sector?” Agree, disagree, not sure. And then they had to comment.
By being with them face-to-face I was able to ask them to tell me why they gave that answer.
We designed and deployed the survey in a way that we didn’t just have the tick box data – we pushed for the reason behind the answer.
This process led to a fuller discussion where obviously you’ve got to be kind. I’m not there to try and embarrass individuals or businesses. In fact the main reason I wanted to do the survey in the first place was to help the sector. I feel passionately about real estate because I really enjoy conversing with the people in the sector. This work was about inputting collectively and sharing collectively to improve the businesses in the real estate and help future-proof them.
The only way you can help leaders and businesses and bring them with you is if you ask questions and keep confidentiality. Having a great sense of purpose (why you are doing something) and integrity is vital. Find the holes and then flag the gaps, kindly. So that the participant can review this and think, “Okay, she’s right to ask the question. I just said it was strategically important, but I’m not measuring and tracking it at all.”
How did you position this request to your target participants?
Part of the invitation was the chance for us to discuss these issues and I could share my expertise. But the other part was the chance to participate in a study of their peers – and get the benchmarking data first, ahead of everybody else.
I made it clear that no one will know who partook. It was 100% confidential.
I know these leaders, and I think you have to have that trusted environment to start with. They’ve got to know that you’re going to do what you say you will. So the relationship has got to be there if you really want to get to the nub of topics and if you want honesty. Which is why I did this myself and took the time with each leader. After all they put the time in so I felt it was important to do the same!
Tell us about some of the benefits that you got out of this research
It’s very difficult to measure. Do I think that it added to our stature as a market leader within the real estate world within Executive Search? Yes, absolutely. And do I know that it helped boards? Absolutely.
I had chairmen, chairwomen, and CEOs write to me to say that they thought this was the handbook of the industry. Some of them had known some of what is written in the report. But to have it written by an independent party that has interviewed a number of other leaders meant they could bring it to their board or their executive committee and discuss it in an independent, objective way. It gave them real power to bring these topics into their business and move forward in those areas.
With this project, I feel we fulfilled our purpose of benefiting the industry. CEOs and chairs now feel a greater sense of empowerment to bring these topics to the table as discussion points. They can say, “Heidrick and Struggles have released this. Have you all seen it?”
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Thanks to Chantal for sharing her experience. Download the report, Leadership in Real Estate, here.