The No. 1 take-away right now is the sense of urgency facing the industry. Often, we use the word urgency to characterize whether prospective or would-be home buyers feel intensely motivated to move into action in a housing market. Urgency is the force that pushes people from a nice-to-have state of mind about housing to a must-have state of mind. Urgency triggers a wide-scale response to market opportunity, often with an underlying current of fear that that opportunity will be lost if one doesn’t move sooner than later.
Here’s where there’s a different kind of urgency at work. As Zelman intimated, a lack of or inadequate response by builders to the need for more homes at more pricing tiers will stifle growth. As our builders affirmed, there’s risk to them, their stakeholders, and their associates, of venturing aggressively into meeting that need without a solid sense that the demand will rise to reward their initiatives. Policy–and the force of capital needing to be put to use to grow and satisfy investors–will ease in the months and years ahead, playing its part.
But home builders and developers are either at an impasse (risk averse), or an inflection point (reward-bound), and that’s where urgency and where teams fit in.
Here are 20 take-aways about teams I learned from the HLS that just occurred.
- Team …. Is trust at work, in action, beyond lip-service.
- Team … is what makes the sum greater than the parts.
- Team … is the ultimate org chart… reflecting a heterarchy, vs. a hierarchy to drive progress and profitability.
- Team … is culture taken out of consultant-speak and translated into plain language and action.
- Team … is your firm’s mission in its human form.
- Team … is a symptom of leadership, and is a contagion that can take over your organization if you allow it to.
- Team … is passion with eyes, ears, and a sense of touch, a feel for forward motion; purpose, the sense of why and for-whom; and process, the clarity of how, or the resolve to find out how.
- Team … is pulling in the same direction.
- Team is the more that you make of less.
- Team is velocity, which is speed combined with direction.
- Teams displace inertia, defy gravity, learn from failures, and emerge winners.
- Team is recognizing that not all ideas and beliefs have to be the same for there to be unity
- Team is accountability for outcomes and responsibility for future outcomes
- When people lock into a team’s goals, they unlock forces of resistance, particles of mass, and the riddle of motion in the wrong direction.
- Team is about solving what scarce resources cannot solve.
- A group may lose. A team never loses—they win, or they learn.
- Team is about taking set-backs in stride, and taking wins with a grain of humility.
- A team bypasses texts, emails, instant messaging, etc. and talks in person to one another.
- Individuals may be brilliant, only a team can apply that brilliance to real world challenges in home building.
- A group may find itself in the way of technological progress; a team finds itself working alongside technological advances toward 1. Asking the right questions, and 2. Generating the answers.
