How to Build Better Managers

The Challenge

Rose Associates is a soon-to-be 90-year-old family business. For the last couple of years, our customer base and competition have changed – to some degree, dramatically – in that we don’t just manage co-ops and condos any longer, we manage multi-family rentals for the institutional owner. To that end, we had to evolve as a company. How were we to proceed?

The Solution

We developed a more corporate basis for how we function, commencing with a new hire orientation. New employees, regardless of their role, meet with each and every one of our core business providers, which includes everything from advisory to development; to construction management to property management; to finance to risk management; and to leasing and sales. Each new employee has an opportunity to find out exactly what people do, and how they’ll interact with them.

The other thing we’ve done is we’ve changed to an employee “Performance Management Program,” where we are asking, “What’s good, what’s bad, what needs improvement?” Once those items have been determined, we’ve asked, “How are we responding to those determinations? How is the employee developing as it relates to our mission statement and customers’ needs?” We do in-house tutoring and mentoring and, where appropriate, we will reimburse the employee to be trained at professional training organizations, such as Dale Carnegie, the American Management Association, Cornell, and New York University in the respective or desired concentration.

The Lesson

What we’ve realized is that to excel and provide an exemplary level of service, we needed to change. We needed to build better employees, and by building better employees, we build a better company. Not to make light of this, but it’s akin to the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams, where the voice is whispering to the hero, “If you build it, they will come.” We look at it this way: “If we build a better employee, we’re building a better company; and if we build a better company, the customers, be it cooperatives, condominiums, or multi-family rentals, will come.”