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A recent Ernst & Young study of challenges 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-enrichment 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 convoluted," 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 proactively seek out one or two mentor relationships."

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 knowledge 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 opportunity to speak and meet with young people looking for career advice," he co-chairs the YPG program's mentor initiative. Less formally structured than the YPG curriculum, to which it's a follow-up, the mentor initiative does come with the expectation that each mentee will be "pretty aggressive" about scheduling time with his or her mentor. "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.

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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 president. 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."

The week before he spoke to Forum in connection with this article, Parker showed Kaufman around the latest phase of the massive, multi-year Summit project Parker Properties is developing in Aliso Viejo. He tells Forum that he found Kaufman's comments and questions "very helpful to me, because some of the new things we're trying to do with office space resonate better with younger people. When I run some of those ideas past some of my peers, they roll their eyes a little bit."

For his part, Kaufman says that having recently launched Blue Sky Basin Realty, a CRE advisory firm headquartered in Manhattan Beach, CA, "It was a perfect time to form a one-on-one relationship with an experienced, senior commercial real estate executive. I couldn't have found or asked for a better mentor than Russ." He adds that Parker "does what leaders need to do, which is to stay current and evolve."

Although the structure is "casual, as opposed to buttoned-down," Kaufman says he gleans a great deal from the interplay between Parker and himself. He recently brought his mentor to a project which Blue Sky Basin Realty recently acquired, still in the conceptual stage in terms of how it will be revitalized. Since the NAIOP program mandates that discussions between mentor and mentee are strictly off the record, "I have no concern about sharing financial numbers or details that people normally wouldn't share because of confidentiality concerns," says Kaufman. "It's fun to not only ask for advice, but also collaborate and potentially give him an idea or two."

That a mentor/mentee relationship could work both ways was "my biggest surprise," Parker says. When his late father gave 90-minute to two-hour talks before YPG audiences, "it was more a case of him being in the mentor role." The younger Parker has emphasized the creative side of office in recent projects, and when he gave a PowerPoint presentation to a YPG class, "they asked such good questions and they were really opinionated. At the end of the class, I was totally blown away by how insightful they were. If I had a good idea, I'd hear about it, but at the same time, some of my ideas didn't resonate with them and they would let you know that."

GETTING A LEG UP

When Patrick Barry graduated from Coldwell Banker Commercial's Emerging Broker Training program in 2014, it was at the top of a class of 50-plus. To hear him tell it, much of the credit for his success in the program could be claimed by the mentor/mentee relationship that CBC requires as a prerequisite for participation in EBT—in this case, with his father, second-generation broker Art Barry III, partner in Coldwell Banker Commercial Eberhardt & Barry in Macon, GA. "I had not one but two legs up on most of the people in the class," says Patrick Barry.

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At first, says Patrick Barry, "I really wasn't doing anything other than watching Dad do what he does, in and out of the office," although he had begun listing properties by the time he began EBT. 'Whatever he was doing, I was there." That included shadow training not only in the mechanics of brokerage but also in such subtleties as the art of talking to clients. "Dad is a master of small talk." When Art Barry wasn't actively engaged in an activity, "It was Q&A time," Patrick Barry says. "I could ask my questions, and basically feel my way through a dark room in my first six months in the business."

The elder Barry, whose father co-founded Eberhardt & Barry with Guy Eberhardt in 1970, recalls that when he started in the business in 1984, he focused on "trying to emulate what seemed to be the more productive parts of what they did, relating to recognizing real estate opportunities." He had previously spent four years working for Northwestern Mutual Life, where he learned advanced sales techniques. "I had that under my belt when I returned to Macon, and I was shocked at how little training there was" at commercial brokerages at the time. "When Patrick came along, he was a natural-born salesman, but he had a much different training than I did. I was trained basically by the seat of the pants. It worked, but it was coupled with some Fortune 100 techniques" that he had obtained at Northwestern Mutual.

He gives plaudits to the sequence of education that Patrick underwent: shadow training, followed by specialized learning through EBT. "Teaching techniques is something that is long in process," says Art Barry. "It's easy in theory, but it takes time."

The younger Barry acknowledges that he would have acquired these skills on his own without EBT and a mentor, but it would likely have taken a great deal longer. In EBT, "I was trying to fine-tune the tools that had already been given to me," he says. "The mechanics of the business, I had down; the finer points I didn't."

The course includes lessons that may not have been available to veterans like Art Barry. Once the younger Barry returned from EBT at CBC's headquarters in Madison, NJ, he was able to pass along what he had learned. "It's exposed me to the younger mindset, and to far more efficient ways than the old dinosaur method of beating the streets and just trying to make it through the network," says Art Barry.

PASSING THE TORCH

The past 18 months have been times of change at the Chicago office of what is now Savills Studley. Since late May of 2014, the venerable tenant representation firm founded by Julien Studley in 1954 has been owned by London-based Savills plc; since December of last year, the Chicago office has been under new leadership for the first time in more than a quarter-century.

EVP John Goodman, who had led the office since 1989 and co-led it with EVPs Joe Learner and Rick Schuham since 1997, turned over the reins to Robert Sevim and Eric Feinberg. Both Sevim and Feinberg had been members of the Chicago region's management committee before becoming co-heads of the region; Goodman, Learner and Schuham are continuing as members of the committee.

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"At the time of our merger, there was a recognition that there was change coming down the pike," Feinberg tells Forum. "The people who had been involved in leading our office for so long felt it would be good if we implemented some change on the local level as well."

The idea, says Sevim, "was to pass the torch to two individuals whom they identified as the right people to move forward with all of the goals and objectives we have as a company and as an office. The transition was relatively smooth because we'd had a lot of exposure to the day-to-day, and the good news is we continue to have access to the same folks who passed the torch."

Goodman tells Forum that with the Chicago office's co-heads having served in that capacity for as long as 25 years, "there's no denying that sometimes you lose energy in that aspect of the business. The three of us still have tremendous energy around our client work, which has gone from 80% of what we do to 95% now. But we recognized that we were probably not the right folks to continue to drive the organization in our office." Sevim and Feinberg's "postive energy," along with "the ideas and observations that they were coming to us with, and our own shift in energy more toward our clients—those two things happened concurrently and became an obvious directional change for us."

Among the changes the new leadership has brought to the office is the way in which knowledge is disseminated. "Historically, knowledge transfer would come from the senior level," says Goodman. But Sevim and Feinberg are "changing it up," in ways that are benefiting the old guard as well.

For example, Goodman says that he's been learning "how to build relationships and capitalize on my network through vehicles like LinkedIn." Previously, he acknowledges, he hadn't seen the value proposition in social media, but now team members in their late 20s are showing him how to capitalize on that.

Moreover, Sevim and Feinberg are engaging analysts on different teams "to transfer knowledge from one team to another, and new ways of looking at analytics and exploiting our research capabilities," Goodman says. Our younger generation has a much better knowledge base on how to get at data and do research in ways that are enlightening to the old-school folks."

One Chicago-region broker who is helping point the way in using social media for business development, at the behest of Sevim and Feinberg, is assistant director Patrick Brady. "The new leadership wants to reach out to the entire breadth of the office and make sure that everyone from every level of experience is connected with and make sure everyone's voice is heard," he tells Forum.

He cites Sevim and Feinberg's selection of team members to serve on a committee that will help them find new office space for the Chicago region, as well as the way in which they identified him and senior managing director Adam Mitchell as bellwethers for social media use. "In a collaborative office, you want case studies of anything that's working for an individual to be shared throughout the company," Brady explains.

Feinberg sums up the new approach he and Sevim are taking. "The old-school approach to brokerage was, "here's a phone, get some clients, your work is done,'" he says. "People want more than that now. They want to have ownership, they want to feel like they're part of something a little bit bigger.'

The larger Savills Studley organization has viewed the transformation in Chicago as "a template for evolution, a template for recognition of those that have long-term aspirations to shape the culture of an office," says Sevim. "We're being very communicative and transparent with other offices, and with our headquarters, in the event that they can utilize some of the things that we're doing here."

MAKING A GRADUAL SHIFT

Another passing of the torch is underway on the West Coast, with some notable differences. The discipline in this case is not commercial brokerage but construction management, and the transition is not occurring all at once but over a period of years. Moreover, what's getting new leadership is not a regional office but an entire company.

What Irvine, CA-based Snyder Langston shares in common with NAIOP SoCal and Coldwell Banker Commercial is leadership training. Chairman and CEO Stephen Jones based the firm's Building Blocks curriculum on what he had learned particpating in the Young Presidents Organization and wanted to bring to his company.

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The idea, Jones tells Forum, is culture-building. "You can have all of these processes in place and people can be very good at what they do, but you can't copy a culture," he says. "And that is what produces results; it's the great differentiator."

As Jones took the reins from SL's founders, so he is beginning a transition to the "next generation" of leadership that will unfold over the next decade. "If you care about the legacy, which we do, you need to have some new group or individual come in and start participating," he says. "So fundamentally that's what we're doing" with three key executives, a number that's expected to grow to five over the next few years.

Among the three executives currently moving toward a leadership role is Jo-E Immel, VP of business development at SL. While she has not participated in the Building Blocks program since joining the company nine years ago, "The leadership training that Snyder Langston put me through has allowed me to come into my own," she tells Forum. The company's leadership training is about "how the individual can become the best that they can be, the highest performer. It's not just about the ability to contribute to the organization, but it's also our belief that it's our responsibility to contribute to our community and to be involved. So we want to be leaders not only within our own organization but also within the industry."

Immel served for three years as SoCal president of CoreNet Global, the second largest chapter in the world, and says that mentoring is a part of all she does. "My mom taught me that it's my responsibility to give back the knowledge that has been given to me, so it's responsibility to pass on to the next generation," she says. "With my internal team, it's my goal to train them to be better than me one day. Always hire people whom you believe can be better than you, and train them to do their best."

She encourages her team not to just accept what she says, but to challenge it, "to continue to drive us to a better organization." This kind of give-and-take is, of course, a two-way street, she acknowledges.

Regarding the gradual passing of the torch at her company, Immel says, "We're transferring the ownership of this 56-year-old organization to the next generation over the next several years. But we're still holding true to everything that has been passed on to us to create the success of the future."