EDITOR’S COMMENT Headlines across the national newspapers this week around institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia in the Metropolitan Police caused me to pause and reflect on our industry.
We have written those headlines. And we have written them multiple times.
Now, I’m not saying the real estate sector is as bad as the Met, but there were definitely paragraphs in Baroness Casey’s report where I thought the words “the Met” could quite easily be replaced with “the real estate industry”.
You all know well enough by now that I am a strong believer in this industry’s ability and willingness to change. And I do truly believe that it is getting better when it comes to ED&I, but fresh back from MIPIM and fresh into reading this report, there is still so much more to be done to fix this and other industries.
The EG team worked really hard at MIPIM to ensure that both our presence and the conversations we brought to life were diverse. We did OK. Not where we want to be, but OK. On gender we were at around 44% female and on ethnicity 11%. Compared with the wider MIPIM universe, these numbers are good. Its published speaker database shows around 35% female and 5.5% ethnic diversity.
It may sound harsh comparing our sector to Casey’s findings about the Met, but we (and I am including EG in this) need to hold the mirror up to ourselves and be honest about where we are.
I get to speak with lots of great leaders who are passionate about making change, about being better, about stamping out bad behaviour and about opening up this industry to all. But for every one of them that I talk to, I will also hear a tale of how little we have changed, about no action being taken, about still feeling closed out.
I would encourage everyone in this sector, from CEO to apprentice, to read the Met report and take its findings to heart. If we want to be a better industry, if we want to attract the best talent, if we want to serve our communities, and if we want to be able to hold that mirror up to ourselves and, as a whole sector, be happy with what we see, there are plenty of takeaways in the report.
Here are just a few:
“There are systematic and fundamental problems in how the Met is run. The Met is run as a set of disconnected and competing moving parts, lacking clear systems, goals or strategies.”
Sound familiar? This is where it is imperative that our industry bodies step up. Your job is not to pander to this sector, even if the people in it are paying you a membership fee, your job is to make sure it is the very best it can be. You have a responsibility to ensure excellence. Hold the mirror up. Are you doing that?
“Recruitment and vetting systems are poor and fail to guard against those who seek power in order to abuse it. The management of people is poor. The Met’s processes do not effectively root out bad officers, help to tackle mediocre officers, or truly support and develop good officers.”
I don’t believe that our sector has many individuals in it that are seeking to abuse the power they have, but this sector’s recruitment practices could be a lot better. And do we really effectively root out the “bad apples”? Hold up the mirror.
What really struck me though and made me hold the mirror up was the issue of optimism bias.
Casey writes: “Following any issue, there is a strong tendency to look for a positive spin, which allows the organisation to move on. They seek to put it in the past and blame individual ‘bad apples’, rather than pausing for genuine reflection on systemic issues. The Met talks up future actions as if they were already implemented… Problems with culture and attitudes cannot be addressed by developing a new policy, changing the rules or developing a new process.”
Reading this caused me to pause again. This is our industry. We do this. I do this. We read, hear and even see stories of bad behaviour and we justify it by saying it is just the odd person. But it isn’t, is it? It is all of us. Because we are letting it happen, we are not stopping the behaviour. We are getting better at dealing with it, but it shouldn’t be there in the first place.
I love this sector and I loved MIPIM this year because there were more women, there was more diversity, we were talking about different things. But the fact remains: we are not an open sector. We do have lots of work to do. And in the words of Baroness Casey, we have to throw it open, or it won’t change.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@eg.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @EGPropertyNews
