Taylor Bruzas Career Background
What is your biggest career achievement?
- My biggest career achievement was being promoted to Regional Property Manager. While a promotion may be an easy answer on career achievement, it’s the value behind the answer that I am most proud of. For those that know me, they know that I would rather talk about my Team than talk about myself. My Team, my people, are my greatest achievement. A majority of my current and previous role has been getting results through others. Anyone in leadership can tell you that this is the most difficult part of what we do. As a Senior Manager, I was responsible for nine promotions of Team Members working under my development. I consider myself a heart-first leader which has both helped and hurt me in my career.
Where it has hurt me, is in situations where I rely too much on my personal feelings of someone and don’t add value beyond, “I really like them” or “they’re really great,” which can discredit my opinion. On the flip side, I’ve also let my opinion of someone I dislike cloud my judgement on their ability to perform their job. I have held those that I didn’t get along with or agree with to a different standard than those I was close with. With the experience and knowledge I now have, there are many situations I would have handled differently.
Where it has helped me, is the ability to connect with my team and people in general. I see value in people’s abilities and hire people whose strengths are my weakness and visa-versa. I surrounded myself with people that had a desire to learn as much as I had desire to teach. My ability to hire top talent and rate of promotions from my properties was one of the biggest reasons I was considered for RPM. Our industry is divided up between what is task and what is mindset. The tasks, however daunting (especially in Washington State), can be taught. Over time, they can be mastered through repetition, skill and ability to retain information. I have a photographic memory, so learning how to work through all of the management tasks was easy for me after a few trials and feedback sessions. How this boded well for me was my curious mindset. How could I take a presentation on my property and have a bigger conversation? How could I present data beyond what was required? What story was I trying to tell in my presentation? How could I make my presentation stand out against the others? I was constantly taking Client feedback and my RPM’s feedback to present my business in a unique way that proved I knew my property, inside and out. Knowledge is power and I have always sought knowledge, wisdom and answers on as much as possible to help myself and my Team work through whatever challenge came our way. This is one of the reasons I love this industry to much- there is always new situations, questions and challenges that come up that give opportunity for more knowledge.
What can’t be taught but can be developed, is mindset. I was lucky enough to be put through a Leadership Development Track that truly changed my life and is one of the biggest attributers to my success. This development track set my guidelines and gave me the ability to identify myself, who I was at my best and what I needed to perform. That lead into a deep dive that allowed me to learn how I communicate and identify why some conversations seem to go well, or seem to go nowhere, depending on who we are communicating with. This track helped me identify how to build trust, how to manage through change, situationally lead and how to effectively communicate through all of it. This not only helped me develop and manage happy Teams, but also helped my marriage and personal relationships. I was able to identify how my reactions and behaviors were impacting others, often for the worst. After this track, I felt like I had gone from a heavy prescription close to blindness, to 20-20 vision; I became truly self-aware.
Given your past experiences, what event/ project or moment would you revisit and how would you go about it differently based on your current frame of mind?
- The moment(s) that come to mind are from when I put someone in a box (figuratively speaking, of course) and lost a stellar Team Member because of it. I was given the opportunity to lease up a multi-phased project that would be 556+ units upon stabilization. When I came to this new property, my team grew from a team of two (me and my Supervisor) to a team of six. What I learned, immediately, was that although I knew how to run a property, I had never been directly responsible for that many people. I had one Team Member in particular who was previously a Community Manager of a 48-unit community that wanted to be part of a larger team. She had agreed to take a step back in titles to come to my property as a Leasing Professional.
This girl was talented, creative and was great with people. She helped me make signs for my wedding and had the most beautiful penmanship I had ever seen. She took wood boards and turned them into something gorgeous in a few hours that would have taken me many instructional videos and weeks to complete. Creating those boards came so easy to her, she could have sold them for a living.
When she joined the Team, I immediately put her on resident event planning and execution, social media management, marketing template creations, market survey completion, resident retention efforts and all things creative. I started noticing that she would come into work late, which turned into not coming in at all. She stopped getting leases, stopped completing the simplest of tasks. I was shocked to say the least. I was upset, she had been a manager before and knew the expectation of what needed to be done and yet, she didn’t seem to care at all. Both of us equally frustrated after weeks of unmet expectations, I looped in my manager. I expressed my dissatisfaction with how/when she was showing up, the lack of ability to perform her job duties and blatant disrespect for me as her manager. I chalked it up to the fact we had been friends before she came to work with me and maybe, we just didn’t get along.
My manager asked me what her job duties were and who chose her duties. I responded that I had assigned them based on what I knew of her and her talents. I found out that she actually hated ever single task I had assigned to her. She loathed coming to work because the tasks that she was responsible for were actually some of the reasons she left the Community Manager role. I put her in a box of being an extrovert who loved being creative, surrounded by people, helping people through concerns, etc. Turns out, she was quite the opposite. Her passion was in the data: invoice processing, budget building, reporting, etc. She requested a transfer a couple of days later.
Here’s what I learned and what I would have changed about this situation. Had I taken the time to sit down with her when she started and asked her why she left her other role, what she was hoping to gain by working at a larger property, what tasks she enjoyed, what she wanted to learn and truly sought to understand how I could best help her be successful- she would have never left. Instead, I focused on how she could best help ME. Looking back, I wish I just had more experience, knowledge on emotional intelligence and had been out of the mindset of trying to make myself look good and worthy of such a huge opportunity. What I learned, though, has stuck with me for the years that followed. I learned that we are all different and we all have strengths that sit below the surface. We all build trust differently and how we chose to act, or react, can change relationships that we are building. I can’t expect people to simply tell me what I am doing wrong or what they need to be more successful. I have to actively work on each individual relationship and building vulnerable trust so that when faced with indifference, conflict, uncertainty, etc. we can communicate through it and come out on the other side with a resolution.
From your perspective, what is the industry lacking to support the modern renter and how do you plan to help supply that need?
- I believe that a need our industry is lacking to support the modern renter is Controlled Compassion. Here’s my best definition of Controlled Compassion in this context: “The ability to hear with your heart and mind when relating to the resident that you are understanding of their situation (whether you agree or not) while maintaining your legal obligation to uphold the lease agreement.”
It’s no surprise that our Teams, and humans in general, are exhausted after the last two+ years of the COVID pandemic. An industry that used to be an easy-sell to someone as a career has lost a lot of its sparkle. We don’t have the power that we used to have in getting “bad” residents out, our lease agreements are 50+ pages of terms that are rarely read or understood, our workloads have quadrupled, and our teams are stuck between who to please: the client, the company or the resident.
Our industry has come up with some incredible ways to support the modern renter through options like clickable maps that show you exactly what unit you’re applying for, what your view is, what the unit looks like, where it’s at in the building- truly, I’m so impressed! It’s never been easier for someone to go online and apply without ever needing to talk to someone. They can even sign a lease online, move in without a person to walk them through a unit, you name it. We have created the “perfect process” so someone could go, application to move in, without ever really needing to speak to someone. What is missing through this otherwise great process, is the need to establish trust with your renter.
I take it back to the quote that “people quit people,” and the majority of the time, people quite apartment communities because of something that happened with their previous management team.
I believe Controlled Compassion to be the biggest need right now because our industry is 100% people serving other people. Whether we openly talk about it or not, our industry is full of conflict. Resident complaints are a part of our daily processes. I plan to supply this need my continually teaching and coaching my Teams through tough conversations. Challenging them to consider an alternative solution and making them debate both sides of their decision. Teaching people how to first, listen. What is the concern, what is happening, do we have all of the facts, do we value that even if we don’t agree- that person has every right to feel the way they’re feeling. After listening, helping find a solution. Referencing our lease agreement, what it states about the situation and how we can help. Laying out a clear roadmap to the process that we will follow and following it, doing what we say we will do. At the end of the day, people want to be heard. While our hands can be tied in what our legal processes are and in what we can truly do to help a situation, it is our job to create a community where people love to live. If it is an unfavorable situation in which we are unable to help, the relationship is key. The resident has to trust that we are being honest and have done everything in our control to truly try and help them. If we don’t have that relationship and that level of trust is not there, we will have terrible resident retention, reputation and will always be chasing our tail.
Simply put, the need ties back to customer service. It ties back to being servant leaders and putting others before ourselves. If we keep people at the center of why we show up to work, we will have happy teams, customers and residents.