Macerich Executive Urges REITs to Take More Creative Approach to Hiring Talent

Thanks for having me.

The priorities in diversity really depend on the industry in which you find yourselves, and even within the industry, there are industry segments that are more successful and have a more diverse workforce by nature of the work that they are doing. So it is really 'physician, know thyself.' You really need to understand your workforce: what retention you have, what turnover you have, what jobs you're looking for. Identifying that baseline will help you develop employee retention strategies or employee attraction strategies. Or you know, should we focus on ERGs? What things can support our employee retention? What things do we need to engage a professional resource to help us make sure that we are attracting a diverse pool of candidates that will improve the chances of us having greater diversity within our successful candidate and new employee workforce?

So oftentimes in people and culture HR, you hear the 'if you can see it, you can be it,' and it really is most often used in job title promotion, and it is certainly applicable in that area, but it is also applicable in the engagement arena. So some of the things that we have done: we've put together employee panels to talk about specific affinity groups' experiences at Macerich, like 'Black at Macerich' or 'Out at Macerich.' And you know, newer employees or even employees that have been with the organization for a long time, particularly organizations like ours which are fairly decentralized in nature, if you can see someone who's similarly situated to you, and you can see the success that they've had in their career or the longevity that they've had in their tenure, you too feel invested. Oh, maybe this is a place that I can stay longer, or maybe this is a place that I can develop my career.

Managing people is one of the hardest things to do in your entire career. I definitely recommend management training that is not just technical training. You need to know all the technical aspects of your job; that's table stakes. But learning how to get the best out of the people that roll up to you, learning how to get the best out of even your collaboration partners. There are positions of authority and positions of influence. So finding either a professional partner or an online partner — there are some great virtual and online tools for management training that will help emerging professionals develop those skills. One of the things that I also like to do is encourage people that are learning about management training or learning about how to be successful in teams to join an affinity group, or join our Wellness team, or join our Mac Impact, because these are positions where you have much broader collaboration partners than your day-to-day operational job might have. As well, you are getting skills that you might not be getting in your operational job, so you can learn how to lead a team, you can learn how to work together on a sprint task force, and then you can position yourself to be well suited for that next job that might come along. Doing all of these types of things really promotes that sort of diversity of experience within the organization that puts all of our employees in the best place for career development.

One of the challenges that the real estate industry has is we're a fairly homogeneous group of people. So if you go out and say, for this job I need 10 years of the same experience or I need five years of the same experience, you're going to pull from that same largely homogeneous group of employees. So we've really challenged ourselves to think about what transferable skills, what core competencies does this job need to have, or does this candidate need to have in order to be successful in this job? Do they really have to have five years of doing the same thing at somewhere else, or can they be an agile learner? Can they be nimble? Will those core competencies translate to success? So you really have to do some soul searching and think about how can we change our paradigm about the characteristics or what we think we want from experience in order to get a broader candidate pool, because otherwise we're going to be stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy; it's going to be a closed loop system.