Are You Ready For HVAC Changes

[Paul Rhodes] (0:02 - 3:23) Have you ever thought that you had the answer before you asked the question, and then once you asked the question, you found out that you were not completely wrong, only slightly so. However, there was a large enough difference in what you thought the answers were going to be to what the answers actually were that you really have to throw into contemplation of, why did you even have those assumptions in the first place? That's what we're talking about today.

It's all about looking at poll results with a maintenance mindset here on the Multifamily Media Network. A couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn, I ran a poll and the poll asked the question, what are your maintenance skills training priorities for 2025? I gave four options.

Those four options were soft skills, meaning like organizational skills. I was thinking in terms of time management and communication. The second option was leadership skills, and that I profiled in the format of career path.

The third was hard skills, meaning the trades, repairs, fixing, electrical, plumbing, heating, air conditioning, all of those type of things. And the fourth option was compliance. And I have to be honest, the results were surprising to me.

The lowest score that only resulted in 5% of the people who responded was compliance. I actually expected that to be higher. The next highest was soft skills, meaning communication and time management, like organizational skills.

That was at 18%. I got to be honest, I expected that to be higher as well. The winner of it all was leadership skills.

And that one, 45% of the people who responded said that was the highest priority with hard skills, the repair, trade skills, those coming in second place at 32%. Now, just from a pure raw data standpoint, I am surprised because as a person who teaches maintenance technicians from a technician level, I'm getting a lot of questions about how do I fix specific things, rewiring, using your meter, dealing with a schematic, how plumbing functions, how to identify a leak, roofing repairs. Those hard trade skills are where I do spend most of my time training maintenance professionals.

And because of my view, that's what I was expecting to be the number one most common priority.

[Paul Rhodes] (3:25 - 3:32) Well, just on the hard data, that is forcing me to rethink some assumptions.

[Paul Rhodes] (3:33 - 5:25) Which is always cool. I like not just looking at data, looking at information. I want to find out more about the information that is presented because like it or not, these are the results.

I actually posed this question in the beginning for a few reasons. One, I don't have the answers for everybody else. I know in my own life, in my own experience, I think the answers are going to be a certain way.

And I also know enough to know that I am not always correct. I'm willing to be wrong. But if I'm going to be wrong, which direction am I going to be wrong in?

The second reason why I pose this is because I'm selfish. I'm kind of data mining for a strategy myself. I want to know whatever path I'm going to go on.

I don't want to make a wrong turn or start out going in the wrong direction and need to go a different way. The third reason why I asked that question was to start this discussion here. Because maintenance development is a huge need.

It's been identified. And all throughout the industry and all throughout management companies, how we're going to develop our maintenance teams going forward is a fundamental strategy issue that needs to be figured out. So now I have the reasons why I wrote the poll and I have the information that the poll provided.

[Paul Rhodes] (5:25 - 5:43) And based on that information, my assumptions have to change. Well, you see, when we go about changing assumptions, that's a very challenging thing to do.

[Paul Rhodes] (5:44 - 9:26) And several years ago, I read this book by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner. You may be familiar with their names. They're the guys that wrote the book Freakonomics.

And the book is Think Like a Freak. And what is fascinating about this particular book is it doesn't purport to be a self-help book. In other words, they don't give you the answer.

Instead, the whole concept of this particular book is how to look at data, look at information in different ways. In effect, ask questions about why the answers came to be what they are. In other words, I was under the assumption that maintenance professionals, the development that management companies need to do for their maintenance professionals is to develop hard skills, how to get better at making repairs.

And based on the poll, that is still important, but it's second to leadership. What I take that to mean is our management companies need to develop our maintenance teams to be leaders or at least get leadership skills imparted to them. Okay, but if we follow the Think Like a Freak thought process, we begin to ask questions about that data point.

In other words, why? Why do we need to develop leaders for maintenance? And the cool thing about it is by beginning to ask questions of the data itself, one, it helps me get away from my assumptions.

And two, it actually makes it to where I have a starting place to research and answer, which could turn into something like, oh, I don't know, maybe the podcast that you're listening to right now. It's about not just taking the data at face value, which is the beginning point. Actually, what this is, is diving deeper into behind the data itself.

For instance, if our management companies are saying that their priority is to develop leadership skills in their maintenance technicians, does that mean, one, they're not currently doing it and the fact that we have identified that as a need, there's going to be a lot of course creation going on. Does it mean that we're on a growth mode, which the multifamily, the apartment industry is with the number of properties that have come online, the developments that are in lease up now in major cities across the country. We're identifying the fact that we don't have enough maintenance supervisors who can perform the job of supervising.

And this identification of that as a priority is a response to that.

[Paul Rhodes] (9:30 - 9:34) In the end, I don't have an answer to either one of those questions.

[Paul Rhodes] (9:34 - 13:23) I do know though, that both of those are starting places for my research. Starting places for me to take the data, the information and apply it to my situation, apply it to what I have going on, both in my career life, which is developing and training maintenance persons, but it's also in terms of myself. You see, my suggestion is that when we begin looking at information, take it beyond the face value.

This information came from somewhere. If we treat this information, whatever information that you are interacting with, if we begin to treat it as truth, then what changes happen in my life or in those around me? What has to change if this is true and my assumptions were wrong?

See, you may have identified by now that I'm asking a lot of questions and I'm not answering very many of them. Actually, that concept, though it was inspired by the book, Think Like a Freak, for data. Once we get into looking at us as individuals, those type of questions were actually inspired by another book.

Actually, it's a couple of books that I'm reading right now for my life because I admit I still have growth that needs to occur. And the book, the other series of books that I'm reading and digesting and internalizing right now is actually, it begins with this one. It's called The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier.

I think that's how you pronounce his name. It's a fascinating book and it talks about instead of providing answers for other people, provide questions for those other people to get their own answers. And it's a fascinating concept, especially for someone that admittedly, you probably realized yourself, I like to talk.

I like providing advice. I like giving answers. Yes, in some intenses, I do like being the most knowledgeable person in the room.

Notice I didn't say the smartest person in the room because I know by far I am not. But I do like to know or at least have something that I know that is more than somebody else in the room. The challenges though, based on psychology, based on leadership studies, based on organizational background, if the leader is the only one who knows all the answers, then your organization has a bottleneck and the people underneath the leader or who report to the leader or who in whatever org chart you're dealing with, those people by nature are held down because the leader always has to be the most knowledgeable in the room.

[Paul Rhodes] (13:24 - 13:28) Well, I don't like that.

[Paul Rhodes] (13:28 - 14:30) I want other people to be developed in whatever path they're going to take in their life. This is really why I'm curious about having this conversation. It begins with asking that question.

And in the first book, The Coaching Habit, he talks about and offers seven questions that as a leader are good things to do. And I highly recommend this as a book. But after a short break, we're actually going to talk about the results of our survey.

The fact that leadership skills training has been identified as the highest priority for maintenance teams for 2025. So we're going to talk about how to possibly solve that. And yes, spoiler alert, there's another book that I'm going to recommend for you.

[Paul Rhodes] (14:31 - 14:31) Be right back.

[Paul Rhodes] (14:35 - 19:59) We're talking about some results that I received from a LinkedIn poll that said that according to the respondents, leadership skills are a higher priority than skills that maintenance technicians are traditionally thought of needing. Fixing things, plumbing, electrical, heating, air conditioning. And again, those were a fairly close second place.

But based on that result, leadership skills is something we need to develop in our maintenance people. And I confess, I'm on a never ending quest to become a better leader. My current book that I'm reading and really enjoying is actually this one.

It's again by Michael Bungay Stanier. And this one is called The Advice Trap. And in it, he talks about instead of giving advice, strategies to allow the people that you are leading to discover what steps they should take and the pathway to get there.

And it's fascinating. And I've come to realize that I have a lot to learn in this particular area. But there's one piece that has really stuck out to me and has made me pause before continuing in the book.

And I'm in about chapter two now, I guess. And the reason why I've had to pause is he introduces a concept called future you. And he's mentioned it a couple of times in the previous book as well.

But this time it really hit me hard because I have for decades, when I've been interviewing people to hire them mostly on site, but even other jobs when I was a manager in retail, there is a question that is very frequently asked that I've always hated. The question is, Mr. or Mrs. Candidate, where do you see yourself in five years? I hate that question.

I mean, who in 2015, when they were in an interview, gave the answer to that question? Well, in five years, Paul, I see myself in a pandemic, wearing a mask and not being able to go out in public or be around other people. Who would have said that?

And what I mean by that is there is too many variables for me to try and predict with any sort of accuracy where I'm going to be in five years. Not only that, in an interview situation, it's kind of a setup. I mean, if I'm asking you that question and you really want the job that I am asking you about, you're not going to give me the answer that you want to have happen within five years.

You're going to give me the answer that you think I want you to have. In five years. For all of those reasons, I think it's a lousy question.

And yet, Mr. Stanier brought it up in the book of asking yourself, your future you, questions. And that's the concept I would like to bring into our maintenance leadership needs. The cool thing about it is it doesn't just have to be for our maintenance teams.

I recognize that chances are the person's listening to this particular episode may not be in the maintenance world. And that's perfectly fine because the awesome thing is being a leader is universal. In all occupations, in all careers, in all parts of life, we either are a leader or a follower.

And those of us who are followers, chances are there are areas where we get to be leaders. The best leaders, I truly believe, are people who are out in front and they recognize that they don't have all the information. Which is why Mr. Stanier points to the fact that we need to be asking questions. Well, the concept of future you, let's change it a little bit, just for learning, for each of us. Let's drop it from five years down to two years, because in my mind, that's more manageable. Not only that, I'm going to ask you the question again, but in this case, I'm not interviewing you for a job.

This is more for contemplation, and this is more along the lines of personal direction. It's the future you question.

[Paul Rhodes] (20:00 - 20:13) And the question is, two years from now, who are you? What is your job? What is your career?

[Paul Rhodes] (20:13 - 20:40) I mean, in my LinkedIn poll, it said that the number one result was number one priority for 2025 was leadership skills for our maintenance teams. So if you are a maintenance team member or a person in a maintenance team, the future you question, where are you in two years?

[Paul Rhodes] (20:41 - 20:42) What's your answer?

[Paul Rhodes] (20:45 - 26:00) You know, two years ago, if someone were to ask me that question, being on a podcast as a part of the Multifamily Media Network, I have to admit that wasn't on my bingo card. Two years ago in 2022, I at this point was new into a new career, a new job. Having just prior to that, June of 2022, I was a director of maintenance.

And then I left that and became a manager of a maintenance learning department. And if somebody would have told me that I would be talking into a camera and sharing thoughts and having great conversations with people around, potentially around the world, that would not have been my farthest guess. If I was to go back and ask past me that question, I could say that I want to be leading a maintenance training department or a maintenance training team.

So in that regard, I was correct. So I still think I don't know what my answer would have been three years from now, although I'm almost there. So we're back to that original five-year question.

I still don't like the five-year time period. So if you've asked yourself that question, where will you be in two years? And if your answer is you want to be a leader, then let's discuss.

If your answer is not that you want to be a leader, that's perfectly fine too. I mean, recently, very recently, I've had two absolutely wonderful conversations with people. One with a gentleman who is working on site at a property.

He's dedicated there. He is doing a fantastic job, but he came out and told me when I was asking him, how's he going? Where does he want to do?

Does he like where he's at? Kind of along the lines of this discussion of where do you see yourself in two years, he jumped out and he says, no, I won't be in this role in two years. Matter of fact, six months from now, I'm changing jobs.

Right now, he's in school to do an entire other slightly related career path. And he admits he's enjoyed being a maintenance technician, but he'll have a degree. He graduates soon.

And once he graduates, he's already got a job lined up in that other career path. More power to him. Meanwhile, he's doing a great job where he's at.

So much so that they actually want to offer him the role of maintenance supervisor, and he's already ready to turn it down when they ask him the question. The second conversation I had was with a guy that just got finished hiking the Appalachian trail. So, I mean, this guy is not lazy by any measure of anybody.

I mean, I don't think I'm ready to hike anything. Me hiking to the mailbox. I'm out of breath.

But he called me because he wanted to start a career and was asking for some insight. He has decided he wants to investigate making being a maintenance professional in the apartment industry, a career, and was asking where to start. He's already asking that question of two years from now, where do I want to be?

We had a great discussion and he's going to move and we're already making connections for him to get the job as a maintenance technician in that new market. The reason why I bring both of these up is it's okay to not have an exact answer. We're looking for two years from now in general, where would you like to be in a reality?

I mean, look, two years from now, I could say, I want to be a bass player in a band playing stadiums around the world, sold out stadiums. That is almost within the realm of impossible, mainly because I don't practice anywhere near enough. But that's kind of why this is such a good question.

And I think two years is about the right time period to have. If you answered two years from now, I want to be a leader, whether it's a maintenance leader or onsite leader or regional or whatever your career path, even a vendor leader.

[Paul Rhodes] (26:00 - 26:13) If you want to be a leader, then what do you define being a leader as?

[Paul Rhodes] (26:14 - 30:24) In other words, if you want to be a leader two years from now, what does that mean? What does successfully being a leader mean? I asked that question and to me, that answer to that means you're the first person to call with new information.

Whenever changes need to be made, you are the first person, maybe even before strategy is developed, but you're on that short list of new information. And the reason why is because as a leader, you're going to be making decisions that not only affect you, but that affect other people, people that may report to you or people that you may be in charge of hiring or responsible for making decisions. If you're going to be a leader, you're going to either directly or indirectly write checks.

By that, for the maintenance industry, more and more often maintenance supervisors are procuring the purchase order, which in essence is creating the documentation, which will eventually be turned into a check to pay for those goods or services down the road. If you're going to be a leader, you're going to be on the hook for the decisions that spend that money. You also are going to be responsible for hiring vendors.

Who are you going to hire or put to work? In other words, are you going to delegate in-house or out of house? That delegation word is critical because you will be making the decision for who delegation gets to.

Those go into being a leader. Ultimately, as a leader, you will begin to identify changes that are needed and be a part of either creating the strategy to implement those changes, or it will be your responsibility to communicate somebody else's strategy to everyone on your team. See, those are my reasons or my definitions of what being a leader looks like.

When you begin defining that, get detailed, get specific. And the reason why is because you end up having a destination. You can see where you're going, what direction you're going to be heading in.

I mean, here, we're talking about being a leader of ourselves. So if you are a leader in two years, that supposes that you're going to have followers. Now those followers may be employees.

They could be vendors. They could be acquaintances. They could be associates.

They could even be leaders of you. You know, there's this concept from John Maxwell of the 360 degree leader. That means you might be leading persons who have a title or a role that is above yours.

You may be reporting to them. And even though they positionally are leading you based on how well you do your job or what direction you do and implement your job, you may be able to guide them in their work. That was a definition of leader I didn't add.

So I need to add that into my definition as well.

[Paul Rhodes] (30:27 - 30:32) But that presupposition that if you are a leader, you will have followers.

[Paul Rhodes] (30:33 - 33:13) Then we get to ask some questions, some more questions. And these questions do get a little more challenging and a little more uncomfortable. The first question that I end up asking is if I'm going to be a leader in two years, what are my followers look like?

And I'm not talking about physical appearance or anything like that. I mean, are they dependent or autonomous? In other words, do they have to ask me for permission to do things or do they know that I trust them enough to go do something and report back and let me know what they're already doing?

Both answers, depending on what type of leader you want to be, are correct. But it's what kind of leader do you want to be? You'll be identified the type of leader you are based upon how your followers follow.

What kind of follower do you want? Do you want them to beg for your time or do you want them to be confident in what they've got going on? Do you want them to be silent, you know, seen but not heard?

Or do you want them to be yes people to where they agree with everything that you do and they hang on every one of your words? Or do you want them to disagree with you? And if you want them to disagree with you, how do you want them to disagree respectfully or bluntly?

Although I guess blunt could also be respect. You see, each and every one of these answers help to decide what your follower is going to look at. Do you want your followers to be passive or actively involved?

Do you want them to be initiative in stance? In other words, they come up with an idea, figure out how to do it and begin implementation or do you want them to wait for you to tell them what step next to take? The reason why these answers are critical for us to have is they get us to the next part, the next piece.

Being a leader, if we're going to develop our teams into leader, our employees into leader, we have to begin thinking like a maintenance mindset.

[Paul Rhodes] (33:15 - 33:20) First question to ask, where do you want to be in two years?

[Paul Rhodes] (33:23 - 33:30) The answer we're supposing in the framework of this particular episode is a leader. Okay, great.

[Paul Rhodes] (33:30 - 33:38) If you want to be a leader in two years, what do you need to have happen in order to get there?

[Paul Rhodes] (33:39 - 33:43) The only way to define that is what type of leader do you want to be?

[Paul Rhodes] (33:44 - 33:46) Answer those questions.

[Paul Rhodes] (33:49 - 34:48) By defining what type of leader you want to be, you have already had the first piece of that question of you know what direction you're going to go. I'm headed the direction of being a leader. The second piece is what kind of leader?

That's that question number two. By answering that, you begin to figure out the steps you need to take. Question number three, are you on that path?

Are you on that step? And getting to that question number three, sometimes that's the hard one. Another version of asking that question from a leadership standpoint is, are you right now acting in ways that you are following the type of leader that you desire to be?

[Paul Rhodes] (34:51 - 34:54) Ouch, that one's tough.

[Paul Rhodes] (34:54 - 37:40) That one is the biggest challenge that I have. And it's a question that I constantly ask myself. All of those go into having a maintenance mindset if you are following along on that pathway.

And even if your answer to the two year from now question is different, I urge you first continue listening to this podcast. Like and subscribe. Pay attention because maintenance mindset, we do talk about maintenance type stuff, but it is about that mindset.

I believe that being a maintenance technician is the best career in the world. And it leads to higher and higher levels of responsibility and turns into what I stated, the best career in the world. Even if you're already here, it only gets better.

Because two years ago, remember, I didn't realize I would be behind this camera and speaking to you. And thank you for your attention. The second piece of it, even if you're not in the maintenance world, let me urge you to listen to any of the other hosts for the Multifamily Media Network.

There is some fantastic information. Matter of fact, a new show is coming very, very soon from a friend of mine. I've even referenced him before is Scott Ployer.

He is such a wealth of knowledge and is so interesting to listen to and speak with. Chris Caramonica, Mark Sharp, Mary Gwynn, Ronald Harris, Lisey Daniels. These are people that have huge amounts of knowledge.

And if you're looking for defining being a leader or whatever your answer was to that two years from now, I want to be, or I'm interested in being this, those other hosts will have information that can either help you define it or help on the pathway along the ways, because that's what the Multifamily Media Network is all about. Thank you for joining me in looking at these surprising poll results I did. I hope you found it as instructive as I have in a direction of research that I need to do, both on a personal level and a professional level.

Thanks again. I hope you have a fantastic rest of your week, and I will see you somewhere. Bye.