David Malcolm is President of Cal West Apartments and a community leader in San Diego with over five decades of work experience.
My “career” has followed two tracks—both informing each other and making me a better business leader.
My more traditional track has been a career in real estate. Over the course of five decades, I have handled sales, acquisitions and loan negotiations totaling more than $4 billion. Today, I head a provider of high-quality rental housing in San Diego and south Riverside counties.
The other track has been public service in various elected and appointed positions within California. Having been elected to the Chula Vista City Council, I served for 10 years and helped engineer the state’s largest land annexation, among other civic accomplishments. For 12 years, I sat on the California Coastal Commission, an appointed position, as the longest-tenured commissioner in the agency’s history.
The private sector and the public sector are different worlds with different goals, rules and ways of operating. In the private sector, you serve the master of financial gain; in the public sector, you serve the master of the public good.
Still, the leadership lessons I gained from my public service have been invaluable in my “other career,” and I would like to share some of these lessons with you.
1. Purpose And Mission
Working for financial gain—yours and/or your employer’s—tends to narrow your worldview and can sometimes shorten your time perspective. The clearest example is the relentless focus on quarterly results for a public company.
Working for the greater (public) good requires the opposite: A more inclusive view of a larger purpose and a mission that transcends any individual or even any single group. It’s a much more distant time horizon, sometimes decades. The business lessons for me all reinforce the notion that a bigger-picture view pays off.
Consider a complex business deal, something I developed as a personal specialty. A complex deal is one that involves one or more of the following: Multiple parties, multiple outside stakeholders, multiple jurisdictions and different business models. Without the ability to weigh and manage multiple perspectives and even conflicting imperatives, you are unlikely to complete a complex business deal.
2. Collaboration Versus Competition
The business world is seen as a cut-throat realm built on unyielding competition. Sometimes that is, indeed, the case. In the public sector, however, you are not going to get much done without working across the aisle with the other party, i.e., people who have very different beliefs from you.
Complex deals, as described above, absolutely require that you work with people whose initial instinct might be to compete with you. Once you have slogged through the laborious process of achieving civic consensus, you will be better at achieving business consensus.
This lesson also applies to building a team in the business world. You do not want to hire only people who share your worldview, which can create blind spots. I’ve found that greater inclusiveness leads to more effective operations and better business decisions. You benefit from team members’ abilities to bring up various scenarios, considerations and what-ifs. It doesn’t help you be a better leader if no one questions your assumptions and judgments.
3. Transparency As Positive
I’m going to use a poker analogy here. In business, you want to keep your cards close to the vest. In the public sector, you are required to lay your cards on the table. The 1976 federal Sunshine Act and California’s Ralph M. Brown Act are intended to prevent bad actors from abusing their offices for personal gain to the public’s detriment.
As a real estate professional, my question was (and is): Can you negotiate a good deal with full disclosure? For example, what happens when a landowner learns that a government entity wants to acquire their property? Too often, the price goes up.
But there is a balance. The Brown Act, for example, allows public entities to keep real estate negotiations secret until the time comes to complete or report a completed transaction.
The lesson here is that at some point in business negotiations, you might gain more from being transparent. For example, you can make all titles and related documents accessible to all parties rather than seeming like you are hiding them, which can create suspicion and mistrust. Drawing that fine line and achieving what you want is easier if you believe transparency is not a four-letter word.
At The End Of The Day
People do not go into public service for the pay (for the most part) or the likelihood of making a big difference in a short period of time. Certainly, I did not.
However, I firmly believe I am a better business leader and a more effective real estate professional because of the lessons learned from public service. The public sector can be a great training ground and a great proving ground. I would urge any professional looking to build a career portfolio and become a successful leader to allocate time and energy to it.
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