Five key takeaways from EG's CEO Summit

Last month EG gathered leaders from across the built environment and other industries to delve into some of the biggest issues facing our sector today. Here we share five key takeaways to help today’s and tomorrow’s industry leaders thrive. If you want more, you had better make sure you’re in the room at 2024’s EG CEO Summit.

1 Do the right thing, not the easy thing

This was keynote speaker and former Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye’s biggest learning from running one of the world’s busiest airports, which almost overnight became the quietest, losing a whopping £8m a day. Holland-Kaye faced some pretty personal attacks during the Covid era as he fought to get aircraft moving again, but he knew that he was doing the right thing, for the right reasons. And with that belief held steadfastly, he could take the abuse. He could handle the hardship.

As the UK dipped in and out of lockdowns, Holland-Kaye knew he had to get Heathrow operating again, not just because losing £8m a day was unsustainable, but because Heathrow is the UK’s biggest port, handling 40% of all the UK’s exports. Without Heathrow operating, it wasn’t just people not being able to move, it was goods too.

“There was a huge economic imperative to get flying again,” said Holland-Kaye, “but when I was talking about this in April/May 2020, I was treated like I was a mass murderer. Didn’t I know that there was a Covid crisis going on? My point was, however, that we have to follow the facts and think about people’s livelihoods as well as their lives. And we weren’t taking into account the impact on the UK economy.”

As a leader, said Holland-Kaye, you have to look beyond and think about the wider impact of the decisions you do and don’t take. And that while leadership can be lonely, especially when you have to make those tough decisions, doing the right thing will give you the armour to survive even the toughest leadership challenges.

2 Don’t just talk to your people, listen to them

No gathering of real estate professionals would be complete without a session on the future of the workplace. Just as Covid grounded aircraft at Heathrow, the pandemic has changed – or accelerated change in – the way we work. Work from anywhere was proved to be possible during the pandemic, whether it was proved productive remains a topic of debate. But what we have all learnt is that our traditional workplaces must work harder if they are to compete with the ability to work from anywhere we like.

To work harder, we need to know more. To know more we have to listen to the voices of those who we want to utilise those spaces. This was the key takeaway from our session on the office shake-up.

While our advisers and designers might tell us that to “bring people back” we need collaborative space and all the amenities you could ever want, our actual workers might tell us we need something completely opposite. What people like most about working at home, said Leesman founder and chief executive Tim Oldman, is quiet. Quiet time to concentrate. “For the average knowledge worker, home is a retreat from the open-plan, densified, noisy environment of the office, which is almost anti-focus,” said Oldman.

The office, our experts told us, is there to contribute to organisational performance. Organisational comes from people. Listening to them is vital.

3 Recognise the human impact of your business

We all know the impact that buildings have on the planet. The 40% contribution to carbon emissions is a much bandied-about statistic. Real estate’s social impact is now also being talked about regularly. But what about looking at your business even wider than that? Sarah Gillard, chief executive of A Blueprint for a Better Business, explained it best. She believes that better business leads to a better society.

“We think that ideas shape our reality and the mindsets that you have when you’re approaching something is a really significant factor in determining the outcomes,” said Gillard. “Business is the most extraordinary system we’ve come up with to organise resources, harness the incredible ingenuity and creativity and collaboration of people and solve problems, create things and achieve stuff. And as human beings, we are creative, intelligent, resilient, resourceful, social beings that can achieve incredible things, motivated both extrinsically through money, status and power, and intrinsically through the desire for connection, for autonomy, for a sense of purpose.”

She added: “Business has been seen as quite one-dimensional, primarily as a profit-maximising machine and humans have often been instrumental in service of that goal. What we do is ask whether that limits our thinking.”

If as businesses we get stuck in needing to maximise profit, do we forget that value can be made outside of that one dimension? Encouragingly, real estate leaders on stage with Gillard – Landsec’s Mark Allan and Grosvenor UK’s James Raynor – were in agreement that we couldn’t let it happen.

4 Experience doesn’t always mean excellence

While Generation Z may not have experienced recession or interest rates in single, let alone double digits, ignore them at your peril. This is a generation that has lived through permacrisis and, so far at least, survived. This is a generation that has had to educate themselves, build connections, ideas and personalities through a period in which the world shut down. They are digital natives, they are consumers of content (at 1.5X speed at least) and they are unburdened by tradition. This is a generation that wants to be heard but also wants to help.

“We have such a unique world view,” University of Plymouth student Denziel Armah, told the audience of business leaders. “We have so many ideas and we just want to contribute to the workplace, especially to managers.”

“We are the leaders of tomorrow,” he added. “We are going to be the people that are taking over the industry, so just creating that space for us all will be really beneficial, especially for the future.”

5 Answer anything

Just as there is no such thing as a stupid question, there is no such thing as a stupid answer. Or at least, not if you answer it honestly and with integrity. And that is exactly what our panel of five real estate CEOs did at the event. From questions on ESG, D&I, data and being resilient, no topic was out of bounds – despite being gifted a free pass. Each leader will deal with situations differently, each leader and their business will have different motivations, different anticipated outcomes, different views of what good or success looks like, but if they’re doing the right thing, every answer will be the right one.

The experts

The inaugural EG CEO Summit brought together 25 experts from across business to share insights with our audience of more than 120 real estate leaders on how to build resilience in the face of economic uncertainty.

John Holland-Kaye, former CEO, Heathrow
Ian Stewart, chief economist, Deloitte
Mark Allan, CEO, Landsec
James Binks, assistant chief executive, Manchester City Council
Sarah Gillard, CEO, A Blueprint for a Better Business
Kate Norgrove, executive director, advocacy and campaigns, WWF UK
James Raynor, CEO, Grosvenor Properties UK
Clare Bacchus, global lead, the Design House, Barclays Bank
Tim Oldman, founder and CEO, Leesman
Jeremy Myerson, author and director, Worktech Academy
Fons van Dorst, executive managing director, EDGE
Tamás Madarász, decision science lead and vice-president, JP Morgan Chase
Sam Bruce, head of housing and communities, Centre for Social Justice
Lewis Goodall, broadcast journalist, News Agents podcast
Liz Peace, real estate industry chair and non-executive director
Julian Carey, CEO, Industrials REIT
Andrew Jones, CEO, LondonMetric
Nick Leslau, chairman and CEO, Prestbury Investments
Geeta Nanda, CEO, Metropolitan Thames Valley
Lynda Shillaw, CEO, Harworth Group
Catherine Webster, CEO, Thriving Investments
Denziel Armah, student, University of Plymouth
Judi Greenwood, director of strategy, Regeneration Brainery and project lead for Future of Greater Manchester
Isabelle Hease, chair, BPF Futures advisory board
Lucia Sanderson, apprentice surveyor, CBRE