In 1999, a keynote speaker urged his audience of board directors to choose “We” over “Me.”
Fast forward to 2009, when housing experts gathered at a small conference in Seabrook to explore what caused home buyers to buy in a recession. They found that a neighbor’s smile and wave triggered sales in ways that a fancy countertop could not.
At first, this surprised the experts. But it began to make sense the more they thought about it.
Say you had to make the five-hour trek to Pullman and there were only two ways to get there. Either hitch a ride in a Tesla driven by, say, a highly caffeinated multi-level marketing enthusiast, or in a Honda Civic driven by Tom Hanks. Which ride would you pick?
Most would pick the Civic. And why? Because they are not picking a car. They are choosing an experience.
Home buyers are the same. They are not picking a house. They are choosing an experience.
And most prefer a “We” experience to a “Me” experience.
Fast forward to now, when a man retiring from the law firm he founded, vows that during this next chapter of his life, he is going to do what he wants to do. And what he most wants to do is to write legal documents in such a way that caring for common property is more of a “We” experience than a “Me” experience.
The “he” here is me. I gave that keynote. I gathered those experts. I made that retirement wish. And this wish fulfilling consulting company is a natural outgrowth of the life I have lived.
I have long been fascinated by the notion of “We.” I have been part of some award-winning teams. And I have also been the gun hired by half of some fractured partnership to prove in court that it was all the other half’s fault. I have experienced both energizing unity and disheartening division.
And I am just bone tired of “me vs. you” and of “us vs. them.” Aren’t you?
That is why “home” as safe haven from a polarized world is so important right now. Home can still deliver the “We” experience we crave.
But how home delivers the “We” experience is what those housing experts were determined to discover when they gathered in Seabrook back in 2009. So, first they made a list of the great places they knew. Then, for each place on the list, they traced the cause-and-effect chain backwards from outcome to origin. Each time, their tracing arrived at the same point of origin: Listening.
Listening caused caring. Which caused bonding. Which caused valuing that bond. Which caused neighbors to commit themselves to preserving and strengthening that bond, since that bond fueled their success in caring for their neighborhood.
Again, on reflection, this made sense. Shared purpose, alone, is never enough. Every team starts its season with its sights set on winning a championship. At season’s end, though, it is the tightest team that has claimed the prize. Team success is almost always a product of a shared purpose and of a strong bond between those in pursuit of that purpose.
What is true of teams is true of all partnerships. Success is a product of shared purpose and of strong bonds.
But what surprised these experts is that the “shared purpose” in great neighborhoods was preserving and strengthening the bond between neighbors. In great places, “We” was both the means and the end.
The experts left Seabrook convinced that if listening could somehow be embedded into the DNA of the neighborhoods they built, then their buyers could turn their neighborhoods into something truly special.
Fast forward to 2018, when the Washington State Legislature captured lightening in a bottle by enshrining the secret of partnership success – listening – into law, passing a law which embeds listening into the DNA of every neighborhood created after July 1, 2018.
For neighborhoods created earlier, that law – WUCIOA (short for “Washington Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act”) – is a rich source of “best practices” they can borrow to embed listening into the DNA of their own neighborhoods.
Because today’s community association experts have begun to grasp that listening is the principal source of value in homes that are part of a community association, they are now updating the governing documents of older communities to add these “best practices” to the DNA of existing neighborhoods.
I believe that for neighborhoods aspiring to become a Great(er) place to live, these “best practices” provide a stronger foundation upon which to mount the effort of uniting with like-minded neighbors to create something special.
This belief has caused me to overhaul the content of the base Declaration and Bylaws I use when a community, intent on uniting neighbors in common cause, asks me to help them replace their old governing documents. So, if laying a stronger foundation for fostering better relations between neighbors is near the top of your professional bucket list, then we have something in common, and it is time for us to connect.