Leadership Lessons From The Orange Grove

Being a leader of others can take on a lot of different guises. Generals plot strategies and send soldiers into the battlefield to achieve them. Politicians clash in debates and use mass media to inspire millions and CEOs write pensive mission statements that are distributed via corporate email servers to attempt to spread their guidance to every person who works for them. But what is leadership without the personal touch? Without the hand on a shoulder, without looking another person in the eye, and without making a connection that lasts?

Meet Jack Guttman, a New York real estate developer and entrepreneur who has been building authentic relationships as a leader in real estate niches for decades. Developing everything from master-planned communities to senior living and assisted living projects to hotels to office buildings over the course of his career has introduced him to people from all walks of life and given him a unique perspective on the commonalities that guide people towards success.

Leadership in the Trenches

“Believe it or not, encouraging your team and inspiring them as a leader will have them work more efficiently,” Guttman says. “I am always hands-on and working alongside them, reassuring them and trying to inspire them. I’m here to help everybody.”

Indeed, Guttman spends a lot of his time on site for his unique company The Glasshouses, which builds, maintains, and leases premiere large-scale event spaces that can hold as many as 2,000 people. His company has hosted soirees for the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, along with nonprofit events and one heck of a bar mitzvah on one occasion.

Finding and founding a unique business in the rapid-paced digital age we live in isn’t easy, but Guttman says part of being a true leader is going one way when everyone else is headed in the opposite direction.

“I am always trying to stay ahead of the curve,” he says. “I am always wondering what the future will look like? How will it feel in the future? It was a combination of leadership and strategy which allied us to build something new that had never been done before. My specialty is businesses with minimal competition, now and in the future. What we have is one-of-a-kind, never to be duplicated, and has high revenue and profitability potential.”

It wasn’t a quick decision to go after the large-scale event space either. Guttman put a decade’s worth of research into potential properties to figure out where he could build the kind of event center he had envisioned. It’s a testimony to patience being a virtue in an era where we see leaders emerge, rise, and fall in the course of a fiscal year as their ambitions outweigh their sensibility.

Teachable Moments in the Orange Grove

That boldness of innovation is one component of Guttman’s leadership strategy. The other hails from simple advice given to him by his former father-in-law which he has held close to the chest for many years.

“My ex-father-in-law once told me the owner’s footprints were the best fertilizer in the orange grove, and I believe that.”

It’s the kind of mantra that has guided Guttman to focus on leading his clients just as much as he leads his employees, believing that he and his team will learn more from customer engagements than they will from any number of seminars and online training sessions.

“I love learning from my clients,” he says.”I always ask them, ‘Is there anything else we can do for you? How did we do? Have we improved?’ Being a good leader is also about being a good listener because listening to your clients makes you more successful.”

What advice would you give to the future leaders of industry?

Take your strengths and run with them

“Differentiate yourself. Be exceptional at whatever you do and very knowledgeable about it.”

Conquer fear and dare to dream

“The most important thing is not to be afraid. Taking a chance is the only way to win. How can I get from nothing to something? If everyone goes one way, I’ll go the other way. I am not a follower. I tell people, ‘Always be a leader.’”

Take the risk

“People we worked with were worried that some of the properties we were building might be risky. A true leader inspires the rest, which means that sometimes you have to take a risk or make a wager.”

It would have been easy for Jack Guttman to continue on developing real estate and making fortunes, but he chose to take the risk and venture out into a previously undiscovered realm. Because that’s what leaders do.