Two weeks ago I attended the Pacific Coast Builder’s Conference (PCBC) in San Francisco.   I came away with a distinct feeling that the skills needed by senior executives in homebuilding and residential development may need some significant adjustment in order for their companies to prosper in the coming upswing.

Over the past several years, the executives and managers who have survived have been ones capable of trimming back the size of their organization, renegotiating bank and land loans, and adapting to a world that always seemed to get worse.   Like an infantryman who has served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, you can’t help but being molded by your experiences.  That molding of outlook and the honing of survival skills are indelibly part of the makeup of anyone who has lived through these past four or five years.  

Realism and technical skill have come to the forefront.   Lawyers and finance folks have been the kings in this world.   In psycho-speak, these are “left brainers”: logical, rational, analytical, and objective.   They get things done, come hell or high water.

At PCBC, one of the over-riding sentiments I observed was one of continuing negativity on the part of many of the senior leaders there.   Most do not see any turnaround yet.   In an exercise we did at the Leader to Leader segment, a vast proportion still saw their world as challenged, confusing, and still in disarray.   Only a few saw things getting better, despite the data that says that things slowly are.  

We are not back to “boom times”, for sure.   But, in most markets things are not getting worse anymore and many are at least stabilizing and getting better, though at lower volumes and pricing than many would like.   It is still an oversupplied market most places.  However, I would be very surprised if we are not much better a year from now.

At Leader to Leader, our final speaker was Mike Singletary, the Chicago Bears Hall-of-Fame linebacker who is now the coach of the San Francisco 49rs.   He is a pretty intense guy.

Someone asked him what it took to turn around a losing team (that has been his charge with the 49rs).  He ticked off the obvious: find reality, figure out where you want to go and communicate it, develop a plan of how to get there, find people who want to get there with a passion, then work together and hold each other accountable for getting to that place in the vision.   In his case, it is a Super Bowl ring for the 49rs.  

He commented that as the leader of this effort, he not only had to have the vision, but the optimism every day that they could achieve the vision.   If he didn’t have the vision and the optimism, his players and staff could smell a fraud a mile away and the endeavor would fail.

After thinking about the negativity created by the recent years of dealing with nothing but bad news, I think it is going to be very difficult for many of the current leaders to project optimism.   It has been sucked out of them by the very success that has allowed them to survive.   Even if the market is turning, the natural instinct is to prepare for bad and forego opportunity.

Making matters even worse, I sensed very little vision among those that I ran into at the conference.   What will the new market look like?   What will make a company excel as the market does get better?   What visions will enchant and motivate customers and employees to experience something new and refreshing?   Who will be dreaming up and delivering the iPads of shelter and community?  

Very few were in that realm.

I now firmly believe that it is time for the visionaries to step forward and lead.  

Often “right brainers”, these folks are frequently random, intuitive, synthesizing, and holistic.   Their skills involve stepping beyond the reality and constraints of today and the apparent truths of yesterday to imagining something unique for tomorrow that will lead to profits for the enterprise.

Robert F. Kennedy is quoted:” Some men see things as they are and ask why.   I dream things that never were and ask why not.”  

Those are the visionaries.   They may not have been the right folks to handle the issues of the past couple of years, but my sense is that we need them now to begin to lead companies into the new tomorrow.    They probably won’t be the lawyers and finance specialists who saved the bacon over the past couple of years.   Those skills were right for the tasks at hand from 2005-2010, but will probably be wrong for 2012-2020.

And a new dose of optimism will be needed, too.   It is going to be very hard to shift gears for those who have toiled successfully over the recent past.

Owners, boards, and investors need to understand this paradox.   In order to succeed in the coming good times, positive leaders with vision are needed.   Now is not too soon.  

The next hard decisions may not be about shrinking companies, but may be about finding leaders adept at setting visions and leading people to new places that employees and customers, now and future, don’t yet know they want to go.

It is the “right” thing to do.