Michael and I have always placed heavy emphasis on close collaboration. We see it as one of the key pillars of success and a driving force for developing a tight-knit and cooperative office culture. As well, we’ve long relished big ideas and enterprise, alongside being a catalyst for change in the Australian real estate industry. Over the past couple of months, we’ve developed a new strategy to find the sweet spot where each of these values intersect: enter our new working groups.
Put simply, a working group brings together the sharpest minds from diverse verticals within the business to solve a problem. It’s an opportunity for various members of our team to come together and collaborate on projects that go beyond their day-to-day duties and develop skills and ideas independently of the work they do for me, Michael and our clients. While the two of us are responsible for goal-setting and delivering the brief, and are kept abreast of project milestones, it’s up to the group to appoint a team leader, establish ongoing deliverables, set up regular meetings, and devise a strategy for bringing the concept to life.
What we love most, though, is that working groups foster learning and exchange between disparate verticals: while some arms of the business – construction and design, machine learning and data science, purchasing and property management – go hand in hand, others rarely get the chance to associate. In our first group, for example, we have our Head of Design (not of the architectural kind, but a role that looks at design systems, visual design and brand identity), National Head of Construction, National Head of Acquisitions, and our economists – seemingly divergent fields but ones that have the capacity to generate some pretty stellar ideas when thrown together.
As a collective, this working group is looking at how we can sink our teeth even further into the Australian property market. Without giving too much away, their goal is to combine their expertise to assess the potential for creating a new property development vertical, which will launch in 2021 (more on this at a later date). It’s an exciting direction for Milk Chocolate and one that wouldn’t be possible without the group’s creative and constructive input. Each team member brings unique expertise and insight and the requisite skills to get the project off the ground, which is why we asked them to collaborate.
While it’s still early days, and the project is still in the embryonic stage, the potential of the working group is already evident. Thus far, the project brief and group structure have been very well received by the members of the group, as well as the wider Milk Chocolate team; observing the initial success of the concept has sparked plenty of enthusiasm towards its implementation. We can’t wait to see what the inaugural group conceives and how future working groups will take shape in the months and years to come.
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