Why Commercial Real Estate Executives Are Rethinking How They Lead

Written by:

Steve Marcinuk

Date:

16 Jun 2026

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Commercial real estate has always rewarded certainty, or at least the appearance of it. But rising vacancies, interest rate volatility, AI-driven disruption, and a workforce that no longer plays by the old rules have put many CRE executives in unfamiliar territory: facing decisions where experience alone doesn’t point to a clear answer. The instincts that built careers are running up against conditions, sustained vacancy, rate uncertainty, and a workforce that has rewritten the terms of employment, that those careers never had to contend with.

Danielle Sprouls, Esq, founder of Unscripted Pivots LLC, has spent more than two decades inside that world, closing over $20 billion in commercial real estate transactions before pivoting to work with the C-suite executives and firm owners now navigating these pressures from the inside. What she’s found is that the challenge isn’t strategic. It’s personal.

The Playbook Has Changed

For decades, success in commercial real estate followed a recognizable pattern: build relationships, close deals, project confidence, repeat. The professionals who rose to the top did so by mastering a set of rules that rewarded consistency, institutional loyalty, and the appearance of always having the answer.

Those rules are still in play, but they are no longer sufficient.

The challenge facing many CRE leaders today is not a lack of knowledge or a shortage of hustle. It is that the moment demands something the deal sheet doesn’t measure: the capacity to make sound decisions when experience stops pointing the way. This is the gap Sprouls has spent the last several years working inside. What she consistently finds is that the leaders who struggle most are not the ones who lack experience. They are the ones whose experience has become the obstacle.

When Identity Gets Disrupted

The executives who seek out coaching are rarely struggling with competence. They are struggling with a question experience doesn’t answer: who they are when the role, the market, or the conditions that defined them have changed. A market correction, a role change, an industry that no longer operates the way it did when they built their reputation, these are not just strategic problems. They are identity problems.

In commercial real estate, that challenge is amplified. It is an industry Sprouls describes as highly competitive, ego-driven, and deeply tied to visible markers of success. When those markers move, the internal disorientation can be significant, and largely invisible, because admitting uncertainty in a highly competitive, ego-driven industry can feel like a professional liability.

Her coaching addresses this directly. The measure she returns to with clients is simple: stop comparing your position to others and start measuring against yesterday’s version of yourself. “If you were coming into your job prepared, well-intentioned, and hungry to do more, then you are winning,” she says.

The same reframe applies to fear and failure, two experiences high performers in CRE are particularly reluctant to acknowledge. Fear signals that something matters. Failure is data, not a verdict. “The alternative is inaction,” she says, “and that is more uncomfortable than it is to fail and to do something.”

The Generational Divide Inside

The disruption facing CRE leaders is not only external. Within their own firms, many executives are contending with a workforce that operates by a fundamentally different set of values, and finding that the management instincts that built their careers are ill-suited to the problem.

Most leaders running CRE firms today built their professional identities around institutional loyalty, long hours, and linear advancement. Younger professionals are less willing to subordinate their personal lives to institutional demands, more comfortable moving between roles, and more likely to carve their own path than to climb an existing one. Neither side fully understands the other, and the friction is showing up in how firms hire, retain, and manage talent.

Sprouls sees genuine validity on both sides. Of younger professionals, she says: “They understand that work is not life. They’re not obsessed with giving over control of their lives to their bosses anymore.” That is not a failure of commitment, it is a different set of priorities, and leaders who treat it as a discipline problem will keep losing people.

Her counsel returns to a principle she applies across all her coaching work: acceptance as a precondition for action. “You can’t move on to action until you accept what’s in front of you,” she says. “Acceptance doesn’t mean approval. But you cannot solve what you refuse to acknowledge.”

Decisions Win in Uncertainty

What Sprouls offers through her coaching practice and forthcoming book, The P.I.V.O.T. Advantage: How Bold Leaders Turn Chaos Into Their Competitive Edge, is not a promise of perfect outcomes. It’s a sharper way to move through uncertainty, make better decisions, and turn disruption into forward motion. Because the strongest leaders don’t wait for the storm to pass. They learn how to lead from inside it.

The framework is easy to hold onto because it spells out the word itself. P.I.V.O.T. The process is built around a counterintuitive starting point: Pause. Not inaction, but deliberate assessment before you move. From there it runs through Identify, Vet, Outreach, and Test, each step built to replace the instinct to react with something more considered.

“Pivot isn’t an action, it’s a process,” she says. The P.I.V.O.T. Advantage gives leaders five sequential steps for deciding when the ground is moving under them. “Everybody tells you to pivot. My framework tells you how,” she says. Anyone can memorize the steps. The real value is figuring out which one you skip. That’s where you’re weakest, and that’s where your work begins.

In a market where interest rates remain unpredictable, office demand is still finding its floor, and workforce expectations continue to shift, the quality of decisions made in uncertain moments may matter more than any single strategy. The leaders who will navigate what comes next are not waiting for conditions to stabilize. They are building the one capacity that compounds regardless of market conditions: the ability to think clearly, decide, and lead without a script.

About the Expert: Danielle Sprouls Esq. is the founder of Unscripted Pivots LLC, a leadership advisory firm serving C-suite executives and firm owners in commercial real estate. She brings over two decades of industry experience.

This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.