Christian Ulbrich has been CEO of commercial real estate and investment management company JLL since 2016, having already spent years in other leadership roles at the company. He helped steer the business during the global financial crisis and was at the helm during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is now guiding the $13 billion-plus company as it navigates post-pandemic shifts in demand.He sat down with TIME in London to discuss navigating uncertainty, the evolution of central business districts, and return to office mandates. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.How has your business and the industry been affected by the uncertainty of the current Administration and how are you making decisions in that environment?Well, 2024 was a good year for the economy overall. In the U.S. it was consistently better than people had expected, which then created quite some momentum the second half of 2024 and it was also visible in our business that things were just going really well, and we started the year with a really significant pipeline of business. Without any fundamental changes going forward, it would have been a very strong year of recovery for the real estate industry in the U.S., and that has lots of implications for the rest of the world, and therefore also excellent for us. And what then happened is we heard a lot of messages which were disruptive. And if you have too much disruption people get cautious.I always use the term it became quite foggy, and fog means visibility is low, and when visibility is low, you’re slowing down, which is the natural reaction, and that’s what we are seeing. That’s pretty much true for every industry, and it’s also true for very large companies like us. You cannot move on a daily basis. It takes a while until an organization reacts to a changing environment, and so when you have so much disruption, you have to slow down so that you can move forward a bit more cautiously, so that you can react faster, that’s what we’re seeing. How are you thinking about what the economy will look like in three to five years and baking that into your decision making?Clearly, most of the things which were true before will continue to be true, and we are living in a world where the big are getting bigger, and there will be an ongoing concentration process towards the best companies within each industry. And that is only accelerated now by all the importance of AI going forward, because for AI, you need data. If you are a large company, you tend to have data, and you can build new applications around that data which will only accelerate your market position. So that will continue to be true for us and many of our clients. So for a service provider like we are, it’s very important that you choose your clients wisely. If you choose those clients that will be on the winning path and you have a great relationship with them, your business will grow. Whether the whole notion of de-globalization will prevail, or whether it will disappear over the next couple of years is super hard to predict. I think there is no doubt that de-globalization will raise pricing and increased pricing hits those who are at the lower end of the income spectrum the most, and so it’s very hard for a politician in a democracy to act against that group of people deliberately. So rationally, you would think that there may be a lot of talk about this, but at the end of the day, every politician will be very careful going down that journey, because nobody can really deny then the hard facts of increased inflation and all the repercussions [that] are coming with regards to interest rates and then housing.We have seen in recent history, but also before, a lot of decisions which aren’t necessarily rational, and that is my learning over the last couple of years. Never ask a business executive to make a prediction around an outcome—that was true for Brexit, it was true for the first Trump election, and was certainly true for the second Trump election. Because we are trained to constantly analyze facts and then take a rational decision based on facts. That’s not how voting in a democracy takes place. And so I have stopped predicting anything like that, because I will always be wrong. I was wrong all three times. That’s why it’s very hard to say what the long term implications are for the economy, but people have all read the example of what it will cost to produce an iPhone in the U.S. I can’t see that anybody wants that, neither side of the political spectrum.How was JLL impacted by the pandemic and what has recovery has looked like for you?The time during the pandemic and then the aftermath of it was more critical to our industry than the GFC [global financial crisis]. And I experienced the GFC as a member of our global executive board. The GFC was a financial crisis, and you could locate the root cause, focus on it and see how you’re getting through. What we have seen [during the] pandemic and thereafter was we had to send our people home more or less overnight and that was very, very scary, because we still had to deliver our services to our clients. On the back of the supply chain issues, we had these massively rising interest rates. We had the question of whether people should return to a building for work. And our industry is very interest-rate sensitive. And then the third piece was already there before, the whole ESG discussion and the question, what do you have to do with a building from an investment point of view, are you allowed to operate that building? And that went quite extreme. In the Netherlands [for example], they passed laws which, said that you were not allowed to bring a tenant into the building if you are not getting that building to a certain level of carbon reduction. And the whole hit from the war in Ukraine in February 2022. If you put that all together, I hope something like that will never happen again for us as an organization. Yes, we obviously had a financial impact from it, but it wasn’t as bad as I might have thought it would be, because we are providing services to a large degree, which you cannot just say no to. The biggest impact [was] on the transactional side—buying and selling buildings, financing buildings, leasing buildings. Fast forward and the industry has recovered quite nicely. Leasing volumes last year were, I think in the U.S., almost 89% or 90% of pre-pandemic peak levels. Peak levels were really high in 2019, and so 90% of that sounds really good.On the transactional side, there’s still a lot of room to grow with regards to investment sales and those types of things, but it has also recovered quite nicely, and so, I would say, generally speaking, the environment isn’t that bad for real estate services providers at the moment, at least not for the market-leading companies.What are some of the biggest changes that you’re seeing in client demands?We see the best companies in each industry trying to occupy by far the best available spaces in the locations they are in, and that trend will continue. That’s why through that whole dip within the office take-up, we still saw new record rental levels on the top end. Overall, the market went down, vacancy went up, occupancy went down, but at the top end of the market rents continued to increase globally, whether in Sydney and Singapore, in Paris or in the U.S. The best of the best companies were securing the best possible space for their people and this is now feeding down to many more companies who are trying to upgrade their space to create an attractive environment for their people. That’s a dramatic shift; while operating costs remain a concern, clients are increasingly responding to pressures to enhance the quality of spaces in their portfolios. What are you hearing from clients about how they’re dealing with the return to offices?The trouble with that whole topic is it’s easier to take a black and white position to bring a point across than talking about the reality. And the reality is hybrid, and with every company, also those who are publicly stating that everybody has to be in the office five days a week, I doubt it, because there is a need to show flexibility, and there is no reason for not showing that flexibility. Now, when I talk to peers, I haven’t met a single CEO who doesn’t want their people back in the office. I met one CEO who said to me, “unfortunately, when I look at our competitors, it’s probably wise for us to say that people can work from home in our company, because we are one of the lower brands within our industry, and so that gives me a competitive advantage in getting good talent.” But back into the office doesn’t contradict hybrid. The question is, to what extent are you allowing hybrid? Is it one day a week, or is it four days a week in the office? The benefits [of being in the office] are clearly around experiencing the culture and brand of the company, innovating together, collaborating, learning from each other. We have a part of a generation which started their working life without the ability to learn from more experienced people. And that will be visible for many, many years, because the things you learn in your first two years you don’t learn in year five or six, because people will expect that you know all those things, and you are too embarrassed to say, “I don’t know how to do that.” The benefits are absolutely clear. But also, I can completely understand that sometimes people will work from home, because it just makes sense. I have those days where it would make absolutely no sense to come to an office if I have all day video conferences. But I think we will probably end up with three-and-a-half to four days in an office, and one to one-and-a-half days on average, working from home. Younger workers seem to be the group that are least compelled to come into the office…We are measuring pretty much everything in the buildings we operate. And we cannot confirm that data. What we can confirm is that the worst people to get back into the office is middle management in the age profile of between 38 and 50. Very often they are home owners. They have space at home. They tend to have a fairly long commute, and they are between accepting and being frustrated around the fact that they are middle management, but not more than middle management. And so they think they deserve it, and that is really dangerous for companies, because those people have to set the example. They have to train the next generation of leaders. And that’s how it spills down. And so when they are not coming back into the office that has real repercussions.How were central business districts affected by the pandemic and what do you expect for them going forward?The way we use our city centers is undergoing a fundamental shift. While we’re seeing an encouraging recovery in activity across many cities, the nature of demand has changed. There is a clear ‘flight to quality,’ which puts significant pressure on older buildings and office-heavy districts that lack a dynamic mix of amenities. This trend has financial implications that are closer to home than many realize. Pension funds, for instance, are among the largest sources of capital for the real estate sector. When a segment of the market is challenged, it can indirectly affect the retirement savings of many. If these new behaviors persist, we have to rethink these urban centers by making them much more livable, but livable in the sense that people are actually living there. We have to convert some of those underperforming buildings into residential spaces, and we have to bring vibrant retail and entertainment there so that there’s a reason to come down on the weekend—not only the ones who live there, but others as well. So you fundamentally have to reinvent those cities, which is tough. Generally speaking, this is more difficult in the U.S. than, for example, many European cities, because many European cities were built differently and have always maintained a much stronger mix between the different forms of living, working and playing.What have you learned about leadership over the course of your career? At the beginning of my leadership career, I could influence the outcome very much by my direct personal performance. My first CEO job was at a fairly small bank and if I went out and won a couple of big clients that would have a direct impact on the P&L. If I were to go out and win a big assignment for JLL, it makes no difference at all, and so what I had to learn is that my role is to identify the best possible talent for certain roles and motivate them to do exactly the same for their direct reports. And you have to learn to accept that you are identifying talent. You’re coaching that talent, but you have to allow them to do what they think is right. And that is something you have to learn, because we all have the tendency to think we can do it better. We want to do it ourselves, but that doesn’t fly in a very large organization. And so that’s probably the biggest change I had to undergo over 25 years in leadership positions.