First, our all-male management team featured zero diversity, no balanced perspective and quite frankly a low group "IQ." We were charged with creating and executing our second wave growth strategy and the ideating environment consisted of a "Don't challenge my ideas and I won't challenge yours" type of dynamic. "Groupthink" had reared its ugly head and we weren't generating good ideas and getting the job done.

Second, historically there existed a disproportionate number of women who were high performers at SVN. When we restructured the company in 2009, we seemed to have lost our way and weren't bringing any intentionality to recruiting and developing from 100% of the population versus 50% of men.

Third, while gender balance is an issue affecting all companies and industries, it seems to have deep roots in commercial real estate brokerage, where men hold an estimated 64% of the positions, and that number hasn't changed much over the past 10 years. Women aren't playing a big enough role in brokerage—and that's just not right.

Superimpose all of that onto a plethora of evidence that shows organizations that consciously include women in the assembly of teams yield stronger financial performance, higher creativity and innovation, and the gender balance problems and opportunities stand out.

At SVN, tackling this problem became not just an issue of doing the right thing, but of driving deal flow and increasing firm productivity. On the leadership side, the business case for gender balance is rock-solid. Research by Catalyst found Fortune 500 companies with the highest percentage of female corporate officers reported a 35% higher return on equity and a 34% higher return to shareholders than companies with the lowest percentages of female corporate officers.

On the production side, achieving gender balance within the SVN agent base to more accurately reflect the changing demographics is a smart business move. Women are outnumbering men in terms of new undergraduate and graduate degrees, more women than ever before are entering the asset and property management business–and the brokerage clients of tomorrow will reflect these trends. Again, the business case for gender balance is rock-solid.

So, given all that, here's what we've done:

Last December, we set a goal of achieving diversity and gender balance across the board by 2020. Since then, our C-suite has become balanced at 50%, our statutory board is actually imbalanced with 60% women. As for our agent base, we are bringing intentionality to providing opportunities to those who are underrepresented in commercial real estate, regardless of gender or race. We have seen the number of diverse agents increase at some of our larger offices.

In the few months that followed and in seeing the speed with which we could affect change within our own organization, we were inspired to co-champion a gender balance movement so that all companies and organizations could be a part of a powerful movement for change. It's called 5050 by 2020