The Frustrations of Being a Team Leader: The Good, Bad & Ugly of Leadership Development

As a real estate team builder, do you struggle to scale your real estate team beyond yourself? Or maybe you hire someone in like 3, 6, 12 months later they're not on your team anymore and you blame it on them and how they're not cut out for the business or you know, something they did. Or do you have folks on your team for two, three, four years and then they fail to see that they can achieve their goals within your business? This is something that I found a chronic issue for me was building a world big enough where my team members could fit into it. Not in a way where they could just do the same things over and over again, but to really develop people in my world. And the last episode of Real Estate Team Builders, we chatted with Dave Hook specifically about the topic of leadership development. And I want to dive a little bit deeper, maybe give a little bit different perspective or a additional insights into the topics that we covered when I chatted with Dave Hook. That's the cadence of real estate team builders as we talk with somebody who's running a kick butt real estate team who has gone from struggling, working 80, 90 hours a week. That's where Dave Hook was to sell, you know, 80, 90 homes. And he will do about 325 transactions, about two and a half million of GCI this year, 34% profit. And he works 90 minutes a week in his real estate business. So do the math on that 34% margin. He's working 90 minutes a week in his real estate business. Do the math on how many dollars he's making per hour. We chat about something in real estate B school called Business Freedom Index. It's simply the amount of money you can take out of a business divided by the hours you put into the business. Most real estate team leaders, you take out their own production, you know they don't have a profitable business. And that is not the case for Dave Hook. So I've had the pleasure of working with Dave and his team for probably five plus years or so. And when we chatted among the many things we could have talked about because Dave has done so many things right along his journey to true business ownership. He spoke about leadership development and specifically identifying talent, crafting their mission and vision and making sure that that fits inside what you're building. And then the cadence, how do you engage with somebody on a regular basis to make sure that they can have an open, honest conversation with you as a team owner to make sure that they are actually feeling as if they're progressing along that personal mission and vision for you to make sure by connecting with them every 90 days that they are fitting into what your business mission and vision is. And so when I look back on my journey in building a team, the process of identifying talent, you know, to pick on the first point, it was not very dialed in in the early part of the journey. And I think, and Dave covered this in the last episode, he said, you know, when you're first getting started, your ability to attract talent is directly correlated to how like good you are, how value, like what your value proposition is. If you've never led or managed or developed another person before, your first hire is not going to be someone that is really clear on where they want to go, because you're not even clear on where you want to go. So there's no question correlation between their personal vision or professional vision, fitting into your business vision. And so identifying talent, you know, in Dave's situation was his first administrative hire and his first agent hire became the two people, over a period of five to seven years, developed them into purely technicians, into managers, and then now into leaders in his business, where they are running the day to day of the business. And Dave is, has the ability to be completely hands off. And so what does it look like to sit down with somebody and I'll give you my perspective on it and to make sure that you are clear on what matters most to them. This is where I feel like most team leaders have not put themselves in a position to slow down enough and connect with another human being. Simply have a conversation with someone else and ask them, like, hey, where do you want to be in the next three to five years? Write that down as you're listening to this podcast. Pause it and write that down. You have to go in and talk to all of your team members and ask them the question, where do you want to be in the next three to five years in your business, with your family, with your finances, and in other areas of life that might matter the most to you? Just ask them that question and engage in a conversation with another person. Me and my journey, I was so busy where I viewed my people. This is going to sound horrible. It's the truth. I viewed my people for at least the first part of my business growth journey as a distraction and an inconvenience. Not because I'm a bad person, because I was so overwhelmed with production and building the team and building building systems and trying to be profitable and evaluating lead sources and getting distracted and trying to be a good dad and trying to be a good husband. And like all these things that fly into our world, that take us away from the actual point of being a business owner is to humbly serve the people that agree to work with you. That is it right there. You have to be in a place of service and submission. It doesn't mean that you let your people just walk all over you. You have to humbly submit to the people that are willing to work with you and realize that they are putting a lot on the line to work with you. Me, in my journey, I was always thinking, not always, maybe the first 2/3 of my journey, I was always, I had this mindset and a little bit of resentment toward folks in my world that, man, I provide so much, I give so much. And it wasn't an anger. It was more of a frustration, like, I can never make you happy. Like, I buy all these leads, I give you all these systems, I have all these administrators hired. I've taken all this stuff off your plate. And you're still questioning this or questioning that, or you're not really doing what I would want you to do. You're not honoring your time blocks the way I would want you to honor time blocks. And it can become this sort of frustration, you know, and this constant tug of war between your team members and you as the team owner. And so maybe I should have titled this follow up episode like the Frustrations of Leadership Development. Dave Hook did a very good job of giving us the straightest path to do leadership development the right way. And so my version is the Frustrations of Leadership Development. The last point is honoring a normal cadence where you're just having an authentic conversation with someone that's in your world. And this is. Dave said every 90 days you could do this every month, where you're just asking someone like, hey, what's working in your business? What's not working in your business? What's working in your personal life? What's not working in your personal life? Like, we agreed that you were going to do these five tasks. That was the big push of your role here on this team. How do you feel like you did? Here's a few things that I saw that we might be able to improve. Let's get an action plan together. Let's attack those things. How do you feel you're doing? Showing up with our core values? That's something that's. I'm sort of scripting it for you here. This is how the conversation goes. Core values, right. One of our core values is that we hustle and work hard. You know, in the last 90 days? Where do you feel like you really crushed it in relation to this core value? Where do you feel like you came up short? Another one of our core values is we embrace accountability and discipline on our team. That's daily number, daily tracking, right? That is, you know, honoring your time blocks. How do you feel in the last 90 days? You did, you know, really great when it came to this core value. Where do you feel like you struggled when it came to embracing accountability and discipline? Positive attitude. We embody a positive attitude. Where do you feel like you really showed up and you lifted the team up? Where do you feel in the last 90 days? Maybe you let us down a little bit and let yourself down and you might have brought some negativity to the team. Is there anything I can do to help you going forward? So that's the cadence, is make sure that you are working with the right person. That's the talent. On two episodes ago, we had a conversation with Dan Jones, and one of the things I talked about in my follow up so was patterns versus potential. So if you have someone on your team that has a pattern of success in their life and business before they met you, and they're coming onto your team and they're really sort of hitting their stride, this is someone that you want to invest in from a leadership development standpoint. And then as. And then you're asking them the questions three to five years from now, what do you want your personal life to look like? What do you want your financial life to look like? What do you want your business to look like? What do you want your, you know, other areas of your life, your faith or your fitness or your fun family? What do you want that to look like? And then you have a good vision of where they want to go. And then you can cast the vision of your business and how they fit into your business, how they can achieve their personal mission and vision in the areas of life that matter to them, their finances and their business. And how that fits into the vision that you have for your business. Is your vision big enough to include them in it? And then this cadence of every 90 days, you have to have an open conversation, give your team members permission to talk openly and authentically with you about what's working and what's not working so you can really show up and really serve them in a way that no one else has ever served them. And so I am hoping that this episode specifically, you can avoid years, I mean, years of pain and heartache because you are not having these open conversations. You are not investing into your folks. You don't know where they want to go. You don't know if they fit into what your, you know, their world fits into your world. Right. That's the whole point of the podcast. So I'm hoping this helps you. And here is the sign off. What is one thing you can do today to take action on that can move you forward in your business when it comes to leadership development? Do that now.