This month: I’m helping great agents expand their businesses by building a team. Each week, I’ll be giving you one principle about team building that assures you build a great team.
The situation: You’re a seasoned agent. You want to double the number of transactions you complete in the next year. What’s your goal—50? 75? 100+ transactions? You’ve thought about hiring an assistant. Or, perhaps you already have an assistant and are considering expanding your team. Top producers rarely work alone. In fact, they have found there is a limit they can do without an assistant and team members. So, top producers have created support from an assistant and teams of agents to help the whole team achieve higher productivity. To develop a team, though, requires leadership and training skills. In this blog series we’ll explore how to develop those skills to build great teams.
The Four Truisms to Developing Team Leadership
Great agents are great salespeople. However, leadership skills are not necessarily natural to the top salesperson.In these blogs, I’ll give you four principles you must recognize and follow to develop your leadership skills for a win-win relationship between you and your team members. Today, let’s focus on principle #3.
Principle #3: It’s your job to train them in how to do the skills.
Some people think “leaders” are the “idea people” and aren’t supposed to get into implementation. But if you want your team to excel, you must teach them how. Why? The ‘how’ contains your values and philosophy of how you do your business! Having worked with assistants for over 15 years, I have found that assistants and team members need help in systemizing any process that you want done. They are good at systemizing their own processes–but not good at all at systemizing ours! Help them. Do you have foundational systems in place from which to improvise? Do you know how to train them, not just tell them?
Telling vs. Training
What’s the difference between telling them and training them? The objective of training is behavior change. So, if you’re going to train, you must have your students practice skills in class. How can you expect them to be competent with clients if they haven’t gained competency in the classroom? You must watch them perform to hold them accountable to what you want done–and how you want it done.
Let’s go back to that example of answering the phone that I gave in an earlier blog. When you’re training your receptionist to answer the phone using a certain script with a certain tone of voice, you won’t know if she is performing to your expectations unless you listen to her actually role play your script. Then, you can coach the positives and ask for more practice on the needed improvements. Now, you have trained to your skill expectations, not just talked through them.
Are You Reaching Your Potential?
If you believe you can have a more successful career, but you’re stuck at a plateau, why not investigate coaching? Our one-on-one unique coaching program is customized to meet your needs. Register for a Complimentary Consultation to see if our coaching is for you.
