If you’ve been an agent for awhile, you are probably experiencing time management challenges. One of the ways through that is to create a team. You can segue from just a career to a business.
TEAM is no longer a four-letter word. The importance and implementation of leadership through teamwork and synergy is back in style in the real estate industry.
You may be a real estate manager, an owner or a team builder—an agent with assistants, buyers’ agents, and sellers’ agents. You may be an agent in his/her first year of business. No matter what your job, you have probably heard, or believed, in the past, that real estate is an independent business. You don’t need to work with anyone. You’re on your own. Guess again.
TEAM Again Embraced in the Real Estate Industry-
In the past few years, the concept of TEAM has come back into vogue. Why? Because we’ve gotten more sophisticated in business. We realize that no one succeeds alone. We understand now that people working together create something more substantial than a sum of the parts.
TEAM Trend in Business and in Real Estate
In addition, with the challenges in the business, we finally get that many minds focused on the same task can accomplish much more than each person working as his own little island. Supporting this trend, strong company cultures have emerged which encourage and reward teamwork instead of solely independent achievement.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said,
People acting together as a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about.
Do You Have a Team–or Just a Group?
If you’ve ever played on a sports team, you know the chaos that ensues when every player tries to be the star—to go her own way. That’s not a team. That’s a group. You may also know the joy of playing on a team that shares a common focus and commitment to excellence. What a difference!
Talking About It is a Slam-Dunk
It’s much easier to talk about teamwork than to create a team. One of the reasons is that most of us have never worked as a team before. I certainly can’t say I worked in real estate sales as a team. Rather, my first experiences in great teams, and then leading teams–comes from the world of music. I’ve created and led teams as a jazz musician. I’ve played in exceptional orchestras (I’m a flutist). I’ve seen conductors pull together one hundred disparate, temperamental, independent musicians as an inspiring team. (It’s a lot like managing a real estate office!).
It’s Not Just About Developing YOU as a Leader
You may think that, as a leader, your job is to find team members that will work well together. That’s true, as far as it goes. But, your ultimate job is to train and coach those team members to start doing some of the leadership jobs you’ve done. That way, you can keep moving to higher levels of leadership. You can expand and sell your business.
One of the Differences Between Group and Team
One of the differences between leading a group and leading a team is that, in a successful team, team members also become leaders, and think like leaders, looking out for the good of the team, not just for themselves, In other words,
leaders develop leadership on their team.
Otherwise, leaders are not really leading. They’re managing—or micro-managing. From developing leadership over a couple of decades, I’ve found four major truisms for developing your team with strong internal leadership. In the next blog, we’ll investigate each of these four major truisms. Identifying these helps you create dynamic teams that can operate without our micro-managing them. What freedom!
My question to you now: Do you believe you’re creating and managing a group, or a team? How do you know?
Agents: Please share this blog and the information below with your manager. I want to help them develop leadership through these effective actions.
Want leadership actions you can put immediately into practice with confidence? Take a look at my subscription series for anyone who wants to step further into leadership: 365 Leadership. You’ll get one leadership action per month that you can put to work in your real estate office. Read what attendees are saying about the program at 365 Leadership. Join us. It’s profitable and it’s fun–and it’s very affordable!
