Building A Top-Tier Real Estate Team

You have probably heard and thought a lot about team building in your career as you’ve attempted to grow your business and your personal brand. It is easy to come up with idealistic notions of what your dream team would look like and, more importantly, what it would accomplish.

There are many schools of thought circulating around the internet and the self-help section of the bookstore in regard to team building. They tell you why you should care about developing your team, how you should do so, and how doing so will help you achieve all of your goals.

Results

None of this advice is wrong, but much of it may very well miss the point of team building. At the end of the day, team building is about results. However, where many sources go wrong is in thinking that the results of a team and the results of a business are the same.

Via E-Learning Heroes: Results matter. But which results?

In the grand scheme of things, you do want your team and your business to become somewhat synonymous. You want a cohesive sense of purpose and a unified drive toward your goals. But you will only achieve these things if the team itself has a reason to work and stay together.

A good team should have its own identity. This can be as similar to or as different from the identity of your business as you’d like. However, it will inevitably encompass more than that. Your business does not care how many inside jokes you have with other team members, how much trust you can place on them, or even how each individual goes the extra mile not just with customers, but with other team members.

Goals

The goal of a successful team should be measurable, but should not have a monetary value assigned to it. A good team could do everything right and, do to circumstances outside their control, have a terrible year. Meanwhile, a terrible team could get lucky with market conditions and make deals and profits that do not reflect their prowess as a well-oiled machine.

Via Marketing Land: A team’s value can’t be measured in money.

To make sure that a team functions as it is supposed to in its own right, no matter what the prevailing conditions would suggest, there are three main areas that team leaders should be sure to address, outline, and measure. Each of these three represents an element of team member trust in the team as a whole.

Three keys to success

First of all, leaders should make sure that team members know how to communicate with other team members, and that in return, each member can expect a certain style and caliber of communication. The communication directives of your team should be flexible enough that they are allowed to express their own identities, but structured enough to provide consistency and clarity.

Each team should also have a set procedure in the event of a decision that needs to be made or a problem that needs to be solved. There should be a clearly defined channel of communication and chain of command, and protocols that are followed in each of many common situations.

Finally, to ensure transparency and cohesiveness in the team even as it evolves, personnel procedures should also be carefully outlined. Each team member should know what to expect with a new hire, a trainee, a vacation, or a replacement.

Ultimately, building a top-tier real estate team is about taking the time to define results: not just business results, but personal and professional results according to metrics that drive each individual member and the team as a whole to betterment.