Building a High-Performing Team from the Bottom Up, in Three Steps

Be selective, play to numbers, and top-grade your talent

Dru Lee, Owner/Operator, Oklahoma City, OK, Forward Coaching Real Estate Coach

When you focus on a new target, a goal, or desired outcome, what do you tend to ask yourself first? “What are my goals for the year?” “How will I get there?” “What obstacles might I run into on the way?” And my personal favorite, although admittedly, I am biased, “When is my next coaching call to go over all these questions in my head?” One question, however, supersedes the others when setting goals for building a business; that question starts with WHO…

WHO, if you should add them to your roster, make the goal instantly more achievable? Over time in the real estate industry, the idea has grown that building a team should be its own goal. Why would you want to build a team? What do we need one for in the first place? We should focus instead on building a business so massive it requires a team dedicated to “Delivering the Dream of Homeownership Everywhere,” to as many people as the team can possibly support.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African Proverb

“If you want to go farther and faster, go with the right others.” — I’ll take credit for that one…

Be Selective

Building any team requires keeping every position filled with the right partners to help you win. If you have ever been involved with youth sports, you’ve watched the forming of a team. We’ve all witnessed teams picking players and filling every roster position rather than finding one team member at a time.

Consider how your growth strategy might change if instead of hiring for one specific role at a time, pausing to train that person, measuring their performance, then resuming hiring, the leader recruits for every roster spot as quickly as possible. The bigger the vision, the further into the future the leader must consider who will be needed and how long it will take that partner to perform to standards.

TEAM-BUILDING STEPS FOR SUCCESS

1. Determine the team you need to accomplish your business goals.

2. Add 30% to that number to account for normal attrition; remind yourself life happens, usually without a “save the date” note.

3. Plan out the next three years of growth to get an idea of the team you are building, along with the total number of people needed for the future.

Organizational Behavioral Management theory teaches four fundamentals occur when a team moves from construction to achieving:

• First, a team is formed. The leader determines where they are going and who is needed, then recruits to the organizational positions, thus forming the team.

• Next, the natural progression leads to conflict known as storming. In a sports team, storming may appear when determining the starter versus the bench.

• Once trust is built and conflict becomes healthy, the team moves into phase three, known as norming. While no team is driving to be considered normal, this phase is crucial to get to the last one.

• The final phase of team construction is performing — now it’s time to achieve the goal.

IT’S A NUMBERS GAME

No matter the strategy, regardless how long it takes to build a great roster, recruiting is ultimately a numbers game. For example, Google, with more than 3 million applications submitted each year, hires roughly 20,000 people annually, for a 0.67% acceptance rate! Statistically speaking, it’s easier to be accepted into Harvard than to get a job at Google.

I graduated Navy basic training as one of just over 52,000 Naval recruits graduating that year. Of those, an average 6% are eligible to try out for the Basic Underwater Demolition School to eventually join Navy Sea, Air, and Land Teams. On average, 2000 SEAL candidates attend BUDS annually; only 200 to 250 graduate with the Trident. The odds of making it from Navy Recruit to becoming a SEAL is a spare 0.49%.

“It takes a Navy to find Navy SEALs.” — Ben Kinney

Perspective: According to Business Insider, our PLACE partner, Goldman Sachs, receives about a million applications for mid-level jobs each year. Only about 0.5% of people (just 5,000 out of that million) actually get hired. PLACE is partnering with the Navy SEAL of Banking.

WANT MORE NUMBERS?

NCAA Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision formerly known as Div-1A, is the highest level of college football in the U.S. These programs start scouting talent from high school sophomore and junior classes. Seniors eventually recruited often start receiving offers four to five years before ever stepping foot into a college classroom. An estimated 310,465 high school seniors play football in this country. Of those, 7,0147 (or about 6.5%) go on to play football for an FBS program.

Of 15,588 starting seniors, only about 6,500 are scouted by the NFL. Only 256 of the 350 top college players invited to attend the NFL combine are drafted. Football hopefuls have a .08% chance of going from playing in high school to making it to the NFL. And of those lucky elites, only 150 athletes play for more than four years, which might be why many players facetiously refer to the NFL as “Not For Long.”

Perspective: Of the NFL’s 25,000 players, 362 reach the highest level of achievement and are inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.

The entrepreneurial optimist recruits one person and crowns them talent. A savvy businessperson knows to recruit four hires; if one is talented and stays, you get to average. If one in three is a great hire, you’d be an expert. Leaders hiring two and finding one great talent are considered genius-level savants. We’ve run the numbers and the results are in; the higher the level of talent needed, the more applicants required. What does performance look like for these amazing hires? We’ve all heard our PLACE Co-Founder Ben Kinney’s infamous, “If you sell 12 houses a year, you get to stay,” career guideline. Are you wondering how long it truly takes to get that person into production? As long as it takes! Think like a college coach — recruit earlier for more time to develop your talent. It’s how to get the best from them.

TOP-GRADE YOUR TEAM

The last step in building your incredible team of high-performers is to Top-Grade. After forming your team, focus on improving it by replacing the lowest performers with higher-caliber talent based on leadership expectations. For example, if a team has 10 members, the bottom 20% translates to two members being top-graded and replaced. The team goal would be improving the talent, while the goal of the players is outperforming the bottom 20%. Jack Welch used this strategy to turn struggling General Electric around. The downside of this strategy is often fostering a cutthroat culture to do whatever it takes to avoid being the lowest performer on the team. Arguably, this recruiting strategy has merit, yet consider, if practically applied, even the greatest basketball team ever assembled (obviously the first — and in my opinion, the only — dream team), the 1992 U.S. men’s team would still have a bottom 20%.

If you want to get ahead, play like you’re behind. It frequently takes longer to find great people than we like to acknowledge, but more people at the top of the funnel get you the best available talent. Lastly, determining who you need is easier when you know where you are going. Recruit ALL the people you might need as quickly as possible in order to have the team, train the person, and then coach to performance. Need 24 hires in a year? Do not hire two a month. Instead, hire 24 in the shortest time possible. Then work with the team you have, while you top-grade to get the best available.

“Team-building is easy,” said no one ever! Unless you want your business to stall, recruiting is the ultimate way to hold team members accountable, while getting the best out of them. Continue growing until you have your own Navy SEAL dream team of the highest and best performers.