3. Train and Consult

money. Talent may cost more than the average person, but the return on your investment is obvious.

3. Train and Consult

The last key area of your organizational model is training and consulting. What you pay talent to help you makes up a huge percentage of your annual costs, so you will always want to make sure you get the most out of your people investment. (And this is for their benefit and yours!) You’ll get the best results from people if you do two things: train and consult them. To get perspective on how this will work, take a look at the model below.

Training and Consulting: The Right Way

TRAIN For Knowledge and Skills

TAKE ACTION

CONSULT For Accountability

Figure 23

This is the way training and consulting should work. You train someone initially to understand the job, learn the skills, and develop the systems required to do the job at a high level. He then starts taking action. Every week, you meet with him to review his goals, priorities, and weekly tasks, and to hold him accountable. As necessary, you’ll also be making sure he gets the additional training he needs to continue his growth and improve his ability to excel at his job. Just like you, your employee should set annual goals and break them down into monthly and weekly ones. His goals should contribute to your goals. And your weekly meetings are designed to keep him on track toward meeting and exceeding those goals.

Now that is the supercondensed version of how training and consulting should be done. As you probably noticed, it is not a one-time thing. You begin with training and consulting, and it continues for as long as your employee works with you. Most agents either conduct training for only a short period following a new employee beginning or simply skip it altogether.

Training and Consulting: The Way Most Agents Do It

HIRE Say “Follow me around” or “Do this”

Meet On the fly

Figure 24

These agents are practicing “sea gull” management. They do very little training (or none at all) and then they just swoop in, make a lot of noise, dump on people, and fly off. Is it any wonder they can’t find or keep talent to work with them?

We’ve discovered that over time talent will not need to be micromanaged. Trained, yes. Consulted, yes. Micromanaged, no. Reviewing goals weekly and then consulting on ways to help them achieve them is usually enough to get great results. If you “Wenow only want people who have a work ethic and share our value system. They need to crave learning.” Mary Harker Millionaire Real Estate Agent Dallas, TX Sales volume—$52 million

find yourself still micromanaging a staff member three to six months into his employment, he may not be talented and may not be motivated to reach his goals (your goals) on his own. That may be the case. Or you may learn that you haven’t quite learned to let leverage work for you and

are overmanaging your staff. Be warned that nothing will scare away talent faster than micromanagement. They don’t need it, don’t enjoy it, and won’t tolerate it. Talent expects that if they exceed your goals and expectations, you will train, consult, and hold them accountable, but no more.

Generally speaking, micromanagement is usually something to be avoided. Sometimes, inexperienced managers pay too much attention and get trapped in “hover mode.” This is when your employees feel obligated to run everything past you, and you feel obligated to check on everything they do. That is a bad place to be, and, at the end of the day, no one feels empowered to take decisive action. Let’s take a quick look at the Ten Principles for Empowering People (Figure 25). They are great guiding principles for managing your staff.

From clearly communicating and getting agreement on their responsibilities to treating them with respect, these ten principles will help you have the highest possible success with the people you employ.

Ten Principles for Empowering People

1. Tell people what their responsibilities are. Get agreement.

2. Give them authority equal to their assigned responsibilities.

3. Set standards of excellence and guidelines.

4. Provide initial and ongoing training that will enable them to meet standards (skills, knowledge, etc.).

5. Hold them accountable. Define consequences.

6. Provide them with weekly feedback on their performance.

7. Recognize them for their achievements (praise in public; correct in private).

8. Trust them. Allow them to grow into self-leadership.

9. Give them permission to fail.

10. Treat them with dignity and respect.

Figure 25

Consulting your employees is at the very heart of the empowerment process. Although many agents think of accountability as tough confrontation, I want you to think of it as “carefrontation.” You’re doing it because you care. When done right, it holds people accountable to their job and goals in a timely, agreeable manner. Consulting begins by setting and agreeing to specific annual, monthly, and weekly goals. Your weekly consulting meet-

The Consultative Interview

ings to cover whether 1. What was your goal? your employees are on target with their goals

2. How did you do?

3. How do you feel about that? should be fairly straightforward. Figure 26 illustrates the formula we use when consulting from a common platform of shared goals.

4. Based on how you did, what is your goal and what do you need to do now?

Is there anything that might keep you from doing that? If you needed training or support to do this, what might it be?

Figure 26

It is a simple but highly effective formula. This simple process of asking questions really brings out accountability. You don’t have to do anything but follow this interview process each week. When people are meeting their goals, they require little corrective management. If anything, you’ll mostly be reviewing their goals and priorities, and consulting with them on improving techniques or solving problems. The main trouble you will have is when someone is not regularly meeting her goals. This requires an additional approach and much more involvement from you.

The first step to take when someone is underperforming over time is to shift gears from the normal consultative interview and get her agreement that a problem exists. This should be done in private. (Remember, it’s always: Reward in public; correct in private.) A staff meeting or when other employees are present is a poor forum for working with people on performance issues. When confronted publicly, even in the nicest way possible, the people you are seeking an honest dialogue with may withdraw or, worse, become defensive. Many, many agents make this simple mistake because they have structured their week around one team meeting. The truth is you need two sets of meetings to be effective: a team meeting to share information and common goals and private one-on-one meetings to address personal performance.

In addressing personal performance, if there is a problem you are first seeking her agreement that an actual problem exists. In fact, the possibility remains that the goals were perhaps unrealistic or that work conditions have conspired to make talented individuals underachieve. So, if you can eliminate those possibilities, you’ll need to get her buy in that a productivity problem exists. Next, ask how she sees the problem and then honestly share your perspective. Depending on the situation, you may need to discuss the consequences for her if there is no change in the situation. You should seek an agreement on what you both want to see happen. This short-term goal should be put in writing.

A big part of the process is discussing alternate solutions. “How are we going to solve this problem?” Let her know that you’re willing to participate in the process and get her ideas on how to fix it. What emerges from this conversation can be very revealing. It may be that the individual does not believe in your models and isn’t following them. She may think she has better ideas. Keep an open mind, but the point of the discussion is to arrive at a mutually agreeable course of action. This needs to be specific and should spell out expectations, responsibilities, and time lines. Again, write it down. What you will have then is a kind of short-term contract for

personal performance course correction. You have a copy, and she has a copy. She has agreed to the terms and understands the consequences. Next, you begin the process of following up and measuring progress.

Stick to your proven models and approaches during this process. An underachieving employee will many times try to convince you that it is the models or systems that are wrong and not her behavior. You have to remember that you are judging results and not people. If someone isn’t right for your system, you can still “love her to death” while parting ways. Conversely, you’ll need to positively reinforce achievement and progress as it occurs.

As an ongoing reminder, think of your Organizational Model this way: Talent to shine, Systems to define, Train and consult to refine.

THE TWO D’SIN YOUR ORGANIZATION

Time out. Before we leave our discussion of your Organizational Model, we need to address systems and tools. We’ve put forth the idea that when you hire the right people, they will develop and implement your systems and tools. That is exactly right, and it’s why we’ve dedicated the bulk of our analysis of leverage to the people aspect. But we need to realize that while the third L—Leverage—begins with people, it also includes these other two important aspects. Systems and tools bring leverage to your staff, and they bring more D to your business. Let’s take a moment and explore the concept of bringing D to your organization.

All truly successful businesses are successful because they get things done. The best businesses get things done by bringing two D’s into the business. The concept of D comes from the popular DISC behavioral profiling tool used by many organizations during the hiring process. In that system, D loosely stands for the “drive” we associate with doers. In other

words,“D gets things done.” It is sometimes referred to as Leadership D. On the opposite end of the spectrum is another kind of D that I’ve identified over the years. It’s the D of the business itself, which is about the “drive” created by infrastructure—powerful systems and tools. This is called Business D. In a business organization, unless you address it, the two tend to exist in inverse proportion to each other. The more Leadership D there is, the less emphasis is put on developing Business D and visa versa. Leadership D and Business D. Having them both in your business is the key to building a truly great business.

Most real estate agents power their sales business by their Leadership D and heavily favor leveraging their growth on their personal drive. This is the classic model we see every day in the real estate industry, where the agent provides the lion’s share of the D. On the other side of the spectrum are mature businesses, which base their success on the quality and effectiveness of their infrastructure, systems, and tools. This brings to mind massive systems-based companies like FedEx, which have exceptional leaders like Fred Smith but which also have amazing Business D. The Business D derived from systems and tools that are so effective that the company could essentially fly on autopilot for a long while without the leader’s everyday influence. Their business model demands that their systems be that powerful and self-sufficient. Such a balance of Business D

The Dilemma of D

Business D Leadership D Business D

Leadership D Business D Leadership D

Is this it? or Is this it?

Figure 27

or Is this it?

“Wehave documented all our systems and put them in our operations manual. We run it like a business.” David and Judie Crockett Millionaire Real Estate Agents Concord, OH Sales volume—$53 million

and Leadership D is hard to find, but when present, the agent has the best of both worlds: Strong momentum from their Business D, powerful drive from their Leadership D.

In our industry, the main challenge for real estate agents is bringing Business D to the organization. Many high-achieving agents have difficulty making this happen and aren’t comfortable depending on systems and tools to move their business forward. The truth of the matter is, to reach your highest level of success, you will have to incorporate a certain amount of Business D in your organization or it will always be 100 percent dependent on you.

Your Organizational Model is the key to adding Business D to your company. The right people will discover and implement the right systems and tools, while bringing some Leadership D of their own.

POINTSTO REMEMBER:The Four Fundamental Business Models of Real Estate

■ Models are the science of business. ■ Build your house with a blueprint or risk ending up with a hobo shack. ■ Warren Buffett teaches us to master the proven models before we add creativity. ■ The Economic Model shows you where your money comes from, where it goes, and how much is left for you. • Focus on the numbers you must hit. • Focus on appointments. • Focus on your conversion rates.