With Christina Guidotti Ceo At Christina Guidotti International , Mandy Wurth Mandy Wurth Consulting & David Smeeth Managing Director Of Real Estate Academy
While we may think we are islands, a successful business is in fact built on the energy and labour of a whole team of high skilled and diverse people.
Persuasive and flamboyant sales people can’t complete sales without the attention to detail of the precise marketing and exacting finance teams. Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined and Christina Guidotti, CEO at Christina Guidotti International, believes that a team leader can bring the different tribes together and is an essential role within a successful real estate office. A great team leader ensures profitability increases and staff turnover lowers. As Christina says, “An effective team leader will most certainly increase the satisfaction of all the individuals within the office.”
“We desperately need team leaders,” says Mandy Wurth. “I think every office needs one. If you've got 10-plus sales people, you need one.” As Mandy explains, you need a person who's in the middle that can manage all the processes for you. “We're dealing with people.
Christina believes, “A team leader must have a zero tolerance for excuses. The only way you can have a zero tolerance for excuses is to have a zero tolerance for excuses in your own life. That is the foundation for success as a team leader: the quality of taking responsibility. A team leader leads by example and takes responsibility for their life, for their world. Instead of either gossiping or persecuting, they take responsibility for their world and they buckle down and just get the work done.”
She continues, “Great leadership is vulnerable leadership. We have to have clarity on where we're going, where we're headed, what we're trying to build. We've also got to have a certain amount of flexibility so that we know to basically expect that there are going to be some setbacks.”
Christina adds, “There's always going to be a fork in the road. A leader must be able to guide and make decisions. One of my key productivity tools is to make decisions quickly because procrastination is where everything hides. It's where fear is, it's where laziness is. A team leader must be able to be quite decisive and to be able to say, ‘Hey, this is where we're going’ and create and help people with their choices.”.
She says, “We need someone that's able to manage time. It's key. It's not easy being in real estate. There's so much to juggle - we're trying to juggle family, we're trying to juggle ourselves, we're trying to juggle our careers, but we need a team leader that hasn't got their backside hanging out all the time. They've got to be real. They've got to admit that it's not easy sometimes. They're going to be people that have a certain amount of effectiveness day-to-day. Someone that's not there until midnight everyday. They've got to be able to manage their time. They've got to be productive.”
Finally, Christina says, “We want them to have a vision.” If a team leader can articulate the vision, the team will follow.
People need to know, ‘Who do I go to, to help me with this?’.” She continues, “This person could have been in your business for a long time. It could be somebody new coming in who has some form of sales background, but understands process and administration as well because you need to be able to wear the two hats and flip the switch when you need to.”
A team leader must be:
According to David Smeeth, a team leader needs to focus on their staff. As he says, “It is not about you as the team leader. It doesn't matter what you have done or what you have achieved as an individual. Yes, it gives you some credibility to be able to speak from that place, where you know what it takes but that is where it stops. It is about supporting them and helping them achieve what it is they want to achieve professionally.”
David continues, “For me, leading from the front is sitting alongside them, picking up the phone, making calls, converting the sales, being part of that team and showing them that I am not afraid to get my hands dirty.”
It can be a challenge however for a principal to share responsibility for the business with another person when taking on a team leader. As David explains, “From a leadership point of view, and it is not different for real estate principals, they own the business, they've run the business for a long time. Their team have seen them as the leader of the business. When someone comes into that business and becomes the leader of that team, there needs to be that separation.”
David says, “For any principal, if you are going to make that decision to bring a team leader into the business, you need to have a clear understanding about what the team leader’s role is versus what your role is in the business. That then needs to transfer to the team. The one thing for me that has made my job much easier is that we have had a clear understanding from the beginning about what Lee’s role is and what my role is.
I am sure there are times when Lee looks at decisions I have made and thinks, ‘Maybe I would have done that a bit differently’. Lee, nevertheless, has allowed me to go ahead and do that.”