Natalka Falcomer

Natalka Falcomer is a lawyer, real estate broker and Certified Leasing Officer who started her real estate career in private equity. She created, hosted and co-produced a popular legal call-in show on Rogers TV and founded and recently sold Groundworks, a firm specializing in commercial leasing law. She is currently the Chief Real Estate Officer of Houseful.ca, leading the development and expansion of the company’s personalized home buying and selling experience for the Canadian market. She sits as an advisor on NAR REACH Canada and is the former multi-year board member of the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

The post Lessons in Leadership: Natalka Falcomer on Don Kottick’s secret to success appeared first on REM.

Ghaz Syed

I once thought that being successful meant that I would be whole, without setbacks or disappointments, where everything in life would be as I had imagined and carefully planned in my youth. I’ve come to love and accept that the pieces of my past are what make me whole as a person. Outspoken and sometimes to my disadvantage, I have no interest in just fitting into a mold. I believe that being different, learning differently, and expressing myself differently is why I have excelled in business ownership (though I struggled in school).

My forte is being a connector. I thrive on connecting people, which is why I accidentally stumbled into recruitment.

The post Finding the perfect hire: Tips for building your real estate dream team appeared first on REM.

There are plenty of managers who hate giving feedback. In their view, if there isn’t anything wrong with someone’s performance, there’s nothing to be said. To many an employee however, silence is deadly. Unless they have an amazing sense of self-confidence, most employees will take silence as meaning there’s nothing wrong but that there is also nothing good about their performance. In fact, the very idea of receiving feedback can be nerve-wracking for some who have had past experiences where the word “feedback” was synonymous with  “ripping a person to shreds”. Even the word feedback can make employees defensive.

From a management point of view, it’s important to provide both positive and negative feedback on a regular basis. It’s more likely to be heard and taken on board than if it’s a harsh reprimand every three months.

What constitutes a regular basis for feedback?

This is really up to the team but remember that feedback doesn’t necessarily mean a formal sit down review, with notes going into a personnel file. Feedback can be as informal as a quick “check in” with each team member on a weekly basis, just to make sure there is nothing brewing on the horizon in their world. Catching a pot before it boils over means a lot less mess to clean up.

Team members have to hear feedback for it to work. We’re not talking about physically hearing it. We are referring to whether or not the employee is really listening and taking it in. This might sound obvious but a bad delivery when the employee isn’t at all receptive can mean that the feedback is of little use to the employee, at best, or is totally misunderstood, at worst. This is why frequency matters. If employees are used to getting regular feedback, they are more likely to a) not be concerned or nervous when you come to give it and b) will be more likely to hear it.

What is badly delivered feedback?

• When only negative feedback is given, without anything positive to temper the message.
• When feedback is delivered in a way that results in the employee feeling unsafe or even threatened. If the feedback is designed to “take them down a notch” instead of helping the employee to grow in their position, it’s not appropriate.
• When the manager is uncomfortable giving feedback, and out of fear of a negative reaction, isn’t clear about what he/she is trying to communicate.
• When the feedback is too general. This just results in confusion or doesn’t provide any usable, actionable information.

Five essentials when giving feedback

1. Be kind.
2. Be specific.
3. Be timely. Providing feedback on a transaction that didn’t go too smoothly weeks after it happened isn’t really helpful.
4. Be clear.
5. Make it a conversation. Allowing the employee to respond and discuss the feedback openly is important. Listening is a two-way street and you might learn something you didn’t know too.

As a manager, your feedback will be more readily taken on board if you have these qualities: authority, credibility and trustworthiness.

Authority – if you are the right person to be giving feedback within the organizational structure, you are more likely to be heard. Peer-to-peer feedback can backfire since most people on a team see themselves as being equal.

Credibility – if you’re a new manager, whether new to the team or to the industry, you won’t have much credibility with employees, nor will your feedback.

Trustworthiness – this loops back to the point about safety. Feedback, given in the right circumstances, builds trust. If an employee feels that the feedback was given inappropriately, they won’t take it on board.

Feedback is a critical management tool to ensure that employees are happy and successful in their roles: their success reflects on you, so it’s in your interest to make sure it happens.

Aiman Attar

The former owner of Imaginahome Inc. and former Realtor at Re/Max, Aiman Attar is the managing partner of AGENTC: The Real Estate Recruiter. She has worked in the real estate industry for over 10 years with Toronto’s finest, most accomplished Realtors. She decided to dedicate her talent and experience to helping you hire the best candidates to build your business. Email Aiman.

The post How to give constructive employee feedback appeared first on REM.

When Calgary agent Sano Stante fell off his roof and broke his wrist, it put him in the hospital for a few days, but it didn’t affect his business. His trusted assistant of two years was well-trained and able to take ownership while the real estate professional healed under the medicine prescribed by his doctors.

A few summers ago, agent Donna Rooney needed heart surgery and had to take two weeks off from her thriving real estate business in Calgary to fly to a specialist in Toronto. Her clients didn’t even know she was away. Her team of three other Realtors and two administrative assistants kept the business churning as if she continuously had her hand on the wheel.

In 2017, Tanya Eklund, leader of the No. 1 team for that year in Re/Max Real Estate Central’s Calgary office went into labour with her second child. Although she hadn’t intended to negotiate deals throughout her labour, she worked on three deals until her daughter was born! Some of her clients hadn’t even realized that she was expecting. Her team of four salespeople, two extraordinary assistants and a gifted nanny kept the status quo while Tanya paid attention to her new family member and recovered over the next weeks. Nothing was missed, clients were cared for and the business continued with the help of a finely tuned machine.

Let’s face it – life happens! And when it does, your business can be affected, whether you get sick, get married, have important events with children or need to be on hand to help aging parents. One challenge about working as a solopreneur is that YOU ARE IT.

If you have ever wondered about the benefits of having a team – or if you are trying to build one but don’t know how to create ideal dynamics – here are the best practices I have seen teams implement.

1. Processes are defined and agreed upon. The foundation for your business rests on having succinct processes and systems. Your checklists should be simple, chronological and adhered to. Everyone should understand the workflow and what is expected.
2. Ideally, I would love each new agent to have 12 months of administrative training (while they are not “full-time” busy). Their opportunity in learning the best practices while gaining valuable experience is one of the best ways to fast track. They should also be expected to discover ways to improve and differentiate using their fresh point of view.
3. Each agent adds their own “special sauce”. If two heads are better than one, then multiple personalities can be an advantage when meeting new potential clients. If your personality isn’t a good fit, your teammate might help convert the lead. When you are in the safety of a group, you have more freedom to really express the best of your uniqueness.
4. You can share the costs of office/administrative support. Many hands make light work and the more people sharing costs makes on easier on everybody. Enough said.
5. The leader grows in their leadership ability. One thing I know for sure is that if you think you’re a leader, but no one is following you, then you are just taking a walk! Just like leading a church or any volunteer organization, when you build and grow a team, you put yourself in school. The best way to learn is by doing.

Once you have your team in place, here are some of the best practices for success:

• Implement regular team meetings (weekly or monthly).
• Task one agent at each meeting to share something and teach the others (a great way to learn is to teach).
• Commit to accountability amongst the group. Be intentional with goals and rise to meet them.
• Support one another, socialize together, appreciate your differences in the dynamics.
• Team mentorship! Mentorship is a key to development.

Recently I was visiting the west coast admiring the beauty of the gigantic redwood trees. They have very small roots – no more than one-inch-thick and they are unusually short, going down only six to 12 feet.

If they were on their own they would be blown over in a mild breeze.  But they join their roots with other redwoods and intertwine with other trees. The whole forest is strong and can withstand any storm. They are together in their foundation and each helps the other to stay upright when they couldn’t stay up on their own.

This is how your team can be, stronger together so that each one can grow to their full capacity.

Sue Styles

Sue Styles is the VP of Real Estate and Mortgages at Relo.ca. She has nearly two decades of experience coaching real estate agents and is the CEO of Maximized Results Consulting. She guides real estate agents to maximize their potential and reach unwavering results by revealing their possibilities, challenging the status quo, and setting up their systems for success. She is the author of three books and a professional speaker; reach out for business coaching and resources!

Send her an email

The post How to improve your real estate team appeared first on REM.

Well-known team-building activities like Zombie Escape, Battle of the Airbands, Office Trivia, or Marshmallow Spaghetti Tower – to name just a few – are meant to create trust, proximity and reliance – and increase performance – among its members. But while these exercises or games may do those things to some extent, they are limited. There is no substitute for the time-tested process of relationships that are formed directly in the workplace.

Team building is a child of organizational development. It should not be regarded as something that originates merely in short-lived activities. Brokers of record and their salespeople must show the ways in which people will feel – and want to feel – that they are members of the group, who will ultimately contribute to the performance and well-being of the group. They must foster a culture of belonging and balance this with the delicate ecosystem of a salesperson’s independence.

That’s a tall task, which is why thought leaders like Eduardo Salas have devised solutions to maintaining this balance. In the Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics Methods, Salas explores the issue of team-building as a phenomenon that extends beyond mere activity or play. It involves:

Goal setting:

This intervention emphasizes setting objectives and developing individual and team goals. Team members become involved in action planning to identify ways to achieve goals. It is designed to strengthen member motivation to achieve team goals and objectives. By identifying specific outcome levels, teams can determine what future resources are needed.

Individual characteristics (team member motivation) can also be altered by use of this intervention. Many organizations insist on negotiating a team charter between the team and responsible mangers (and union leaders) to empower it to accomplish things on behalf of the organization. Successful goal settings help the teams work towards the same outcomes and makes them more task and action-oriented.

Role clarification:

This intervention emphasizes increasing communication among team members regarding their respective roles within the team. Team members improve their understanding of their own and others’ respective roles and duties. It defines the team as comprising a set of overlapping roles. They are characterized as the behaviours that are expected of each individual team member. It can be used to improve team and individual characteristics (by reducing role ambiguity) and work structure by negotiating, defining and adjusting team member roles.

It includes an understanding of the talent that exists on the team and how best to use it, and allows members to understand why clear roles are important. The members should also realize that they are interdependent and the failure of one team member leads to the failure of the entire team.

Problem solving:

This intervention emphasizes identifying major task-related problems within the team. Team members become involved in action planning and implementing solutions to identified problems and then to evaluate those solutions. They practice setting goals, develop interpersonal relations, clarify team roles and work to improve organizational characteristics through problem-solving tasks. This can have the added benefit of enhancing critical-thinking skills. If teams are good in problem solving skills, they are less likely to need external interventions to solve their problems.

Interpersonal relations management:

This intervention emphasizes increasing teamwork skills (mutual supportiveness, communication and sharing of feelings). Team members develop trust in one another and confidence in the team. This assumes that teams with fewer interpersonal conflicts function more effectively than teams with more conflicts. It requires the use of a facilitator to develop mutual trust and open communication between team members.

Environment:

Teams are not closed systems. It is critical that they interact effectively with their external environments. Teams need good diplomatic relationships with key managers, other teams and the functions that affect their performance. Team members must feel free to disagree with each other during team meetings but should present a united, positive front to the rest of the organization.

Teams are compromised of individuals who have their own integrity and are responsible for their own performance, but also owe their existence as team members to the productivity and longevity of the group. Neither individual nor group should be ignored. The interests of both must be balanced, so everyone can enjoy the benefits of each.

That might be a way into the culture of winning. And as the saying goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Penn Javdan

Penn Javdan is a contributing writer for REM.

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