Leverage Ladies

In this episode we’re getting together to discuss a topic that is challenging for most business owners, and that is how to manage conflict and have difficult conversations. Many leaders are afraid to even hire people and grow their business for fear of dealing with conflict down the road. Fortunately, you can take intentional steps to make this process easier.

The first step should always be to look at your behaviors first. Decide whether or not you’ve given them the right tools, clearly explained your expectations, and trained them properly. If you answer yes to those questions, then it's time to have a conversation.

There are some helpful tips that can make this conversation easier to tackle. Be specific and have clear examples of the behavior you want to change. Be proactive by taking time to plan what you say, but don’t wait so long that the emotion festers and builds. Practice what you’re going to say, either to yourself or someone else you trust, so that the conversation doesn’t go off track.

When you're engaged in the conversation, make sure to show empathy for their side, actively listen, and acknowledge any criticism they offer you back. Take responsibility for your part in the conflict. Prove to them that you understand their point of view. Remember that they may need time to reflect since this conversation can come up unexpectedly for them.

You can’t know the outcome beforehand, but it opens up a dialogue and will lift a weight off of your shoulders. It’ll create the potential to move forward together on the same page as a stronger team. Regardless of the outcome, you’ll build character as you learn how to face conflict with more confidence in the future.

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

In today's episode Linda and Shannon discuss talent vs. non-talent, and how to distinguish between the two. 

There are several ways to identify non talent team members. As leaders, they can be harder to notice since you are in the thick of it. Ask yourself: Is the workload constantly coming back to you? Do they help find solutions, or bring new problems? Typically, energy drainers are non-talents and energy givers are the talent.

If a person is true talent, they will take initiative in the role they are placed in. Often, they will take the role to the next level and exceed your expectations. Everyone will run into challenges in whatever position they are in, but the individuals with talent are self-sufficient and can find solutions on their own.

It’s incredibly helpful if you can learn to discern between the two during the hiring process. Just because a team member is good at their tasks doesn’t make them the right person for that role. Real talent is someone who is intrinsically motivated to complete the tasks because they enjoy them or get something out of them. Otherwise, they won’t stay long in the role. Tie their vision of success with the growth of the company, and the relationship will be fruitful.

Don’t rush into bringing someone on board. Learn more and get to know each other, because then you can make a more informed decision and the potential hire can decide for themselves if they feel the role is a good fit for them, too.

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

Today we’re welcoming Jeff Kuhn. From a young age, Jeff has had a desire to work closely with people and help them in their lives. He leaned into this desire over the years, and has many years of experience working as a recruiter. All of this has led him to being an executive leadership coach, public speaker, and business owner.

Jeff focuses primarily on helping businesses grow via their leverage, and believes the purpose of a true leader is to facilitate the evolution of their team members so that they can achieve their own goals.

One of the biggest things Jeff has learned from years of creating teams is not to hire people you like, but to hire someone who is truly fit for the job. Working in a high-performance environment requires a motivated personality type, and those who want to do the bare minimum will not thrive in this environment.

For many leaders, their greatest hesitation arises when it comes to signing another paycheck not knowing if it will be worth it. Hire for a position that will make the biggest difference in your business; someone that can do revenue-generating tasks and free up your time as the owner. Hire someone based on whether or not there will be a return on your investment.

Attracting the right type of people to your business and knowing how to figure out who’s the best fit for the position can be challenging, but if you learn how to bring in those people and help guide them toward their own success, your business will be successful too.

Connect with Jeff:

www.bemoreeveryday.com

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

We’re with our friend and special guest Dana Gentry in today’s episode. Dana has been in real estate for 18 years, and currently she is enjoying her leadership role with a team in the central Kentucky and Lexington area. Dana is the owner of multiple market centers, and is proud to say her success is driven by her desire to be outrageously generous.

What often holds people back from true success are the fears they have about failure, success itself, or other unhelpful thoughts. Dana knows what it's like to have a fear of letting people down. It’s vital to remember that failure is not the end, but part of the journey. Focus on the big picture and the impact that you want to make.

It’s not about the money that you make. Wake up every day and do your best. Aim to improve, and money will be a byproduct of that. We mistakenly think our goals are about getting that item on our dream board, but it’s so much bigger than that. Those material things will show up when you live a meaningful life.

The more you acquire, the more leverage you have. The more leverage you have, the more time, energy, and financial support you can provide to the people you care about. It’s about how to use the leverage you have to support the type of dream life you want to lead.

Make the phone call, take the course, do the work. Learn to be disciplined, and commit to the success of your dreams. Believe you are worthy of the opportunity, and you’ll see what exciting opportunities come your way and how you can use them to connect with your ideal future.

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

Connect with Dana:

Email : [email protected] 

Monica Reynolds joins the conversation on today’s episode of Leverage Ladies. Monica is a real estate coach, author, and group trainer of the Perfect Real Estate Assistant Program. She considers herself a confidence builder and is passionate when it comes to helping other agents continually improve their businesses.

Two of the most important aspects of your business are the systems you have in place and the people you have working on your team. If you can get these two things working optimally, you can streamline your day-to-day work life.

Having a systematic way of operating in your business has many benefits. Creating systems makes it easier to duplicate a process and can make any process easily scalable. It leaves nothing to chance, and shines a light on any issues so that you can consistently improve on them. Most importantly, it provides a blueprint for you, and in essence, your assistant so they have a guide for how things are meant to operate, thus increasing your efficiency.

Finding an assistant is something even Monica resisted in the beginning. It starts with finding the right person. Highly analytical people make great assistants, since they typically want to address and fix any problems that arise. They also have a high level of attention to detail. This person should also be someone whose company you enjoy, since you’ll end up spending a significant amount of time with them.

At the end of the day, your systems and assistants are intertwined in your daily work life. Finding a way to have them work cohesively and optimally will influence the ease or difficulty of your everyday life as an entrepreneur.

Connect with Monica:

Email: [email protected] 

Website: www.monicareynolds.com 

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

Shannon Waller is with us for today’s episode of Leverage Ladies. Shannon is an expert on entrepreneurial teams, and creator of the The Entrepreneurial Team Program. She is also an author of The Team Success Handbook: 12 Strategies For Highly Productive Entrepreneurial Teams. Integrating entrepreneurs with their teams is what Shannon is truly passionate about. 

Additionally, she’s written Multiplication by Subtraction: How To Gracefully Let Go Of Wrong-Fit Team Members. Entrepreneurs often need support identifying right-fit team members and knowing what to do with them, which is exactly what this book can guide them through.

Subjective information isn’t enough to establish whether or not someone is a right fit in your business. This is precisely why Shannon emphasizes the importance of establishing profiles. The best way to approach this is to have it be a part of your hiring process. The kind of person you are looking for should always be considered with their specific potential role.

There are four different kinds of unique abilities: unique, excellent, competent, and incompetent. Pairing people with work they find endlessly fascinating is the best possible scenario. Unique ability gets more concentrated and more defined over time. It grows deeper, rather than leading to disinterest. 

As an entrepreneur, it’s important to create a team of self-managing individuals. In three terms, that looks like: clear vision, clear values, and unique ability. Conversations create priority, but always keep in mind the best ways you and your team members receive communication. We’re all unique in our needs, so we can’t assume other people think like we do.

Connect with Shannon:

https://yourteamsuccess.com/ 

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

This time around, the Leverage Ladies, are joined by Wayne Turmel. Wayne is the author of The Long Distance Teammate, as well as several other novels and stories. He’s a former stand-up comedian and is now an entrepreneur and expert in remote leadership.

Over the past 18 years he’s spent working in virtual communication, he’s come to become an authority in the remote space—especially given the changes since the pandemic. When this event happened, virtual work got pushed in a way so many people didn’t anticipate (although Wayne certainly saw it coming).

What does it mean to be a good teammate? There are “3 P’s” of remote work success: productive, proactive, and potential. Great teammates don’t just complete their own work—they reach out and help others once their work is done. Engaged employees also stand above the rest as the best kinds of teammates.

In the hiring process you can test for aptitude and stylistic fit, but you can’t necessarily test for engagement. Engagement comes from within. As an employer, the onus is on you to create an engaging environment, but whether or not an employee connects with that is up to them. Opening a conversation, even when a team member says everything is “fine,”can help you keep a pulse on how they’re really feeling.

A big mistake managers tend to make is over measuring or under measuring. Constantly checking in can get in the way of productivity, but not checking in often enough can cause you to miss important factors along the way. If you can learn to think of yourself as a leader rather than just a manager, you have a greater chance of creating trust and engagement with your team.

Connect with Wayne:

https://wayneturmel.com/ 

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

In this episode we’re joined by Ryan Allen. In 2012, Ryan got into real estate on a whim. She was a new mom and her job at the time required her to travel, which wasn’t feasible while having a newborn. She took a job as an assistant for a single agent in a Keller Williams office, and that’s where her journey began.

Once she started diving into business, she found what her strengths were. Naturally, she had a passion for taking someone else’s vision and then making it happen. Throughout her years on that team, she grew it to 14 people. From there, she got her license to sell homes. 

For the next year, she excelled at selling homes but then decided to get out of it. Ryan realized there were so many other leaders who weren’t leveraged properly and who weren’t given a vision or a world big enough to thrive in, so she got into coaching to help other people build their life by design through operations. 

Ryan and her husband now run AGL Properties in the Southern Indiana and Louisville, Kentucky area. They have 10 agents, 4 cyber backers, a Director of Sales, and recently leveraged a Director of Operations. By onboarding a Director of Operations, Ryan and her team were able to fill gaps that they couldn’t manage on their own. 

The success from leveraging came with an open mindset. She recommends that, when hiring, to not go in with the expectation that you must teach them everything. You need to know the role you’re hiring for explicitly. Don’t cut the processes short by skipping steps. Follow the process, stay true to the process, and hold them to your standards.

Connect with Ryan:

Email: [email protected] 

Connect with us: 

https://www.leverageladies.com/ 

Award winning real estate broker Emily Marchese is the guest on today’s episode of Leverage Ladies. Emily started her career in real estate in 2003 and is transparent about how she struggled in her business until she began to use leverage. Her first hire was an administrative assistant. Fast forward to just last year, her team of eight achieved 240 units for $105 million.

The right hire can do so much for your business. Each great hire has helped to elevate Emily’s business. Finding people with work ethic, experience, and a desire to succeed can compensate for a hire’s shortfall if you’re willing to invest time into them.

The one mistake Emily has made when it comes to hiring for leverage is hiring someone primarily because she liked them while overlooking certain areas that may be missing. She’s also given chances to people she shouldn’t have given chances to. Now, she takes into account her team's input to make her decision more objective.

Supporting virtual team members starts with a morning huddle for Emily and her entire team. It’s their chance to talk about what their plan for the day is. Virtual leverage comes with its own set of unique challenges, but it also comes with cost-effective advantages too.

Emily foresees needing even more virtual support in the future to convert leads in their database. What’s important to her is helping her team become leaders and hiring them the leverage they need to continue to be successful.

Connect with Emily:

https://marcheseteam.com/ 

Connect with us:

www.leverageladies.com

In this episode we’re joined by Brindley Tucker, owner of Your Realty Leverage. At a young age she discovered drugs and alcohol, which took her down a negative path. She eventually began working with Keller Williams, an international real estate firm, but hit her personal rock bottom in 2012. Luckily, her company helped her get out of this difficult time.

When eEdge from Keller Williams was released, she was biking from agent to agent helping them to set it up. During that time, she received a call requesting her to help with transaction coordination. From there, in just 3 years, she did 2,000 transactions with a team of 6.

She progressed to building operations at KW MAPS and was able to sell her first TC business. Brindley then went on a 3-year journey with KW MAPS and built out their Director of Operations coaching program. When COVID hit, she grew her passion into leverage by creating a company where agents could be guided. Errors were made along the way and her business bloated, so she learned that things had to be scaled back to move forward.

After taking a step back, Brindley returned to production. She had to change her mindset and worked on meeting her team’s needs. To get it right, she felt she had to make mistakes and to develop skills to address conflict. 

So that Brindley can continue to strive, she puts time aside to have weekly leadership team days. She’s engaged and continues to run 3 successful businesses. Many different systems have been put in place so that she can remain involved with her team and keep culturally connected in a virtual world.

Connect with Brindley:

https://yourrealtyleverage.com/

Connect with us: 

https://www.leverageladies.com/