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Being A Leader

Leadership | June 17, 2021
Adam Hooley

Being a leader

I took on my first leadership role at the very young age of 24. This was a middle management role and was a great place to learn how to navigate this new and exciting minefield. I soon became a senior manager with accountability and deliverables of my own. I was still in my late 20’s and I saw the team as ‘my resource’ to ensure I hit my targets. Their failure was my failure.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I would performance-manage my entire team out of the business if I didn’t start supporting them to do their roles more effectively. After all, I was the one with all the experience and expertise. I realized that the team wasn’t my resource, I was theirs. My success was their success. From this day forward my attitude to leadership took a 180-degree turn. If one of my team members was underperforming, I would ask myself first, what haven’t I done to ensure their success.

I thought this blog would be a great space to share the two biggest pointers that have had a huge impact on how I train and influence my team.

Skill suitability

Different people have different skills and I truly believe 90% of this is in their DNA. I generally think about my team in three core cohorts. The first cohort is people that are process-driven and levitate to these processes as a guide to doing their job well. These people are generally great in-office property managers where speed, accuracy and organisation are crucial to staying on top of their work. The second cohort is ‘doing’ people. These people are often more active and are highly proficient at out of office tasks. These people are generally great at periodic inspections, ingoing and outgoing inspections and leasing. The third cohort is relationship people. These people are great at building relationships with their clients and don’t see any client request as a problem. They are often the people that celebrate many referrals from their customers.

In an ideal world, you would split up the job roles so that these cohorts can take advantage of their individual strengths. However, this is often not the case. As I’m working with each team member I acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses in these three areas. It will soon become apparent, the areas they require the most help and the area they naturally perform well in.

Learning method

We have all heard in the past that people learn in different ways. The three obvious ones are listening learning, visual learning and doing learning. As a leader, you will spend much of your time teaching and upskilling your team members. Having a sound grasp of the best method to deliver training to them will simplify your life. It is important to understand that each team member will learn the same task in different ways.

When training and upskilling your team, remember each person is unique in the way that they learn and the factors that influence their performance. Consider it their unique performance fingerprint. Unlocking their unique fingerprint is the first step to promoting success and building a high-performance team.

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