How to Develop Your Team Like a Real Estate Investor
One of the keys to successfully leading at the next level is to develop and leverage a team of go-to people. When you’re thinking through your strategy and approach to team development, it can help to think like a real estate investor. Successful investors in real estate or any other sector think through their goals and then develop a portfolio of investments to align with them.
When you’re developing your team, you first need to assess the mix of talent and skills you’ll need to succeed. There are five basic moves that real estate investors make that can also provide a framework for leaders who are thinking through how to develop and leverage their teams. You can:
Buy: When you need experience or skills that don’t already exist in your organization, you may need to go out in the market and buy it. Recruiting new talent from outside the organization can be the right move when you need to rapidly accelerate your performance to meet your goals in a given timeframe.
Build: As you get clear about where you are, who you have and where you need to be, you’ll likely see some opportunities to build high potential people into high capacity leaders. This tactic works best when you’ve got a little bit of margin based on the mix of availability of time, talent and fit.
Rent: There may be short-term but critical needs on your team where it makes more sense to rent talent rather than buy it or build it. This could look like hiring a consultant to execute on a particular initiative or borrowing a key player or two from other parts of the organization.
Renovate: As you develop your team for the future, you may identify some folks who have the potential to contribute in meaningful ways but need some renovation. It could be that what they were doing and how they were doing it was great for the past, but no longer fits with the future vision. The key here is to position these people so that they have the opportunity to retool in ways that help themselves and the organization.
Sell: It’s likely that you’re going to have people on your team who don’t fit with where you’re going and, for various reasons, aren’t realistic candidates for renovation. That’s when you need to make the decision to sell. In the long run, it’s not in anyone’s best interest – the employee, the team, you or the organization – to keep people on board who aren’t a good fit. When you need to sell, you need to sell.
One other thought on developing and leveraging your team – you’re never done. Because your operating environment, opportunities and challenges are always changing, you should always be assessing your next move to invest in the success of your team.
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