Why commercial real estate principals need weekly one-on-ones.

CRE Success Principle: If you want to properly lead and develop your people, give them dedicated one-on-one time where they have your full and undivided attention.

Talking to Your Team Isn’t Enough

I hear this objection all the time from commercial real estate principals:

“We already talk constantly. Why do we need another meeting?”

The problem is that constant contact and deliberate leadership are not the same thing.

Most conversations during the week are about deals, clients, listings and immediate problems. There is rarely enough space for someone to say, “Here’s what’s really on my mind,” or “Here’s what I need from you to improve.”

That is where weekly one-on-one meetings come in.

Make Development Deliberate

I recommend a scheduled 30-minute meeting with each direct report every single week.

There are only two agenda items for this meeting: theirs and yours. And theirs comes first.

I used to start with a simple question: “What’s been happening?”

That gives the person an opportunity to raise what really matters to them, while giving them your full attention.

The surprising benefit? One-on-ones give principals time back. Instead of being interrupted by questions, concerns and ideas throughout the week, most of those conversations get funneled into one focused discussion.

That creates more focus, better relationships and greater momentum in your business.

Build a Better Leadership System

If you want to develop your people, don’t leave it to chance. Create the rhythm, protect the time and take purposeful action.

Listen to Episode 286 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership to hear exactly how I recommend running one-on-ones.

Then put the system into your business.

Episode transcript:

If you're never sitting down with your team to properly understand what's important to them, how do you actually know what they need from you to be the best that they can be in their role?

Think about what happens without that dedicated time.

If a member of your team has something that's on their mind, it might be a concern, an idea that they want to raise, or just something they want to talk through with you, and they don't know when they're going to have your full and undivided attention, one of two things will happen.

Either they will spend a lot of time and energy trying to find that perfect moment to raise it with you, which actually reduces their productivity as they're distracted and possibly anxious about when they'll get that moment to speak with you. And if you're busy all the time, that can take days or even weeks.

Or they may just decide that it's not worth the effort, and then they don't bring it to you at all. You get the information either late or you don't get it at all.

Today's episode is about the specific mechanism that fixes that. It's not just about talking to your team more, which most principals already do enough of, but something much more deliberate and systemized than that.

This is episode 286 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm Darren Krakowiak. I help commercial real estate principals to build an agency that can run without them, so they have the choice to work on or off the tools.

And we are getting into the topic of people today: hiring people, developing people, and retaining them.

We covered hiring in depth back in episode 278, so I don't intend to rehash all of that today, but I'll just take a moment to highlight some of the key points, because you can't develop people, which will be the focus of today's episode, without hiring them first.

And the core idea in that recruitment episode was that you should really treat the task or activity of recruitment the same way as you treat prospecting for business.

That is, it's a consistent, ongoing activity. It's not something that you scramble to do reactively the moment that a vacancy or gap that you need to fill appears.

Now, a lot of principals only start looking for their next hire once they're in desperate need of someone to fill a role, and that means that they're making a decision under pressure with a shallow pool of candidates and settling for whoever's available at the time instead of whoever's actually the right fit.

Now, the specific fix for this is to warehouse candidates.

That's building relationships with good people in the market before you have a role to offer them, staying in touch, keeping them warm, so that when a genuine opportunity does open up, you're not starting from zero. You've already got people in mind, and they know you too.

If that part of your business isn't working as it should, if you're still hiring reactively under pressure from a thin talent pool, then go back and have a listen to episode 278.

Today, I want to move into the next question, the next portion of the people topic, because once you've got someone good, it's time to develop them.

And as with the pipeline topic over the past two episodes, the topic of people has a bit more depth than fits into one episode, so we're going to do a two-parter for this one as well.

Today will be about develop, and the next episode will be the retain piece.

So, before I get into the mechanics of how it is that you can do better to develop your people, I want to tell you where this idea came from.

Because I didn't invent one-on-ones. I learnt this from someone at JLL.

One of the more senior leaders in the business at the time sat me down and shared a resource with me about how to run a proper one-on-one meeting with your team, the structure, the rhythm, why it mattered.

And I took that to heart, and I started running them with my own team the way that I'd been shown, and it immediately made a positive impact.

And it showed up in two places.

Firstly, the relationships that I had with my team improved, like much better, not just slightly.

And also, I became a much more efficient leader because I ended up managing most of the business through the one-on-one meetings rather than through constant ad hoc interruptions throughout the week.

Now, in my time overseas, I ran some large commercial real estate agency businesses with a lot of complexity, largely through this one mechanism, one-on-one meetings.

So, when I tell you it works, it's not just theory, it's what I actually did.

Now, with that being said, whenever I introduce the idea of a dedicated one-on-one meeting to a principal, I get the same objection almost every time.

And that objection is, "I already talk to my team constantly. I see them every day. We're in and out of each other's conversations all week. So why do I need to carve out time to talk to them again?"

Well, it is true that you are spending a lot of time speaking to your team throughout the week, particularly in a smaller agency. Principals and their people are in very close contact almost every day.

But ad hoc interaction and a dedicated period of time where you give someone your undivided attention are not the same thing.

Quick conversations during the day are almost always about something specific and immediate, like a deal, a client, a question that needs an answer.

They're rarely about the person, their development, their concerns, the things that they'd like to raise with you if they had your full attention and they knew that you weren't about to be pulled into something else.

Constant contact and dedicated conversations are different things.

 And the businesses where a lot of daily contact happens between the principal and the team are sometimes the one where development actually happens the least, because everyone assumes that we're already talking all the time, and that's enough.

Well, here's the part that tends to change people's minds about this.

It feels like a big time commitment to add a scheduled 30-minute one-on-one meeting with every direct report every week, but the principals who do this properly actually get more time back than they're dedicating to one-on-ones.

And the reason for that is all of the ad hoc communication that's currently going on in a business; the phone calls, the quick questions in the office, the emails that need a reply, the texts at all hours.

These are coming at you constantly throughout the week, whenever it happens to occur to your team member to ask you. And you're getting interrupted at random moments all week long.

When the one-on-one is genuinely working, a lot of that gets funneled into one place.

Your team learns that not everything is urgent and things can wait for the one-on-one, because they know it's coming reliably every single week.

So instead of a dozen small interruptions scattered across five days, you get one focused conversation. And the total time might be similar or it might even be less, and the experience of it is completely different.

The constant background interruption, which also costs you focus, drops away, so you become more productive when you start using one-on-one meetings.

So let me just talk to you about the mechanism, how it works.

It's a weekly scheduled meeting between you and each of your direct reports. I reckon about six people can realistically be direct reports of one principal.Beyond that, you probably need another layer of management in between.

Now, weekly is really important. We're not doing this fortnightly, not when we get a chance. Weekly on the calendar, and it's an important meeting.

And there's a reason for that, because the research on workplace relationships shows that weekly one-on-ones is the rhythm that best builds strong personal relationships over time.

It's frequent enough that trust compounds, but it's also infrequent enough that it stays sustainable as a commitment to be fulfilled by both parties.

Go much less often than weekly, the relationship never quite gets the depth that it needs.

And that same rhythm is what supports someone's development properly, and it also generally enlists them in what you're trying to achieve in the business.

Now, the meeting can be rescheduled if something urgent comes up, that's fine. But it shouldn't just be canceled. Unless someone's on holidays, that is.

Rescheduling it says that this is still important, it's still happening, it's just not happening right now.

If we just cancel one-on-ones willy-nilly, it kind of sends the message that it's not really that important enough to keep its place in the week.

And if you continually cancel them, your team starts to get an impression of how much priority the meeting has and how much priority communicating with them you have, regardless of what you might be saying about it.

So that's about the cadence. Let me talk to you about the structure.

There's only two agenda items in a one-on-one meeting. There's their agenda and there's your agenda.

And the order at which the agenda is covered really matters. It's got to be their agenda first and then yours second.

And that's important because of the power dynamic in the relationship between a principal and their direct report.

Whether either of you thinks about it constantly or not, if you open the meeting with your agenda, the things that you want to cover, the updates that you need, the direction that you want to give, it tends to just take up all of the space and conversation.

Not because you're trying to dominate it, but it's just how the dynamic naturally works.

Whatever the other person wants to raise gets crowded out, or they end up deciding that it's not worth bringing up once your agenda has kind of taken all of the air out of the room.

So really important that you ask what's on their mind first. What do they want to talk about? What's going on for them? Let that consistently be the first part of the conversation.

I always used to start with, "Okay, what's been happening?"

A fairly neutral question, which then allows the other person to talk about whatever's most important to them with my full attention on whatever it is that they're talking about.

And then once their agenda has been exhausted, or once you're about halfway through the 30-minute meeting, you then move on to what you want to cover.

And this makes the difference between a meeting that surfaces what really matters to the person in front of you, and one that's just really you talking at them with more detail and focus than normal.

We want the first type of meeting for one-on-ones.

So, developing your people happens through this specific weekly protected, correctly ordered one-on-one conversation. Not random chats, a different kind of discussion.

So, that's the main tool that I recommend using for developing your people. It's one-on-ones.

Next episode, we're going to move into the retain portion of this conversation, covering culture and also vision. This is what keeps good people in your business as you are developing them.

Now, if you're not currently running proper one-on-one meetings with your key people, and you want to talk through what that might look like implementing in your business, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Darren Krakowiak is my name. Send me a message and I'll get back to you personally.

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening, and I will speak to you soon.