Your values aren’t your culture.

CRE Success Principle: The behaviour you tolerate will always be more noticeable than the culture you have written down.

Walk into almost any commercial real estate agency and you’ll probably find a values document somewhere.

The problem is, the stated values do not necessarily reflect the actual culture.

Culture Is What You Reward and Tolerate

I believe culture is shaped by three things: what leaders do, what they praise, and what they call out or let slide.

Your team watches how you behave under pressure. They notice what gets recognised. And they pay very close attention to what you tolerate.

If respect is one of your stated values, but a high-performing employee treats colleagues poorly and nothing happens because their numbers are good, the team gets a very clear message about what really matters.

The standard you walk past becomes the standard you accept.

Your Vision Needs to Leave Your Head

The same principle applies to business vision.

Most commercial real estate principals already have a sense of where they want their business to go. The problem is that the vision often stays inside their head.

A useful vision should answer three questions:

• Where are we going?
• Why does it matter?
• How will we know when we're making progress?

The goal is not simply team compliance. It is enlistment, where people understand the destination and feel ownership over helping the business get there.

Make Culture and Vision Part of Every Week

This is where weekly one-on-one meetings (which we discussed in last week’s episode) become so valuable.

They give leaders a recurring opportunity to recognise behaviour that reflects the company's values, connect individual work to the bigger vision, and address issues before they become accepted norms.

Retention is not a perk or a program. It is often the result of people working in a culture they believe in, towards a vision they understand.

Want to build a commercial real estate agency that can grow without depending on you? Listen to episode 287 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for the full conversation.

Episode transcript:

Walk into a lot of commercial real estate agencies and you'll find a values document somewhere.

It might be framed on the wall, could be sitting inside an onboarding pack, or maybe it's just collecting dust somewhere in the principal's office.

Words like honesty, excellence, collaboration, they're usually somewhere in there nicely laid out.

And then you spend a couple of hours in the business and you watch what's really going on, and it doesn't always match.

Not because anyone's being dishonest, usually because nobody's connected those stated values to what's being rewarded and what's being tolerated each and every day.

That mismatch is what I want to talk about in today's episode.

Welcome to episode 287 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host. My name's 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.

Now, last episode, we covered the topic of hire and also develop. The one-on-one meeting was the centerpiece of that. We looked at it in depth.

And today I want to look at the third piece of the people category, which is how do you retain people?

And look, a values document, as we talked about at the top of the episode, is a good place to start.

Usually, it's a series of words that are important, which typically reflect the principal's core values, clearly stated and defined in terms that hopefully people can understand and that are also relevant to the business.

It's not nothing, but it's just a claim about your culture. It's not necessarily the culture itself.

You may have heard the expression, culture is caught, not taught.

What that means is it doesn't come from what you say or what you've written down. It comes really from three things that you do, whether you're doing them on purpose or not.

Now, the first thing is from your actions, what you do personally every single day, like how you treat people, how you handle pressure.

Whether you do the things that you ask others to do, not the tasks, but the way that you're showing up because your team is watching you constantly. You're always on camera even when you think you're behind the scenes.

And they're certainly paying more attention to you than they're reading any document.

The second is what you praise.

Whatever gets genuine, visible recognition from you is what your team comes to understand is what really matters, regardless of what the values document says matters.

Now, if you only ever praise great deals or people's revenue, and you never praise the way someone, for example, handled a difficult client with, say, patience and grace, you're now telling your team what it is that you really value, which is revenue and deals, not the way that people treat your clients.

The third is what you call out or what you let slide.

This is the thing that does the most damage when it's wrong, in my opinion. Say you've got a value on the wall about respect or about this being a great place to work.

In many commercial real estate agencies, the way this is described is, "We have a no dickhead policy."

And then despite the claim, there might be a high performer in the team who's consistently rude to people, including support staff, their colleagues.

They're a dickhead, right? They write great numbers though, but they treat people around them quite poorly.

Now, if you let that slide because the numbers are good, that tolerance is your actual culture, not the words on a wall, not the ‘no dickhead policy’ that you stated.

It's actually the thing that you're willing to accept.

Because your actions and what you praise and what you call out or let slide is what people perceive the culture to be, and that is actually what the culture is.

Another expression you may have heard of is, "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."

That's the real culture in your business, whether or not it matches what you've taken the effort to write down.

Now, the second piece of this topic on retaining people is about vision.

And there's something I want to say very clearly about this, because I think most principals get this backwards.

The problem is never, or almost never, that you don't have a vision.

Most principals I work with have a real sense of what they want in their business, and they've got that before we start working together.

It's just that you need to sit them down and draw it out of them.

The problem is almost always that the vision is stuck inside their head, and it's never been communicated in a way that actually resonates with the people who the principal needs to help them to bring it to life.

Now, I've been taught that the way a business owner's vision should be constructed is that it should just answer three questions.

Where are we going? Why does that matter? And how will we know if we're on track or if we've arrived?

So, let's just talk about what that means.

“Where are we going?” just needs to be specific enough that someone could picture it in their mind.

Not, "We want to grow," but what we want is a description of what the business will look like at some point in the future.

“Why does it matter?” needs to be connected to something real, not just like your ambition, but like, why does this really matter to the people who are doing the work, what it means for them?

Think about it from not just your perspective, but also from their perspective.

And then, “How will we know once we've arrived?” needs to be measured against some kind of marker.

It could be a number, it might be a milestone, something that's concrete enough that everyone can agree when we're actually making progress and when we've arrived versus when we're just staying busy.

Now, I want to give you now the distinction that I think matters the most.

There's a real difference between a team that's complying with a vision, nodding along, going through the motions, can maybe say it back to you after you've told them.

And there's a difference between that and the team that's really enlisted, truly enlisted into the vision that you want to see achieved in your business.

Complying means they'll do what they're asked. Enlisted means that they feel some ownership over making it real.

They'll advocate for it even when you're not around.

Getting from compliance to enlistment isn't about a better slide deck or a more polished speech at the end of financial year lunch.

It's about repetition in small moments, connecting someone's specific work back to the bigger picture consistently, not just once a year.

When you're starting to get sick of talking about your vision, and this also is equally true, I think, for values and what's important in the culture.

When you're starting to get sick of hearing about it is when people will just start to be hearing it and understanding it.

So, if the culture isn't delivered by a document and the vision isn't delivered in an annual speech, where do these things actually get delivered?

Well, it's in these small recurring moments, which brings me back to the one-on-one meetings from the last episode.

The weekly one-on-one is the most reliable mechanism that you have for reinforcing culture and vision at the individual level.

It's where you can notice and praise the things that reflect your values, not just their financial performance.

It's also where you can connect what someone's working on right now back to where the business is going.

And do it specifically for them. Make that connection, not just relying on a generic company-wide statement.

It's where a pattern that you need to call out can get identified early before it becomes the accepted norm.

That's where you call out the things that you don't want to walk past, that you don't want to let stand.

So, culture and vision aren't this project that you just run once. They're reinforced or undermined constantly in whatever the smallest recurring amount or unit of contact is between you and your team.

Now, for many good principles, that unit is the one-on-one, which is exactly why this episode and last week's episode in this series belong together.

And I want to offer you now a reframe about retention specifically.

Reframe isn't like a perk that you add or a program that you run.

It's the result of people working inside a business with a great culture and feeling like they're working together towards a vision that they understand and they actually believe in.

If you can get those two things right, then retention will most likely take care of itself.

So that's the people part of the framework. We talked about hiring, treating it like prospecting with candidates that you warehouse before you need them.

We've talked about developing your people primarily through a weekly protected one-on-one meeting where the agenda is in the right order - their agenda, then your agenda.

And then retention, retaining people through a culture that people can actually experience, not just one that's written down, but they can believe that it's really happening.

And also, a vision that's been communicated clearly in a way that resonates in terms that people can understand, not just something that's sitting inside your head.

Next episode, we're going to move on to the final pillar when we think about a commercial real estate business and all the issues that are going on.

Remember, we talked about there are either pipeline issues, there are people issues, or there are process issues.

It's about systems, structure, and also where, AI is genuinely changing what's possible in a commercial real estate agency over the last couple of years.

Now, if culture or vision feels to you like the piece that's missing and you want to talk some more about it, I'd love to hear from you.

Find me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message, Darren Krakowiak, a DM, and I will send you a message back.

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