Unlocking success: The secrets of high-performing teams

• By Mike Heddle
• Posted Monday, Jun 19, 2023 12:35 pm

Unlocking success: The secrets of high-performing teams

What makes a team thrive?

As a high-performance business trainer, I believe the key is in an eco-centric performance culture. For years I’ve coached North America’s top-producing CEOs, team leaders, and brokerages to translate high-performance systems into billions of dollars in additional sales volume, and in these spaces, I’ve recognized the secret weapon inherent in all top one per cent performing teams. 

Conscious leadership — the tool with the power to bolt or unhinge any business — became my mission. 

How do we unlearn top-down leadership to support a thriving business ecosystem? What should solo agents and team leaders look for in each other to build healthy collaborative environments? 

At the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board’s Realtor Quest in May, I dug into the topic with a panel of team lead all-stars, sharing their best practices with attendees of Canada’s largest real estate conference.

Know who you are

The first step is knowing who you are. A legacy business in a luxury niche market operates differently than one in its building phase, so before you set off on the journey, you need to envision exactly where you want to end up. 

Representing the building phase of team structures, Kenneth Toppin, leader of the Kenneth Toppin Team and CEO of the Harvast App, believes that strong teams thrive when agents relate to their leader’s values and sales approach. 

For example, Toppin is a data-driven leader. He created Harvast to track leads, conversions and follow-ups from door-knocking efforts. Harvesting the data, he works with his team to train and mentor specifically where they are not meeting their targets. His focus on systems streamlines growth for his agents and leverages their strengths to support the team effort.  

This lead generation approach isn’t for everyone — and that’s okay. Discernment starts with knowing who you are as a team and an agent because misalignment and lack of inspiration break down company cultures. 

Know your role

Mike Heddle of The Heddle Group rejects top-down leadership in favour of bee-hive collaboration. “I wake up every day with the idea that it’s my job to make it rain for these people. They don’t work for me — I work for them,” he says.

Representing high-performance teams, he notes that for a lean number of high-producing agents to achieve 200 to 300 unit sales per year, everyone on the team has to be interested in supporting each other towards a greater purpose. 

He encourages agents to seek teams with aligned values but also ensure there is space to support their strengths. Heddle gives the analogy, “First, you need to ask if you’re on the right bus. Then you need to ask if you’re in the right seat on the bus.”

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