Bonzai Real Estate Blog

There is good news and bad news depending on how your mind works. During my 15 year career in mental health I had a front row seat in the theater of the absurd -- the mind works in strange and diverse ways arranging all that's experienced in some meaningful (at least personally) whole that becomes a philosophy. Even those who claimed to have no philosophy of life had, indeed, built one, even if it was unexamined and mostly an unconscious mish-mish of ideas sewed together like a patchwork quilt.

Those who have consciously developed a philosophy of life are the easiest to understand -- those who've unconsciously formed a philosophy are more difficult to understand because they can hold contradictory ideas which to them seem reasonable, but to an outsider (someone outside their mind) it can appear confusing.

If you ask someone how a good team operates, depending on outlook, you will get different answers -- some will say it's the teamwork, the coordination of effort, the common purpose, the "group mind" at work, etc -- these people believe in a source of heat that's generated from the "group" itself. If you investigate their belief you might find it vague, some mystical power that "group" entails, or you might find it based on thought that relates to systems and backed with data about how systems can enhance efficiency and productivity. Yet, even the most thoughtful answer will usually minimize or ignore individual effort.

Groups/teams are made up of individuals, so it's difficult to avoid talking about individuals when you are analyzing team effort. Groups don't think - individuals within the group think. To talk about a team effort is to talk about individual effort within a team. "Team" indentifies a group of individuals acting together toward a purposeful goal.

Is it the system that makes a good team or the individuals that make up the team or a combination of both? I say it's a combination of both with individuals being the most important factor. Incompetent individuals will fail under any system no matter how much the system is tweaked, while competent individuals will succeed under any flexible system because they will tweak it until it produces the desired outcome. So, strong individuals are key, yet I include system in the combination beccause a rigid system that hasn't changed with the times and can't be tweaked by innovative individuals will shackle individuals, no matter how great they are, and lead to failure.

The reason I give more weight to individuals is because I believe competent individuals in a bad system are more likely to do better than a good system with incompetent individuals -- given the bad system isn't sooo rigid and out of touch as to totally render all individual effort meaningless.

Even among competent individuals on a team, some individuals will exceed competence and achieve excellence -- and here is the source of heat. Leaders tend to emerge from all teams.

The ideal team is made up of secure individuals who aren't threatened by excellence and actually use the heat source to become better themselves. Teams made up mostly of insecure, incompetent individuals will be threatened if excellence shows its head and they will work against it, try to neutralize it, and may even attempt to destroy it and be rid of it. "It" being an individual who performs excellently.

The ideal combination of system and individual efforts to make a great team consists of a system that recognizes, nourishes and rewards excellence and individual players who feed off the heat source and try to provide as much heat as they possibly can without envy. Then you have individuals internally motivated and externally inspired by excellence within a team that fosters excellence, innovation and growth.

Ideal is not always real, but ideal is a good way to see what has to be accomplished BEFORE a team is ever built. It's difficult for a consultant to help a group suffering from all the ills a "team" can suffer from and try to implement something this dramatically different and idealistic. Most times the organizational defenses are so strong and ingrained that no progress is made to re-form poorly functioning teams.

Many large real estate companies are suffering more than this -- they don't even have the concept of team down to begin with. It's a willy-nilly roll of the dice that hopefully a bunch of people with licenses will create business -- yes, there is training -- some more than others -- but no real system to help individuals organize their power to create something truly excellent (for the most part.

Like from what I hear about Russell Shaw, teams can splinter off of BIG and create something special -- I'm sure it's happening in different locations, but it appears time for a model going forward. Sean Purcell, myself, Bob from San Diego and few others have talked about this from time to time. What I want to do is to begin developing a model online -- something that can be put together as a pattern to go by -- something that doesn't necessarily depend on an anomaly of one person's unique personality and skills (many unique individuals succeed due to their uniqueness and hard work but can it be widely replicated through a combination of system and competent, secure individuals?)

This will be a boring project, but I'm inspired to do it, and I welcome all input into the process. I will be posting the progress on Bonzai, then I will put it all together in one place.