Burnt Out Leading Your Real Estate Team? You Might Be Building the Wrong Kind of Team.
Team leaders tell me the same three things all the time.
"Amy, I feel burnt out."
"I'm actually not happy running my team."
And the one we all know: "It's not profitable. I don't think this is working."
Most of them assume it's a 'them problem'. Their discipline, their leadership, their systems. And sometimes it is. But after nine years of building North Group and countless conversations with leaders across North America, I've come to believe something different.
A lot of burnt out team leaders aren't failing at their model. They're building the wrong one.
Here's what I mean. There are two dominant team models in our industry: the sales culture and the community culture. Both work. Both can be profitable. Both can scale to whatever level you want. But they attract completely different agents, they demand completely different strengths from you as a leader, and they cannot be blended.
I know because I tried. My business partner and I both did, on different teams at the time. We each tried to build a hybrid of the two, and it clashed every single time. When I was attracting community culture agents and then trying to manage them like a sales culture team, nothing worked. Not the recruiting, not the retention, not my own energy.
And here's my confession, the thing that surprises people when I share it.
I'm a sales culture girl.
Productivity driven, hustle culture, that's my natural leadership style. If I were joining a team tomorrow, I'd join a sales culture team without thinking twice.
But that's not what I built. Because about three and a half years ago, I got crystal clear on the agents I actually wanted to serve: mid-level to experienced agents who want to grow their own brand and business inside a platform that supports them. And I had to be honest with myself that those agents would never join the team my instincts wanted to build.
So I built for them and everything got easier. Recruiting, retention, decision-making, all of it. When you know exactly who you want to serve (right down to small things, like the fact that I won't lead agents who don't adopt technology), you stop chasing everyone and start attracting the right ones.
So here's the question I'd ask you to sit with: do you actually know which model you're building? Not which one you fell into. Which one you chose, for agents you chose.