VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Azal Khan: Hi, I’m Azal Khan from Elite Agent Magazine, and we’re here at our event, How to Lead a Winning Team in 2018. I’m joined now by Matt Lahood, Chief of The Agency, one of the fastest growing real estate brands in Australia. Matt has spent over two decades transforming careers, building super teams, and mentoring hundreds of agents.
So, Matt, you say the key steps to recruiting and retaining a high performing team involve identifying talent, retention and connection, and taking responsibility. So, could you take us through that process a little bit more?
Matt Lahood: The first thing is you have to ascertain as a leader, and when you’re recruiting, who you feel’s got the right attitude to work, and how they’ll work with the rest of the team. So, real estate’s all about attitude. You gotta be able to come back from set-backs, knock-backs. You gotta be able to accept “no.”
In terms of retaining, and you mentioned connection. That’s a big part of what I do. I don’t have an office, so I just keep roaming around the offices in general, and dropping in and getting a feel for how each person’s going during the day. You can get a feel of people when you look at them, what’s happening in their life. I’m pretty perceptive around people with black clouds over their heads. My job is to blow the clouds away from everyone.
Azal Khan: Matt, what do you think about super teams? Is that where you think the industry is heading now?
Matt Lahood: 100 percent. I’ve been in front of that personally myself. I have always had a team for the last 20 years, even when it wasn’t trendy, but I just knew to scale up, Azal, and to do more business and to create better service, you need to have more people around you.
Azal Khan: Matt, why are you passionate about being a leader? Why are you still skipping out of bed after 28 years?
Matt Lahood: It’s a good question, Azal. A lot of people do ask me. I’ve actually never saw myself as a leader. It’s quite funny. I just seem to have fallen into the role where I built my own team. People are asking me how I built my team. Then, I started to have a lot of people stay with me in my team for a long time.
Most of my team have been with me for 15, 16, 20 years now. We were all junior burgers when we started. I’m 45 now, but I was 20 or 17 when I started and people have been with me on the journey. They started to ask me, “How have you kept people and why do people want to work with you?” I actually never thought about it until when I started interviewing my own people and they said, “Well, you’re always making us grow. You’re always pushing us. You’re always looking after us.” People said, “You know, you’ve got leadership qualities.” I thought, that’s not something that I really set out to do.
I was a sales agent since I left school, and I was in property management. What excited me as I looked over everything is when I saw I could actually impact people. That’s a drug in itself, and you can actually change people’s lives. And I mean change them financially, mentally.
My job is not only about changing people financially. I like to think of impacting their family life, in their health, in their mental well-being. It’s a whole range of things. That’s what I’m actually passionate about. Someone comes up to me and goes, “Matt, you changed my life.”
That makes me skip to work, because I’m surrounded by people that want me to be there in that role. I’m excited about other people growing.
Azal Khan: Matt, as always, thank you for insights and your time. Have an amazing session, and enjoy the rest of the event.
