Leanne Pilkington talks to herself in the third person, out loud, and she’ll tell you so.
“I actually talk to myself in the third person and just go, ‘oh, come on Leanne, you know you can do this’.”
She ran Laing+Simmons for years while thinking of herself as “rather a great number two”. When a mentor told her buying the brand at her stage of life would be a big mistake, she spent a couple of weeks believing him. The voice in her head has had plenty to say over the years. She just keeps getting better at answering it.
She hosted Courageous Conversations because she wanted to hear what sat behind the success stories. “And I wanted to find out the stories behind the stories.”
So this one is hers. Across her columns and conversations with Elite Agent, she returns to the difficult parts of leadership: admitting when you’ve got it wrong, letting people do their jobs, and speaking up when staying quiet would be easier.
The quotes below are her own words, drawn from her columns and conversations with Elite Agent. Here are 30 of her best.
On backing yourself
1. Get over yourself and get on with it. The instruction she gives herself is one she eventually put in print: “Get over yourself and just get on with it.” Confidence isn’t a prerequisite. “It just takes that 30 seconds of courage to ignore the voice in your head that says you can’t, and to jump in and have a go.”
2. If you value the people around you, value their opinion of you. A mentor had told her not to buy into the brand. A small group of women she trusted told her she could. “If I value the people around me, then I need to value their opinion and stop talking myself down.”
3. Say yes, then ring somebody. Her advice when an opportunity arrives before you feel ready. “If I can give you anything, any piece of advice, it’s say yes. Even if you’re scared, even if you don’t know how to do it, say yes, and then ring somebody. You’ve got to take those opportunities when they come because they don’t come when you’re ready.”
4. Her hardest decision became her best. Buying into Laing+Simmons meant taking on ownership in her late fifties. Discussions began at the end of 2019; the buyout was completed on 1 April 2021. “In the end, knowing there were good people who would have my back, I decided to push my chips into the middle of the table. All in.” Her verdict afterwards: “Making the leap to ownership was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. It has also been the best.”
On learning
5. A repeated mistake is a decision. From a Transform masterclass in 2018. “If we’re not making any mistakes, then we’re either not taking enough risks or we’re not being honest with ourselves. And if you keep making the same mistake, you’re actually making a decision. You’re not making a mistake.” The other half of it, which she added straight after: “You have to be a little bit kind to yourself sometimes.”
6. Come out the other side of your discomfort zone. In 2021 she signed up for improv classes, on a speaking coach’s suggestion, and wrote about it for us. “One week I was a life coach for dolphins.” The point wasn’t the comedy. “Coming out the other side of my discomfort zone has actually made me more comfortable.” And a note for the perfectionists: “You don’t always have to be the ‘best in the class’.”
7. Make the years count. Looking back on 25 years in franchising, she chose to value what experience had taught her rather than resent getting older. But time served wasn’t enough. “Remember, 25 years should never be one years’ experience, 25 times over.”
On leading people
8. People want to know their leader cares. When she was made general manager in 2000, she rang every franchisee and asked what they wanted from head office. The answer, more or less word for word from all of them: “We know you love Laing+Simmons, we know you care about us, and we know you care about our business.” That was the whole brief. “This care is best expressed not in words but in actions.” Today it still looks like this: “Everyone across the brand has my mobile number and knows I will respond if they reach out.”
9. Don’t assume you know the questions. Her advice to a first-time leader is the opposite of what most first-time leaders do. “I wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking I knew what the answers were. I wouldn’t even make the mistake of thinking I knew what the questions were. So talk to the people.” She’d say the same about motivation. “Leaders can’t tell people what their motivation should be. This is not an answer we have. It’s asking the question that’s important.”
10. Don’t broadcast. Find the frequency. Her MBA cohort once workshopped her business and handed back a list of ideas, most of which she’d already implemented. Nobody knew. “That was a really powerful lesson for me in communication. You can’t just broadcast. You’ve got to make sure that you’re on the right frequency. We will tell the same thing consistently in different ways.” The follow-on: “It’s not just about me and how I want to tell the story. I understand how other people want to receive the story.”
11. Culture is not luck. “People say to me ‘you’re so lucky at Laing+Simmons, it’s a great culture’. It didn’t happen by luck. It was strategic. It happened by design and we invested time and money into changing that culture.” When she arrived in 1995, “all the franchisees hated each other and they hated head office even more.” She gave herself two options. “Either I go and find another job, or we roll out a plan to fix this and it’s going to take some time and it’s going to take some financial commitment.” The plan included what she calls “the bonding ability of beer”.
12. Say “this one’s on me”. Her most reliable move for defusing a room. “If I put my hand up and go, you know what, I am so sorry about that. I should have handled that better, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry. And people just go, oh, I didn’t see that coming. Any anger and upset kind of dissipates really quickly because you’ve just so unexpectedly taken responsibility.” Then, instead of blame: “Let’s get curious about that. Why did that happen? How should we have done that?”
13. Ideas from the top get “Oh, God, really?” “If you try the top-down approach and say, here are all the projects that I think we should do this year, people are just going to go, oh, God, really? Whereas if they’re involved in the ideas, they get excited about them.” She’s audited her own failures on this. “The ones that didn’t reach the potential I’d envisaged had a common thread. I hadn’t engaged the team in the right way. I hadn’t effectively sold the ‘why’.”
14. What you do when nobody’s looking is your CV. When the brand was sold in the late nineties, the outgoing owner told the buyers to keep her on as the one running the business. She hadn’t been angling for it. “I realised it was the things I did when I didn’t realise anyone was looking that set me on my own leadership path.” Or, from the same column: “It’s not about what I say, it’s about people watching what I do. Culture is set from the top and will fail if the leader doesn’t embrace it.”
15. Change the word “change”. From the 2018 masterclass. “The first tip I would suggest is to change the word change. Don’t use the word change because it’s actually a trigger for a lot of people. You could use the word tweak or alter.” And go slowly. “Change can be incremental.”
On hiring and letting go
16. Hire to your weaknesses, not your reflection. “We’re always attracted to people who are like us. And I think that’s a big mistake when you’re recruiting. You need to be employing somebody who is strong in the things that you’re not strong in.” She’s specific about her own gaps. “An admission: I’m not a ‘details’ person. I’m not an accounts person either. Be clear about the value you bring to the business and employ people that can happily fill the gaps.”
17. Ask what would surprise me about you. Her induction question, and she still runs the inductions herself. “What would surprise me about you? You’d be surprised the things that people have done that you have no idea about.” The follow-up is harder than it sounds. “Tell me something that you’re proud of, not something that your team has achieved or your family has achieved. It’s not about your kids. It’s about you. Something that you’ve done that you were really proud of. It’s amazing how hard some people find it.”
18. Don’t bend the job to the person you like. One of the three hiring mistakes she’ll own in public. “Having a person I really liked, who couldn’t actually do the job I employed them to do, so I changed the job around to suit her. I let that go too long before I dealt with it.” The written version is the rule: “Having great people in your team is one thing, but those people will only reach their potential and achieve satisfaction if the role is right for them. This is what being people-first is actually about.” And when it isn’t working: “I’ve been guilty of not cutting my losses fast enough. You need to learn to trust your gut feeling, to be frank.”
19. Know why anyone would work for you. “Help me to understand why a good staff member would come and work for you. What is it that they’re going to get from you that they’re not going to get from somebody else? It’s quite a profound question if you’re prepared to be honest about it.” She picked up a sharper version of it from a conversation with Are Media’s Jane Huxley. “I think every employee is a volunteer. So why are they with you?”
On the craft
20. It’s consistency, not rocket science. “It’s not rocket science being really good at real estate. Everybody knows what you have to do, but it’s just not everybody’s prepared to do it and prepared to do it consistently.” She won’t tell you which method. “I don’t necessarily espouse one method of prospecting or canvassing. Find what works for you in your market and do it consistently.”
21. Automate the rest so you can be human. “When it comes down to it, real estate is about human connection. Technology is wonderful because it can automate all of the other stuff that you don’t have to do, to give you more time to connect with more humans.” Where that connection happens is up to you. “For some people connecting with humans is doing the school run. For some people it’s going to the pub.” What it can’t be is nowhere. “You are not going to develop the kind of business you want hiding behind digital, social, letterbox drops. You do have to at some stage connect human to human.”
22. Tell them the truth, and tell them where to find you. From her column on frank conversations. “Your customers expect, and deserve, you to tell it like it is.” Her method is to set the expectation before the campaign, not after: “Explain that the best buyers typically come through in the first three weeks of any marketing campaign.” And if a seller won’t hear it: “Let them know that if and when that strategy fails, they know where to find you.” Because “a customer who feels hoodwinked will not be a customer again.”
23. Give buyers the information they need. Writing on underquoting, she argued that agents need to give buyers more information. “The crux of the underquoting issue – whether real or perceived – is the feeling among buyers of a lack of transparency. Therefore, the best counter is for agents to be more transparent, and this means educating buyers.” Her practical suggestion: put the information buyers are asking for on the auction handout. “Instead of accusations of underquoting, by being fully transparent, agents can create understanding.”
On community
24. Give back without keeping score. In her 2023 column on community contribution, she described an Avalon office that made room for local art and used artwork sales to support local causes. The principals’ interests shaped something people could take part in. Her test for agents considering their own contribution: “Your contribution will probably not be measurable in business growth terms. Don’t expect it to be.”
On hard markets
25. Calm. Clear. Consistent. Communication. Her four Cs, written for a crisis and just as true for a slow year. “Don’t avoid talking to your teams when there’s no specific update to provide, as people feel better just knowing that their leaders acknowledge the issues and are working on a solution.” And on forecasting: “There is no value in speculating about the cliff we might fall off.” Her own learning from leading through the worst of it: “Even when I didn’t know the answers, just knowing I was there to share the challenge made people feel calmer.”
26. Focus on what you can do. “People were focusing on everything that they couldn’t do. Let’s just focus on what we can do, step by step.” For an agent in a quiet market, that’s the phone. “I’d be on the phone. I wouldn’t be ringing saying, do you want to sell your house? But I would be just talking to all of the people in my database and finding out where they’re at.” And when it all feels like too much: “My time management strategy for when things are really stressful is do the things that kept me up all night last night. So I just do them first and get them out of the way.”
On standing up
27. You can’t be what you can’t see. When she won her first Most Influential Woman award in 2019, the first message she received was from a friend. “He said, oh, congratulations, Lee. So tell me, who’s the most influential man in real estate? And I said, you know, that’s actually a great question. It’s not the bloody point, but it’s a great question.” She had spent the eighties trying to be one of the boys “because what else could I do”, and never planned to be the woman other women pointed at. “If I’m able to inspire other females in the industry to go, you know what, if Leanne can do it, so can I? If Leanne can do it, it can’t be that hard.” Her request to the women reading this: “I think that women do need to back themselves a little bit more.”
28. It’s not how he means it. It’s how she feels. Her answer to the leader who explains the joke away. “It doesn’t matter how he means it. It matters how it’s making her feel, and she’s been brave enough to tell you how she feels. Don’t avoid the conversation because it’s difficult.” The same rule applies in the moment. “You have got to actually stand up and say, it’s just not okay. You might think it’s funny, but I don’t think it’s funny. Please don’t do that again.” And it isn’t only your own corner. “You also need to stand up for other people. So if you hear it or see it, you need to say something.”
On success
29. Only fight the battles that matter. From her 25-years column, a set of rules for lasting. “You’ll never make everyone happy. Make peace with that.” “Only put into the world the views you are happy to defend.” “Choose your battles. Only fight for the things that matter, and once people know that about you, there are fewer battles.” And one for this industry in particular: “Keep your ego/greed radar switched on. Real estate is a business that attracts both, and neither is attractive.”
30. Success is being happy to get out of bed. “For me, the definition of success is very personal. Success is more freedom, and it’s more joy, and being happy to get out of bed and do what you do every day. That’s success.” She learned early that she’d never be the best at anything by someone else’s metric. “There was always going to be somebody who was better or smarter or faster or richer.” So she picked her own. “I never set out to be the boss, but I always set out to do a really good job. And in the end, that’s what people noticed.”
There’s more where these came from – including the story behind a pay-rise request in 1997. She asked, didn’t get it, and stayed anyway. But I think I’ll save that one for the book….