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Lisa Pennell reports to a board. She doesn’t have a boss, a day-to-day manager or a mentor in the way she mentors her own team. Three and a half years into her first CEO role, she has learned what a lot of leaders find out the hard way.

“Everyone wants to be at the top and then you get to the top and you go, I’m here on my own. Who do I talk to?”

Lisa, CEO of Barry Plant, joins Samantha McLean and Chris Hanley in Track 07 of The Edit, with John Cunningham staying on for the first half. Sam wanted to talk about leadership in real estate and what it is really like for women right now. Lisa’s answer starts by questioning the question.

Leadership is the metric

Sam puts it to Lisa directly: does the industry need more female leaders, or more excellent leadership? Lisa would rather move the conversation away from quotas, which she believes can trigger the very bias they are meant to address, and towards experience and capability.

“I think, again, when we talk about gender, we’re missing the point. We’re not focusing on the key metric, which is leadership.”

She is clear that there are poor and excellent leaders of every gender. The bigger issue, in her view, is unconscious bias – and she includes her own. Lisa describes taking a Harvard online gender bias test years ago and being shocked to find she had one. As a career woman, she believed she also had to pack the lunches and drive her daughter to school, while turning herself “into a pretzel” under pressure she had put on herself.

John agrees the question starts with capability, then flexibility. His team is more than 60 per cent female, and he sees diversity as the proof point rather than the target.

Power with, not power over

Asked what excellent leadership looks like beyond the labels, Lisa starts with what it doesn’t look like: LinkedIn posts about what a great culture someone leads.

“I think leadership does not have ego. I think leadership for me is power with not power over, not power under, but power with, pure, true collaboration.”

That applies to a direct team, customers and stakeholders alike. In a franchise group, it also means remembering that principals own their own businesses. Lisa says trust has no magic bullet. It comes from repeatedly showing up, owning your mistakes and repairing the damage when you get something wrong.

Chris adds that leadership is about mistakes and recovery, and that no one ever nails it. Lisa takes that further, describing new leaders who posture “like little kids in dress up”.

“When a leader says, I don’t know, or I made a mistake, or you know, that’s power, that’s leadership.”

Calm on the surface

The conversation turns to the market. Lisa says most of the Barry Plant director group is calm right now, and she is certain that is why the group is tracking well and growing market share. Her point about the directors who aren’t is blunt.

“Because everyone’s panicking and in a panic, no one can make a good decision. And who’s going to buy or sell a house to a panicking agent?”

John reaches for the duck – calm on the surface, legs running underneath. Lisa adds that if leaders are freaking out, they need to be talking to other leaders, not to the people underneath them. Chris explains why. Picture the leader under a microscope, where the smallest movement is magnified for everyone watching – and the panic spreads through the whole business.

Who the boss talks to

Which brings the conversation back to Lisa’s question. Her biggest lesson as a first-time CEO is how much she needs support from outside the business.

“I have a therapist, I have an amazing coach, I have some really good colleagues in the industry.”

She counts conversations like this one among them. Her advice for anyone stepping into a senior role is to drop the guard, admit what you don’t know and find the people who can actually help you lead better – not the people who report to you.

The rebrand she stopped halfway

Sam asks what the early days were like. Lisa arrived with one clear view: the brand looked extremely masculine. From the outside, she had shared the perception of Barry Plant as a boys’ club. Inside, she found an accepting and diverse group.

The rebrand was already halfway through when she walked in the door. She assumed that was one thing off her list, then realised it wasn’t heading in a direction that showed the brand’s values.

“And so we stopped, we reversed out and we went in a completely different direction.”

Her advice for any leader starting something new: ask a lot of questions, see what you’re working with and adapt to what is in front of you, rather than repeating what worked somewhere else.

The behaviour you walk past

Sam asks the question that has followed women through their careers: do you still have to work twice as hard to be considered half as good? Lisa’s answer is candid. Probably yes, although she says she has been helped more by men than by women in her career, and that a lot of the behaviour has gone underground rather than away.

Then Sam turns to Chris and asks whether the industry needs to look after its young men better too. Chris says yes. He talks about comparison, social media and who young agents are holding up as role models.

“Because in so many offices, the people with the worst behaviour write the greatest GCI.”

His fix is simple. When you see or hear about wrong behaviour, act on it then and there. Lisa backs him with a recent example of her own, acting on a former star performer well before a regulator’s investigation had run its course. She now repeats a line from Barry Plant’s Kirsty Nolan: “The way you do one thing is the way you do all the things.”

What you’ll take away

  • Why Lisa would rather talk about capability and experience than quotas.
  • What “power with, not power over” looks like across a franchise network.
  • Why saying “I don’t know” can be the strongest thing a leader does.
  • How calm at the top changes what happens in a difficult market.
  • Who a CEO talks to when there is no boss above them.
  • Why the behaviour you walk past tells your people what success looks like.

Lisa’s closing advice for leaders feeling the pressure is short: don’t panic, but don’t stand still. If you’re anxious, get it out of your own head. This week, find one person outside your business you can be honest with – and deal with the behaviour you’ve been putting off.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube or listen or watch on Spotify.

This is The Edit

The Edit is Elite Agent’s real estate mixtape – a series of practical, honest and occasionally uncomfortable conversations with the voices and hard-earned wisdom worth paying attention to.

Each track begins with one hard question facing agents and principals now. Samantha McLean and her co-hosts stay with it long enough to get past the easy answer.

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Explore every episode of The Edit.