How to Manage a Large Team

By Kathleen Black, KBCC

For most top producers turned Team Leaders, the people management is often the most difficult aspect. When you are growing, you need to manage and leverage to create a performance environment for everyone. If you want a big team, there may come a time when people management moves into a “Neutral,” “Includes Others,” “Unconscious Incompetence,” or “Stop” task on your GENIUS Model. We use this model to guide a leader's highest and best use within a company.

This does not mean you will stop motivating and leading the team. It means that you move some of the management portions of leadership to another team member who thrives in that area. Most high drivers are self-starters and struggle with others who do not self-start to their level. When training, shadowing is generally the path taken when showing someone the ropes, but the mistake here is that every person does it differently every single time.

This inconsistency doesn’t work to effectively prepare an agent for success when that agent is on his own. The team leaders that I coach work on the idea of mastery – everyone follows the same steps, so everyone knows what it takes to be successful.

At that point, the agents approach the situations with their own personalities and interpretations, but they have been empowered with a set system to be successful.

When it comes to enforcing the training, anyone who has talked to me about it knows this will be my answer: “Know it so well you can’t forget it,” so learning it all with intensive training and weeks dedicated to the art, ultimately, pays off more than any other implementation of the systems.

Working with the KBCC model, you move beyond learning and memorization to become part of who you are.

The following sections are the best methods to properly manage a large team.

Vision

In order to manage your business and team successfully, you need to know where you’re going. It’s important for you, as a team leader, to know what the top 1 percent life and what the top 1 percent team looks like to you.

While formulating your business's vision, it is crucial to get your team members' visions, dreams and goals first, then add or subtract to ensure your vision is wide enough to encompass all growth, for all members.

Quotas look down, dreams reach up.

This vision will guide your everyday decisions, habits and goals. When you put the pen to paper, get as detailed as possible. See yourself in this life one year from now. Get creative.

Trust yourself. This is going to give you depth.

If you have a vision of the business you want to have in the coming years, you can step into the reality that the key players might change, but you need to make decisions based on where you’re going, not based on where you are.

Efficiency

The second most important thing to look at when you’re managing your business, is how you can make your team more efficient. Luckily, as a single mom who once sold over sixty houses a year, and is now the CEO of Kathleen Black Coaching & Consulting, an author and Keynote Speaker, I know all about refining systems and the efficiency and mindset needed to excel. Your role as a leader is to build the systems and processes that lead your team to results.

This will make sure your systems allow others to deliver the standards of your business, and hold team members accountable to keep the system on track. Systems are a win-win scenario for everyone. It allows you to manage the real system, not micro-managing every single person on your team.

These systems intend to guide us towards our goals. Let’s take a lead system. When creating any system, you need to start by narrowing down specifics and plans, which will allow for a more efficient life and business in the long run.

Opportunities The third step in team managing is looking at your business opportunities. We need to know all the opportunities that are coming into the business, the source of business, what our top sources are and whether we need to expand them.

We need to be aware of checking in on the things we’re testing, to make sure that they’re working properly, and to cut things if they’re not working, to make sure you’re getting insight into when you’ll know something is working or not.

Leverage

For the fourth step, you will carve out what you love to do most, take away what you dislike doing, and work to create the ultimate momentum maker: leverage.

As I mention in my book, The Top 1 % Life, once you know what you love and how you will step into your next phase of leadership, we will carve out your unique values, allowing for the space and training to attract others to help you create these values and believe in them along you to serve your clients.

This is the key to leverage that so many business owners miss. It is not enough to get more done or to get more done without needing you. The key to successful leverage is to elevate the end experience or product for everyone involved. It is the ultimate unfair advantage!

Data

Lastly, when you’re business managing you need to focus on tracking and data. Measured results will show a team member's ability to successfully bring your values, standards, and services to the public.

You will know this is the case because you are connected to the tracking. You have your finger on the pulse of tracking. You know how to pay others, invest in growth, pay yourself, and profit to make sure a healthy business.

Tracking is crucial to know what business is coming from where and how much it’s costing you to create an appointment or deal. What are your budgets, profits and losses?

This allows you to be more agile and adaptable quickly. You need to track how to spend your money, and stay up to date on how your business is getting and doing business.

All of these different steps rely on strong systems and the protocols that support them.