Leadership & Brokerage Culture
Years ago, I took a ten-minute break from my desk and walked outside our office. Second palm tree on the left, if you want the exact spot. I sat down and watched a colony of ants move a crumb of food across the concrete.
No manager directing traffic. No incentive plan. No one ant getting the credit.
I came back inside and wrote about it that same day, because I recognized something in that crumb-carrying operation that I’d spent years trying to build inside my own brokerage. Ants aren’t selfish. They don’t wait for permission to solve a problem. And nobody’s carrying that crumb alone.
Twenty-two years of leading a real estate team have taught me those three observations hold up better than almost anything I learned in a leadership seminar. Here’s what they mean once you bring them inside a brokerage.
01
Ants Aren’t Selfish
Watch a colony long enough and you’ll notice something. The ants don’t ration effort based on what they’ll personally gain from the crumb. They give it where it’s needed, because the colony’s success and their own success are the same thing.
Most brokerages train agents to think the opposite way. Split sheets, individual production boards, top-producer spotlights at every meeting. All of it quietly teaches agents that their success and the team’s success are two separate scoreboards.
I’ve watched this play out for over two decades, at my own brokerage and everywhere else in this business. When I built McQuaid & Company from $17,000 and no safety net, I could have built a culture around who closed the most. Instead, I built one around who showed up for each other, because I’d already seen what the alternative produces: agents who help a teammate only when there’s something in it for them, and call it teamwork.
What this looks like in practice
- An agent covers a showing for a teammate without being asked, and without expecting a favor back.
- A top producer mentors a newer agent instead of guarding their playbook.
- Leadership celebrates the assist as loudly as the closing.
02
Teamwork Over the Solo Hero
No single ant gets remembered for carrying the crumb home. The colony moves as one unit toward one goal, and that’s the whole point. There’s no solo hero story in an ant colony, and that’s exactly why it works.
Real estate, more than almost any other business I know, is built to produce solo heroes. The industry celebrates the agent who closed the most, sold the biggest listing, hit the top of the leaderboard alone. I understand the appeal. I built plenty of leaderboards myself over the years.
But here’s what I’ve noticed happens to teams that only celebrate the individual: agents start operating as a loose group of solo operators sharing a logo, not a team. They compete internally for leads, for recognition, for the broker’s attention. Trust erodes because everyone’s playing a slightly different game under the same roof.
What teams that actually work together share
- They have a goal bigger than any one person’s production number.
- They know how leads get distributed and why, so nobody’s filling in the blanks with suspicion.
- They talk about the business openly enough that nobody feels like they’re the only one in the dark.
I wrote about this same idea in Building Your Real Estate Dream Team, and the throughline is the same one the ants demonstrate every day.
03
They Dare to Solve Problems
An ant that hits an obstacle doesn’t wait for instructions. It goes over the obstacle, around it, or finds another route entirely. Nobody calls a meeting. Nobody waits for the queen to weigh in. The problem gets solved by whichever ant is closest to it.
This is the lesson I think about the most as a leader, because it’s the one most brokerages accidentally train out of their agents.
Here’s how it happens. An agent takes initiative, tries something outside the standard playbook, and it doesn’t work. Leadership responds with criticism instead of curiosity. The agent learns the lesson fast: wait to be told what to do, because trying something risks getting it wrong in front of everyone.
I’ve made this mistake myself, early in my career, more than once. I corrected a misstep publicly instead of privately, and I watched that agent stop taking any initiative at all for months afterward. That was on me, not them.
How the best brokerages run this differently
- They reward the attempt, not just the outcome.
- Leadership models solving problems out loud instead of disappearing behind closed doors to fix things quietly.
- Mistakes made in good faith get a conversation, not a correction in front of the room.
I talk about this in Leading with Heart, because initiative and psychological safety aren’t separate leadership topics. One doesn’t exist without the other.
04
Why This Isn’t Just a Nice Story
It’s tempting to file the ant story under inspiration and move on. I’d resist that. The data backs up what the ants demonstrate for free.
Agents who move internally within an organization retain at roughly 89% after twelve months, compared to about 76% for external hires. Internal movers also outproduce external recruits by nearly 28% in annualized volume after the transition.Source: Recruiting Insight
Translation: the agent who already trusts your culture, who already knows the “why” behind your decisions, tends to outperform the exciting new hire you spent months and a signing bonus recruiting. Trust and shared goals aren’t soft metrics. They show up in production numbers. This is exactly why leading a real estate team well matters more than who you can recruit to it.
I’ve also seen this reflected in how we built traditions at McQuaid & Company, something I wrote about in Creating Business Traditions That Build Community. Traditions work the same way the ant colony works. Nobody has to be told to show up. It’s just what the group does.
05
The Leadership Assumption Getting in the Way of Leading a Real Estate Team
Most brokers assume culture is something you build to improve retention. I think that gets it backwards.
Retention is just one of the things a good operating system produces. If you’re only investing in culture to reduce turnover, you’ll cut it the first time budgets get tight, because you’re treating it like a tactic instead of the foundation. The brokerages that get this right treat culture as non-negotiable, the same way they’d treat their license or their trust account. It’s not optional infrastructure. It is the infrastructure.
06
Which Lesson Does Your Team Need Right Now?
I’ll leave you with the same question I ask myself whenever something feels off inside a team I’m leading.
Is the problem that people aren’t sharing effort generously? Is it that everyone’s playing their own game instead of one shared game? Or is it that people have stopped trying new things because the last attempt got picked apart?
The ants never had a leadership seminar. They just move the crumb. The rest of us have to work a little harder at it, but the target is exactly that simple.
