June 4, 2025Lauren Holland and Mie Yamashita unpack one of the most misunderstood dynamics in scaling real estate teams: the relationship between team leaders and their admin. With brutal honesty and strategic clarity, they expose why leadership—not operations—is often the real reason your systems are breaking. Whether you’re overwhelmed, burned out, or blaming a struggling admin, this episode delivers the mindset shifts and tactical tools you need to reset the foundation. Learn how to build systems people can rise into, how to align your vision with execution, and why scaling with clarity always beats hustle.
Chapters:
- 00:00:00 – How Leaders Sabotage Their Own Admins
- 00:00:36 – Quick Welcome, Big Truths
- 00:00:45 – The Real Power Behind Leader-Admin Synergy
- 00:02:02 – Ownership Starts with Expectations
- 00:03:09 – Speak Clearly or Spiral: Why Clarity Wins
- 00:05:15 – Don’t Hire Cheap—Hire Right
- 00:06:54 – What’s Actually in Their Lane?
- 00:11:18 – The Feedback Loop Most Teams Miss
- 00:19:04 – Tech + Systems = Freedom (If You Let Them)
- 00:25:42 – It Ends Where It Started: You
Links and Resources:
- Reside Platform
- Reside Platform Website
- Lauren Holland on LinkedIn
- Mie Yamashita on LinkedIn
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Episode breakdown: when the admin struggles, check the leadership
Lauren Holland, director of team operations at Reside, and Mie Yamashita, Reside’s director of team production, focus this episode on one relationship: the team leader and the admin. Their opening gut check is direct. If your admin is struggling, ask whether you set them up with clear expectations, SOPs and regular time together, or threw them into the chaos and expected magic.
Get the expectations out of your head
Mie says one of her own past struggles as a leader was getting what was in her brain out of her mouth, then being frustrated that someone couldn’t read her mind. Her longtime ops manager got close to doing that, but she calls that person a unicorn. If you haven’t outlined what success looks like for your admin, you can’t expect them to hit it.
She also watches for a specific red flag. When an operations hire keeps giving the job back, it may be the wrong person for the seat. Before deciding that, she checks whether the expectations were ever clear. Mie adds that a leader may go through one, two or three bad hires before getting it right, and she sees many team owners take the role back themselves after one because they don’t want to be burned again.
You can’t want something more for someone than they wanted for themselves. And really the most powerful thing that you can do is build a system and then let them rise to it.
Mie Yamashita
Know each role’s 20%
Both hosts lean on the 80/20 rule. For agents, the 20% is lead generation, follow-up, appointments, role play and adding to the database. For leaders, Mie lists recruiting calls, inspecting the database and lead generating with the agents. For an admin it might be processing a pending file or updating the pipeline. The specifics vary, but each person needs to know theirs. Lauren’s starting point for a new hire is a not-to-do list of the work that drains you.
Mie has run a virtual assistant team for four or five years and credits them with much of her efficiency. Even so, for a team owner with three to five agents who wants to reach 25, she says the first hire needs to be an assistant who can help them scale.
Run a daily download and a weekly priority meeting
Mie recommends a 10-minute download every morning. The admin reports pendings for the team, closings for the month and the projection for next month, then the two review the calendar. She says she often joins team calls where nobody knows those numbers. Lauren adds a non-negotiable weekly meeting to cover what went well and the top three priorities. At Reside, the team meets four days a week. The Monday meeting runs 35 to 45 minutes, and the others are 15 minutes per department.
The admin’s side of the deal is ownership. Lauren’s advice to admins is to prep for the role you want, do the research, use AI tools, and bring a finished draft back instead of handing the problem back to the leader.
Bring a solution and then let them help you work through a solution if it’s not the right solution.
Mie Yamashita
Give specific feedback, even when you’re busy
Lauren hears from admins whose leaders give no feedback, or only say something was wrong after the fact. Mie’s counterexample is her own first week at Reside, when Nick McLean went back, watched recordings of her trainings and gave her feedback on them. She says that kind of attention is where loyalty and drive come from. For leaders who feel pulled in every direction, Mie’s boundary tool is to replace a reflexive yes with “yes, and here’s when,” “yes, and here’s how” or “yes, and here’s who.”
Write it down and know the numbers
Lauren’s rule is to document every process and run from a checklist, because you will miss a step otherwise. Mie’s shortcut is to record a Zoom whenever you teach something, then have ChatGPT turn the transcript into an SOP with a checklist. Lauren’s list of numbers for admins and ops leaders includes coming soons, signed listing and buyer agreements, actives, pendings broken out by buyers and listings, terminations, deals that pushed to the next month, and month-to-date and year-to-date closings. She also tracks when each agent last logged into the CRM.
You don’t need a hero, you need a system.
Lauren Holland
Key takeaways for team leaders
- Before you replace a struggling admin, check whether you wrote down what success in the role looks like.
- Name the 20% for yourself, your agents and your admin.
- Hold a 10-minute morning download on pendings, closings and the calendar, plus one weekly priority meeting.
- Expect your admin to bring solutions, and give them specific feedback in return.
- Record what you teach and turn it into SOPs with checklists.
