Million Dollar Team Principle #71: The True Test of a Mentor
The test to see who your first or next mentor will be on your team is simple: look for the agent already mentoring someone.
There’s a common mistake in real estate leadership—running your team like a brokerage of solo agents. Each agent doing their own thing, protecting their own clients, making their own rules. That’s not a team—it’s chaos with a shared logo.
A true team works together, sharing resources, following the same guidelines and procedures, and marching toward the same goal.
Here’s the secret:
A team thrives on decentralized command—leaders created from the bottom up.
When a newer team member has a buyer who also needs to sell, that’s a perfect opportunity to pair them with a senior listing partner. The buyer’s agent doesn’t just “hand off” the lead—they shadow, they learn, they watch the senior in action.
And here’s the counterintuitive part: the person you’re really developing isn’t the new buyer’s agent—it’s the listing partner.
Your role as team leader is to coach the senior partner on how to lead the new teammate. How to show them our process, our standards, our values, and the results we expect.
Most team leaders miss this moment. They’re afraid:
“If I don’t let agents do everything themselves, they won’t stay.”
Wrong.
You don’t lose agents because you train and develop them.
You lose them because you let them do everything on their own—and they end up doing nothing well.
People want to achieve at a high level.
They don’t want to be average. They don’t want to feel invisible. They want to be mentored, cared for, shown how to act in the real world with class, style, and professionalism.
Now take this one step further. At your team meetings, use this as a case study. Track and trace every step of the process and give a full breakdown in front of the team. Stop teaching theory and start using real examples. Then—hand the microphone to the future mentor leader and the new agent. Let them both teach the team how it unfolded.
This shows everyone what leadership looks like, and it reinforces the message: we don’t just work in the same office—we work together.
