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Delegation is about more than just finding more time to fill with additional clients or work commitments. It’s about making space to live a more complete life and pursue your “personal genius,” according to the panelists.
At their Wednesday afternoon session “The Power of Delegation,” WomanUP! Executive Consultant and Chief Strategist Debra Trappen moderated a panel that featured Nikki Beauchamp, broker at Engel & Völkers; Barb Hindle, chief brokerage officer at Radius Agent; and Bernadette Cole, regional owner at EXIT Realty Virginia.
For Cole, that means traveling to Mexico City several times each year to work with survivors of trafficking. On her last such trip, Cole said that she had the realization that because of the ways she had delegated she was “able to do things that [she] feels she was put on this earth to do.” Without delegation, “you get stuck in the day-to-day and are unable to do other things you were meant to do with this life,” she said.
Hindle learned the power of delegation when she took on the management of a dysfunctional brokerage that lost its leader and half of its 100-person agent count literally overnight. Her only option to keep the brokerage open was to fill it with brand new agents.
Although her instinct was to take on their training herself, she enlisted the help of a senior agent in the office, asking him to help train and mentor the new sales force. “We hired 50 agents in a short period of time and saved the branch, and the only reason it happened was because I delegated,” she recalled.
Beauchamp’s path to real estate was through finance and technology. There, she said, there is an infrastructure built in for delegation and she was “shocked” that it didn’t exist in real estate. She learned to delegate when she started a team and realized how much more efficient the team structure was.
She learned the importance of delegation anew during the pandemic. “I used to think we all had to be together every day, but the pandemic taught me that I could work with people all over the country,” Beauchamp said. Because of her ability to delegate, Beauchamp said she was able to take care of her parents through their last illnesses.
Women, trained to multitask and take care of everyone else, often view delegation as a sort of weakness, Cole said. Agents and brokers should look at both the work they can accomplish when they free themselves up and the leverage it offers to help them improve their businesses, she said.
For Beauchamp, a data-driven approach shows her that delegation can allow her to spend time both on those things that are personally important but also on those that can have the biggest impact on her business, including thought leadership and content creation. In addition, she pointed out the importance of adding leverage as contributing to job creation, “helping other people to feed their families.”
For Hindle, a major value in delegation is the ability to spend time away from the office, allowing others to help clients. She said that she learned this from her agents who would cover for each other to allow their colleagues to travel.
“I look back and wish I had done that,” Hindle said. Her advice for those who are planning to leave their clients in the care of others? Don’t delegate to new agents who may not be as busy as other colleagues. “Make it somebody of your caliber,” Hindle said.
Christy Murdock is a Realtor, freelance writer, coach and consultant and the owner of Writing Real Estate. She is also the creator of the online course Crafting the Property Description: The Step-by-Step Formula for Reluctant Real Estate Writers. Follow Writing Real Estate on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.
