Her best agent stopped prospecting. She had the fix ready before she had the diagnosis, until she made herself ask one question first.
Renee had run her team for six years, and in that time she had developed a reflex for agents whose numbers dropped: more calls, a tighter script, a renewed accountability check-in every Monday at nine. It had worked often enough that she trusted it, right up until the week her strongest agent, a woman named Priya who had closed more transactions than anyone else on the team for three straight quarters, simply stopped prospecting.
Renee's first instinct was the one she always reached for. She drafted a message about renewed call volume and a return to the daily activity tracker Priya had used in her first year, before she had ever needed reminding. She had the message half written when something stopped her, not sympathy exactly, but a kind of professional doubt: Priya had never needed this kind of push before, and the standard fix assumed a standard cause. What if the cause here wasn't standard at all?
She deleted the draft and asked for a conversation instead of sending a directive.
The conversation did not start where Renee expected. She opened with the question she had learned to ask before any other: what's actually happening here, not what do you need to do differently. Priya was quiet for a moment, then explained that a closing two months earlier had gone badly, a buyer had backed out at the final walkthrough over a problem Priya felt she should have caught earlier, and the client had been upset enough that Priya had absorbed it as a personal failure rather than a transaction that fell through for reasons mostly outside her control.
She hadn't stopped prospecting because she lacked a script or had grown lazy. She had stopped because, somewhere underneath the daily routine, she had quietly started avoiding the moment where a deal could blow up on her again, and prospecting was the first step in a process that now carried risk she hadn't felt before. More calls would not have touched that. A tighter script would not have touched that. The activity tracker Renee had almost reassigned her would have treated a confidence problem as a discipline problem, and it would have failed the same way it fails every time the diagnosis is wrong.
Renee asked a second question she had also almost skipped: what would help, specifically, right now. Priya didn't know yet, and that was fine. The point of the conversation was not to produce an immediate answer. It was to replace a guess with actual information before building anything on top of it.
What Renee built over the following two weeks had nothing to do with activity volume. She walked through the failed closing with Priya in detail, not to assign blame, but to separate what had actually been Priya's responsibility from what hadn't, and to name specifically what Priya could watch for earlier next time. She paired her with a colleague for the next two listing appointments, not because Priya needed supervision, but because having another set of eyes in the room made the next closing feel less like a solo risk. And she checked in weekly, briefly, with one question: did anything this week feel like that walkthrough.
Priya was back to a full prospecting schedule within a month, and the numbers eventually reflected it, but Renee noticed something more useful than the numbers. Priya started naming her own hesitations out loud before they became a silent slowdown, which meant Renee caught the next one in days instead of months. That shift, an agent willing to say "this is the thing I'm avoiding" before it shows up in a production report, does not happen because a leader pushed harder. It happens because a leader asked a real question once and the agent learned the question was safe to answer honestly.
Renee has since noticed how often her first instinct, the standard fix, would have been wrong in a way she wouldn't have discovered for months. She still reaches for it. She has just trained herself to treat it as a guess rather than a conclusion, and to ask one real question before she builds anything on top of it.
Renee didn't announce what had happened with Priya to the rest of the team. What she changed instead was quieter and more structural. She rebuilt her weekly one-on-ones around a single opening question, the same one she'd used with Priya, and she asked it of every agent regardless of how strong their numbers looked that week. Most of them answered with something surface-level the first few times, a scheduling complaint or a comment about the market. She let those answers stand without pushing, because she had learned from Priya that the real answer only shows up once an agent trusts that the question isn't a trap.
It took most of the team the better part of a quarter before the honest answers started arriving. One agent admitted he'd been quietly avoiding a specific type of listing appointment, the kind with a seller who wanted to set the price above what the comps supported, because he didn't yet have language for that conversation and had been steering his pipeline away from it without ever naming why. Another admitted she had stopped following up with past clients after a referral had gone sideways in a way that embarrassed her, almost the same shape as Priya's hesitation, just pointed at a different part of the business.
None of these were accountability problems. All of them would have looked like accountability problems on a production report, and all of them would have gotten the standard fix if Renee had still been running the version of herself that existed before Priya's stalled quarter. Instead, each one got a specific, built-for-that-person response: scripting and roleplay for the price conversation, a structured reintroduction to the referral pipeline with Renee present for the first few calls, a direct conversation about what had actually gone wrong with the embarrassing referral and what, if anything, had genuinely been the agent's fault.
What struck Renee most, looking back on the quarter, was not how different the underlying problems were from each other. It was how similar the fix would have looked from the outside if she'd skipped the diagnosis on any of them. A call-volume push. A tighter script. A reminder about the accountability tracker. Three different agents, three different real problems, and one generic intervention that would have failed all three in three different ways, for the same underlying reason: it would have treated a question about what was happening as if it were already answered.
Renee still keeps a short note after every one-on-one, not a production number, but a sentence about what she actually learned that the agent hadn't said directly in previous weeks. She goes back and rereads a quarter's worth of those notes every few months now, the same way she eventually went back and reread the quiet shift in Priya's numbers. She has found, more than once, that the pattern she needed to see had been sitting in three separate conversations the whole time, waiting for her to read them together instead of one at a time.
Want the full list? 10 Things Great Real Estate Team Leaders Do Differently lays out the behaviors Renee's story illustrates, and the nine others that separate leaders who develop agents from leaders who manage them.
Every page on this site about leading a real estate team, office, or brokerage, written by Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH, former EVP of Learning and Development at Douglas Elliman.
Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH works with real estate team leaders through executive coaching engagements focused on the specific behaviors that separate leaders who develop agents from leaders who manage them. Real Estate Leadership Training for Brokers and Team Leaders explains the full framework.
Dr. Jeffrey Scott Stanton, DCH is the former EVP of Learning & Development at Douglas Elliman Real Estate and the founder and Chief Learning Officer of R2R Diagnostic Group, where he helps real estate organizations and agents diagnose and fix the behavioral patterns behind inconsistent performance.