Building your growth team’s career competencies

Each member of the property management business should have a career plan, and this doesn’t exclude the growth team. One of the biggest overarching principles that I believe in, when it comes to your team, is that you need to offer them a career path. It’s not enough just to have a job, there needs to be a plan for each team member to grow and learn within the business. This not only ensures that your team members stay with you long term, but also as the knowledge of your team gets stronger, so does the knowledge of your business.

When I engage with businesses, most of them are not asking for team training, in fact they have this all under control. What they are often asking for, is how to structure a learning and career plan for their team. In the early days of my career I fell into property management, not an unusual story as a large percentage of industry people I speak to have a similar one. But what was different then, was that property management was never considered a career. Property management had huge staff churn, no formal training and no career planning. Like me, if you were lucky, you work hard, be good at what you do, and look after your clients. Roll forward nearly 20 years and property management is now seen as a career option for young people making career choices. We have an obligation now, as an industry, to provide the platform for this. Something I am very passionate about.

Career planning is made up of two key components. Firstly, there needs to be a plan. Having the right organisation structure in your team, not only offers efficiency for the business but also offers a career path for your team. To preserve your culture, I have always encouraged businesses to recruit from the bottom, and train team members in your ways and your culture. You may recruit a new person into a leasing role, very much a sales role and a path into becoming a business developer or growth expert. Acknowledgment needs to be made by the business owner, long before the recruitment process, that the leasing role an entry level role and a transitional path to something bigger.

The old school thinking is that we employ a leasing person to do leasing, with no regard as to what happens next. Logically a leasing role would transition into a business developer and then into a business development manager and possibly a team leader. Once you have the plan worked out, you need to work on the vehicle to progress your team members through this career path. This is where the second component of career planning comes to play, building out the career competencies for each role.

Career competencies are all the skills and experience required to become proficient in a role. Once your team have completed all the competencies for one role, they can now move forward into learning the competencies for the next role. To establish a list of career competencies for each role, start with the position description.

Each role in the growth team would have an individual position description. The position description would detail each task required to fulfill the needs of the role. These tasks become the competencies for the role. Some tasks may have many competencies to become proficient at the task itself. In your monthly 1-on-1’s, with each of your growth team members, you would plot out these career competencies and prioritise each as a learning path. You would review the competencies from the month before and set goals for learning new competencies for the month coming. As a leader, your role is to ensure that each team member has been allocated both time and resources each month to learn these competencies.