Five Essential Enablers of Real Success

Since April 2020, we’ve had the privilege of coaching some of the most accomplished and effective people in the UK real estate industry. We have been observing successful people during these 5 years – for over ten thousand coaching hours with over a thousand professionals – and noticed a theme or two emerge amongst those who consistently deliver impressive results. Whether these were high-performing individuals, transformative leaders, rising teams or early-stage growth businesses, there are identifiable attributes that appear to set them apart, and provide tell-tale signs of what is holding others back. We have called these “essential enablers” and share them with you in this article.  

Go further than simply playing to their strengths – they capitalise on their strengths by adding a conscious focus and discipline.  

Seek support and/or resource for their weaker areas for optimal enablement. They do this without blame or shame, simply accepting they are naturally stronger in certain areas and seek improvement in the rest.   

What they don’t do: 

Waste time trying or pretending to be perfect.  

Struggle in silence or blame others for their limitations.  

Avoid work they find difficult without putting anything in place to help address the challenges.  

Work on their business, not just in it, carving out space for thinking, planning, and designing smarter ways of working – alone, and with their teams. This allows them to know what the highest value activities actually are.  

Invest time to articulate what they want to achieve and track their progress against those goals. They schedule regular constructive reflection – assessing and course-correcting their efforts and results to make sure they stay on track.  

Actively exert positive influence over interactions and working relationships to achieve win/win scenarios, for example delegation = elevating others.  

Make a big deal out of doing “strategy” (it is a regular occurrence and part of everyday life).  

Stay in a reactive cycle and confuse busyness with progress, usually reacting to the inbox as a priority.  

Leave strategy conversations for “when things quieten down” (when does that ever happen?!).  

Get distracted by seemingly urgent but not truly important work.  

Invest in learning how to lead – rather than seeing leadership as an accidental by-product of seniority. 

Seek and accept feedback openly and with curiosity.  

Adapt their communication and leadership style to different team members to get the best results – instead of expecting everyone else to flex for them.  

Fall back on “I’m just not a natural leader.”  

Rely on authority or job title to get results.  

Expect people to ‘just get on with it’ without clarity or motivation. 

What they do:  

Organise themselves and execute their efforts around client needs.  

Teach others how to build brilliant client relationships. 

Document what works, share playbooks, and develop junior team members (regardless of whether they are in the office or not!).  

They focus on systems, not secrets.  

They know that client trust isn't a personal prize – but a scalable business asset.  

Behave like a team of one.  

Hoard or hide clients and deny access to other colleagues.  

Guard their client base making it impossible for others to learn or share success.   

Deprive others of relationship-building know-how and keep success strategies to themselves, for fear of others gaining traction.  

Assume no one else can deliver their level of service. 

What they do:  

Actively seek to build resilience and adaptability.  

Hold themselves accountable.  

Face fears.  

Work to rewire unhelpful thinking patterns.  

Have the self-compassion to know they’re a work in progress, and the courage to keep growing. 

Avoid looking inwards.  

Blame external factors.  

Expect others to fix what’s ultimately their own responsibility.  

Wait until burnout to consider inner / mindset work. 

Success is Learnable. So Are These Enablers. 

What we have observed in our time is that none of these five attributes are necessarily innate. They’re all learnable, buildable, and coachable. We have witnessed people accumulate these enablers through desire, motivation and above all, taking intentional action. As well as being the top 5 essential enablers that represent success, these topics also feature in the most popular of coaching topics:  

• How do I make the most of my natural strengths and improve weaker areas?
• How do I become efficient and effective, to do more in less time?
• How do I lead and deliver though others, as well as doing my day job?
• How do I serve clients, gain market share and deliver higher financial returns?
• How do I maximise my progression and futureproof my performance?  

Here’s to continuing our mission to make coaching more applicable, accessible and affordable for everyone in real estate over the next 5 years. It will be interesting to see if these observations stand the test of time.  

You can find out more through our website, on this page.