Although it is Management 101, career imprinting is not understood by many of today’s team leaders and managing brokers.
When new to the workforce in your chosen field, especially in real estate, you learn new skills, a new language, and your industry early in your career. More significantly, you are creating values, a way of thinking, and a compass for making decisions that will endure throughout your career.
These latter “imprints” are more difficult to identify, and if you aren’t clear about them, you might not be aware of what’s preventing you from progressing, landing the ideal job or company, or developing into a great leader.
Unfortunately, this is seen in the real estate business often. A “team leader,” “rainmaker” or “primary broker” often obtained that position by being a high producing real estate agent. That doesn’t always translate into being a good leader of a team of agents.
Imagine if your manager consistently forbids you from speaking at a listing presentation. If you have very little or no professional experience, this type of behavior could make you think that all managers are like this.
If you don’t realize that your prior manager’s behaviors were unacceptable, even if you subsequently succeed in improving your presentation abilities, you can still engage in the same destructive behavior of holding your team members back.
This is similar to the paradigm for child development. Even if personality does influence some outcomes, it is commonly acknowledged that even insignificant early experiences can have a lasting impact. By understanding the impact of unfavorable events and taking the required steps to change one’s behaviors and decision-making patterns, one can get rid of undesirable qualities or ways of thinking.
Through substantial research on child development, we now know that an individual’s response to present difficulties and opportunities can be greatly influenced by their early experiences.
General counsels, for instance, may have experience in business development, compliance, deals, or litigation. Lawyers who “grew up” in transactions may be a great fit if your company is hiring a legal team to enable the advancement of solutions and needs to take some measured risks for innovation.
These lawyers are trained to think about the upside as well as the downside, focused on closing deals by incorporating both sides’ agendas, and have a moderate appetite for risk. On the other hand, if your organization—let’s say, the legal and compliance team at a hedge fund—must place the highest priority on risk mitigation, you might want to choose a candidate with a solid background and early training in risk mitigation and compliance.
While one can acquire many different abilities and experiences over time, how they were taught to define success at a young age frequently dictates one’s preferences.
Career imprinting cannot be caught up to over time like skills can. It is more about your leadership style, problem-solving methods, and how you gauge your professional success.
This is influenced not just by the job you consistently produce and how your performance is assessed, but also by the impact of your management and the business culture that initially set the course for your professional compass.