The Secret To Building A High-Performing Team That Actually Lasts (Podcast)

Insights from Evan Bell on Building a High-Performing Team

When you strip business down to its core, it's about people. Every deal, every partnership, and every bit of growth comes from how well your team works together. Real culture comes from integrity, empathy, and a shared belief in doing things the right way.

Strong teams start with trust. They create an environment where people can make mistakes, recover, and keep moving forward. Leaders who protect that culture and put their people first build something that lasts. They attract talent that wants to grow and stay part of something meaningful.

In this episode of The Dealmakers' Edge, Aaron Strauss shares what it takes to build a high-performing team that endures. He talks about why integrity shapes culture, how empathy becomes a true advantage, and what great leaders do to keep their teams performing at the highest level.

1:11 – Trust, empathy, and the foundation of sustainable performance

2:19 – Integrity as the first principle of leadership

4:04 – Creating psychological safety inside high-performing teams

6:05 – Team first vs. customer first and why it's not a contradiction

8:18 – Avoiding mediocrity and keeping a culture of innovation alive

11:18 – Recognizing and developing star, solid, and struggling performers

12:22 – Why soft skills and human connection are the next competitive edge

13:47 – The pitfalls that quietly destroy culture

17:04 – Building a culture of "we can figure it out"

18:03 – Resilience, mindset, and how leaders manage setbacks

21:01 – Generosity, perspective, and putting people before yourself

Mentioned In The Secret to Building a High-Performing Team That Actually Lasts

Transcript

You're listening to The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss, diving deep into stories behind commercial real estate leaders. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Dealmakers' Edge. Today, I'm excited to spend some time with our listeners one-on-one to talk to them about strategies, insights, and mindsets that drive high-performing teams and cultures.

Recently, I had the chance to sit on a panel with other business leaders where we tackled some of these big challenges at the organizational level: attracting talent, integrating talent effectively, and building teams and cultures that really sustain performance over the long haul. I just wanted to bring that conversation here. It's something we've been talking about throughout The Dealmakers' Edge again and again with great leaders. I wanted to tie a lot of these themes together because these issues are not just for business people who are running professional services firms like myself, they're universal deal-making challenges.

If you're buying buildings, you're building brokerage teams, you're building a law firm, you're building any business whatsoever, it really comes down to having the top people working collectively and cohesively together. Every growth play, every strategic partnership, it comes down to trust, it comes down to empathy, it comes down to how you build meaningful and sustainable relationships. It's how you deal with people and how you determine if people are fit for your culture and what you are trying to build. How do you support that performance to sustain your competitive advantage over time?

So in this episode, it's going to be very unusual because you're going to hear me talk, and it's not going to be with a guest. So, admittedly, it's a little bit unnerving for yours truly, but I feel like I've become more of a subject matter expert, not only in growing this firm, but also learning from all of our awesome guests that we've had over the past few years.

First of all, when it comes down to culture, when it comes to building teams, what exactly does that mean anyway? It just sounds like a lot of fluff, but all it means is creating a group of people that you're comfortable dealing with on a regular basis and that not only you're comfortable with as a leader, but they're comfortable with each other.

So what's the secret sauce of building those teams and gathering those teams together? You're looking for integrity. Is this person somebody you can trust? Integrity essentially means that you trust somebody even when you're not looking, like the famous presidential quote, "Trust but verify." So if you start with a high ethical threshold, your chances of success over time will be higher. You want to ingrain that threshold into the ethos of your company so that people know these are the guiding principles upon which you do not pass in a negative way.

As soon as you can create that groundwork for saying, "We're going to do things the right way here and gather enough people who are self-selecting to be of that ilk, who protect that safety in the culture," if you will, then you can have a foundation upon which you can build. You can't track everything, but if you bring the core group together that wants to do things the right way over time in a non-negotiable fashion, you can create the core of that culture, which will inevitably, over time, self-select and push out those who are not looking for a similarly situated culture.

The next thing is you're looking for people who have empathy. It's oftentimes a thrown-around word, but essentially, will this person understand what I'm saying beyond just the X's and O's from a technical perspective? Will this person hear me for what I'm actually saying, both verbal and nonverbal cues? Will they be able to connect with me? You're looking for people who allow you to be you with all of your faults and provide strengths around your shortcomings, and who allow you to embrace who you actually are without making you feel less than or otherwise.

You're looking for people who you don't have to become best friends with in real life, but professionally, you feel very comfortable around them, that they're going to do the right thing, they're going to build you up, and they're going to create a safety net around you. I recently also read a book about the psychological safety element. When people are feeling like they're in a safe environment, it doesn't only mean physically safe, that they're not going to have bodily harm, but it also means emotionally safe.

Obviously, you are looking to work with elite-level people who do not want to be spoken down to, who want to be respected for their talents, but people should feel comfortable that they're in an environment that although you're not looking to make mistakes on purpose, should a mistake be made, they can easily recover from it and not have to hide those mistakes. So it's a safety of emotions.

A lot of studies have been written on the fact that joy is the highest state of productivity. So when you look at companies that have more of a fear-based culture—I'm going to screw this up, did I get this wrong, will this be a problem, hide this from my boss—you may have a level of success, and you don't want to have a total company that doesn't have checks and balances.

But if people feel that they're in an environment that supports them truly, and they're surrounded by people that have empathy, then invariably they're going to be happier. When you're happier, you're going to be happier not only for your internal team, but all of the clients of the firm or of the company, whatever it is that you're selling, will feel it straight through.

Invariably, the brand will grow, the revenue will grow, the recruiting pipeline will grow, and all of the good things that come vis-a-vis that natural circle of life, as we're describing, from having a good, coherent core culture from the get-go.

Additionally, when it comes to finding great people, you have to be open-minded. Finding the right people is a miracle, and retaining that person as well is very difficult. But if you can again build that culture of self-selecting, rewarding, and motivating, you will have a leg up in the recruiting process.

In that vein of psychological safety for the team and entering that highest state of wellness, mental satisfaction, joy, if you will—if your organization tries to put the people inside the organization first, as opposed to external people first, it's almost like an existential divide where a lot of businesses, they say, "You know what, customer first, customer first, customer first."

Yes, you need to thrill the customer, wow the customer. Every five-star brand in the world always wants to exceed customer and client expectations and satisfaction. However, in a very demanding business, such as service business or any business for that matter, there invariably comes a point where you can have a clash between what the client or customer wants and what the team feels like they are able to deliver.

If you take the side of the client or customer who puts an unreasonable demand on your team, which just frankly cannot be done, except for an absolutely unreasonable, unachievable request, which would frankly exhaust or deplete the emotional resources and the physical resources of the team, my personal view is that you always want to put the team first, build that psychological safety so that internally people feel that you're going to have their back first.

They can make a mistake. They can strive to service the customer, but we're going to do what we can do as a team first. If you can make the team happy, if you can make your stars feel like they have everything that they need to be successful, every single time, the client's going to have a superlative experience. When you try to reverse engineer it and say, whatever the customer wants, we got it, you're going to ultimately either burn out your people or create unrealistic expectations. You're not going to be able to have holistic, sustainable growth over time.

I know this is a big debate in the business world as to customer always comes first, the customer is always right. I believe that it's not mutually contradictory or mutually exclusive to have the team first and also have a superlative client experience. But if you're in the business of building sustainable, holistic teams that get along well, that build that great empathetic culture as described, you want to start by putting them first and bringing in that guardrail, if you will, to protect everybody internally from that dangerous world out there.

You also want to have a culture where it's always innovating. You're always growing. The classic situation of we've always done this this way, or we're good, this is okay, to me, what kills businesses, what kills organizations, is a culture of mediocrity.

To me, the biggest nightmare I could run as a service business leader is to hire people who are just fine doing their thing. We've always done it this way. Groups and firms that continue to do things as they've always done them ultimately just get run over in the marketplace.

Technology is changing every single day with artificial intelligence. If you're in the knowledge business, you have to be fearful daily because there are incredible levels of augmentation coming into the market every single day. So you just have to have an incredible open mind and have the courage, frankly, to hire people who are not only very intelligent, but perhaps more forward-looking than leadership, and to lean into those relationships with that high level of trust and empathy and to say, "What do you see?"

Somebody once told me that they learned a lot about business from somebody who's a racecar driver. The racecar driver, what they can do is they can't see years and years into the future, but they always have their eyes on the horizon. What's coming around the corner, literally and figuratively, can kill your business. So you can't have a culture of mediocrity.

You have to constantly work with people who want to break the script, who want to defy the norms, and who want to create the future as opposed to being left behind by other companies and businesses that leverage things like technology to create that future as well.

When it comes to leading a high-performance organization, the only constant for leaders is that they need to be constantly improving. If you were at level eight yesterday when you grew your firm or you hired wonderful talent, if you're not looking to push to level nine or level ten, ultimately, talent will look for the next level leadership, and your leadership will be tested.

The only thing consistent about leadership is that there's going to be a new challenge around the corner. It's always evolving, always changing. What you set your heart out to do in the morning has nothing to do with what's going to happen the following day, week, month, or year. So as a leader, you have the main job of constantly evolving and studying and learning and growing and developing, and networking. These things never stop.

The moment you stop as a leader is the moment that your organization stops to grow. You don't need to have all the answers, but you need to be surrounded by people in a culture that are constantly looking for better answers, and you need to reward those around you that constantly bring solutions as opposed to create problems. When it comes to an organization, typically you'll have star performers, you'll have solid performers, any other performers that just are not able to really get much done.

You have to have compassion for the latter third category. You have to reward the solid performers, and you have to hold on for dear life with the superstar performers. Having all three of these groups is not usually exclusive. It's impossible to have an organization where everybody is an absolute superstar, but having an environment where people can be themselves and continue to grow at their level, whatever that may be, and to be respected for who they are, as opposed to being denigrated or looked down upon for anything at any time.

In a nutshell, culture, talent building, growth, recruiting, deal-making, it's all tied and parcel to the same thing, which is human capital. I also do believe that the further we get down the road with greater artificial intelligence, trending towards concepts like super intelligence that the big tech titans speak of all the time, I believe even a greater skill set, which will make you more successful over time, is leaning into these softer skills. Because whether you have technical knowledge of a subject matter over time will become less and less important.

What will become more important and more vital and more crucial is how you take and discern and filter and sift through all of those collective data points and apply it. Here's the key, Apply it with a capital A towards human beings that you're actually working with. That will create the next level of success. People who lean into these types of soft concepts and align it with great technical expertise, those are organizations where magic happens.

I think that's really the soft side of building a culture, building a team, and developing as a leader. All of these concepts are critical towards the future, especially as we continue to see everything become disrupted more and more by emerging technology.

To be a force multiplier in the business world, you need to leverage and attract and motivate and hire, and retain absolute star performing teams. It's teams of human beings leveraging technology and data, which will create the best businesses of the future.

It's leaders who understand that people are just that, people. They're not machines. They're not data points. While they do drive profit and loss, they're more nuanced than that. Understanding that gray and seeing where things can go and seeing things in people that perhaps they don't even see themselves, that's where leadership and growth happens. That's the most exciting and fun part of business to me.

So we talked about what are the drivers making a very positive culture in an organization. Maybe now we talk a little bit about what are obstacles in creating a great culture and what are the types of pitfalls you're trying to avoid. I think people know it intuitively when they see it, but it's sometimes hard to articulate. So I'll start with one of them.

I think a big, big red flag for me is when you are spending time with somebody and you do need to spend significant time with people before they become part of your organization for vetting. But on an ongoing basis, if people keep saying me, me, me all the time, they're typically not necessarily going to be the ones that are most empathetic. You want to have there to be a focus individuals and individual contribution. But in general, leaders, you typically hear them use the word me and I less and less.

For leaders, it's all about the team. It's about a we. It's stronger. It's more cohesive. It's unified. It's vibrant. It brings people up. So the people who like to talk about themselves in first person all the time, me, me, me, it could create a little bit level of toxicity that you want to avoid, especially at a leadership level.

The other thing is dealing with people who put up obstacles all the time. There's always an obstacle or reason for why they don't want to get things done. It's also just hard to reach them. Typically, I find that there's an inverse proportion of success based on people's accessibility and responsiveness towards their level of success in any organization.

I think this is a very difficult topic because you really want to avoid got to be reachable at all hours syndrome. That's a danger for a culture because it could be too much and inappropriate.

People do need to be able to have their personal lives and separation and weekends and vacations. Big proponent of that. Otherwise, what's the point of working so hard? But I will tell you, typically, there are a couple of principles that when you're very good, the work finds you, and the more of a leader you are, usually the greater level of responsiveness that you have.

I think across the board, when investors look with whom to partner, where clients look with whom to hire, they're looking for organizations that are obsessive about responsiveness. You also need to balance that with the reality that there has to be work-life balance. There has to be that safe space. You don't want to be emailing people late nights and weekends. It's unhealthy. It could become toxic in its own right.

But at the same time, if people are ambitious, they're going to be responsive in their own right. That will lead to a greater level of performance and success over time. Additionally, if people are less responsive and they're trying to make it more difficult to work with, they're going to be less busy. Essentially, also, if you're really talented at what you do and you're very responsive and you care, and really that comes down to the secret ingredient, just caring.

If you talk to leaders, they're looking to hire people who just care. You cannot put that in a resume. But if you give people work that want to do it, that are responsive, that are optimistic, that are forward-minded, they're going to get busier and busier. Then you have to deal with the reality of perhaps they have too much to do because they're so good. You have to hire more people to support those people who are already doing that core amount of work.

That's really where the special sauce becomes greater. If it becomes magnified around a culture of we can do it, we can step up together, we have each other's back. What you're looking to do is find the right balance with the resources that the organization has at the time to find successful people to fill as many roles as possible. But with the ideology and the support level mentality of, I can stretch and figure this out.

It doesn't fall outside of my rubric to say, I'm going to get this project done today, even though it doesn't specifically fit exactly right into my job description. Those people who stretch themselves and take on more responsibility, invariably those are the individuals you're looking for who are going to grow in an organization. You want to listen to them carefully. You want to staff around those stars, and you want to continue to find more people who think the same way. With that, coupled with a good healthy culture, you have almost no choice but to be successful.

This podcast is called The Dealmaker's Edge, and I'm always prodding our guests, very successful guests who have achieved amazing things. You know, what is your edge? How are you keeping your head on straight effectively as you are accomplishing these great things?

How are you managing the most valuable real estate, which is in your own brain, in your head, in your heart, if you will. Building on topics, talking topics like resilience, getting up after a setback all the time. If you think about businesses, it's just really one big series of setbacks. I was hanging out with a friend of mine who's a developer recently, and he said you just have to like challenges.

You have to be okay with everything going wrong all the time and just making incremental progress. Sometimes it's an inch, sometimes it's many inches, sometimes it's a mile. But the idea of always moving forward, even where there's a setback, not to view it as a setback in its totality, but that success is not linear. It's not, you just go up and up and up. Sometimes you fall down.

Think of that game, Chutes and Ladders, which is what little kids play. You may hit that ladder and fall all the way down, but you just need to keep spinning. You need to keep moving up all the time and knowing that you're going to have those setbacks built in. Also, the way you're speaking to yourself as a leader trying to build a practice, trying to build a firm, trying to build an organization, trying to be successful at whatever it is that you're doing, you need to also sometimes cut yourself some slack.

I think the grass is always greener on the other side. We're looking at people, how they post on social. We're looking at how they live their lives. It always looks like everyone else is doing amazing except for you. The reality is that nothing can be further from the truth. Oftentimes the more successful the person, the more they're struggling in many ways, even though that sounds difficult to believe.

A lot of the struggles are mental. Oftentimes, they can be physical. It's celebrating the small wins every single day and appreciating them and being thankful for them in order to build that emotional resilience to keep moving forward. When we get back to the core theme of culture, we talk about growing teams and growing firms, growing businesses, building alignment.

The analogy I like to use as well for building something special, building something great, is if you look at a famous sculpture like a Michelangelo, he never set out to go create this specific culture per se. What he did was he envisioned what he was going to create and he just kept chipping away at that block until the sculpture was left there standing.

So in effect, conceptually, what you're trying to do is, whether it's internal from your culture perspective or external vis-a-vis the market, is you want to keep removing any obstacle or barrier why somebody would not want to work with you. Transact with you, partner with you, team up with you. Keep seeing things through the eyes of that other person and step into their shoes, walk in their shoes and listen to them and listen to what you think they would need.

Not only listen to what you think they would need, anticipate what you think they would need, and then give it to them. It shows that you're thinking thoughtfully about other people before yourself. If you put other people before yourself, ultimately, with that spirit of generosity, you're going to attract similarly situated, like-minded people. That's really where the magic happens, as discussed.

I hope you've enjoyed listening to this unique episode of the podcast. We'll be back with our regular programming in short order with some exciting guests coming up.

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