Thoughts on Leadership: Face-to-Face Leadership

By Gino Blefari

This week my travels find me in Irvine, CA at our HSF Affiliates LLC headquarters for a Sales and Service conference. The conference brought together our sales, service, operations, education and business consulting teams for a collective, three-day event filled with presentations, team-building activities and idea-sharing. As you know, I’m a firm believer in setting Wildly Important Goals (WIGs) and not just setting these WIGS but also limiting them to only the very most important achievements you need to get done. These were our two WIGs for the meeting:

1. Increase the collaboration between our sales and service teams relative to working with our affiliates to help them achieve their goals faster than they would in our absence.
2. Expand on and improve the way we connect with potential franchisees for whom we share our Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices value proposition and its important tenets of trust, integrity, stability and longevity.

Beyond these two WIGs, it was an important conference for another reason: The face-to-face interaction of business associates who have in many cases worked together for years but haven’t yet had a chance to meet in person.

Trust cannot be formed through a cell phone or computer screen. Trust, a pillar of not only our particular brokerage organization but also a pillar to sustainable success, must be built through genuine connection. This genuine connection, I should add, is found when you can look into someone’s eyes, shake his or her hand and be present in a room to feel the energy and passion this individual has for the work he or she does. That’s real trust. That’s real commitment to a shared goal. Emails and conference calls will never replace what it’s like to sit right beside your colleagues as they explain, illuminate and ultimately, inspire.

So, what’s the message? I made it a point to sit through our entire three-day Sales and Service conference to hear every presentation given and proposal offered. In the end, I believe we achieved the two WIGs we set out to accomplish. How? Well, of course it was due in part to the strength of our great sales and service teams but it was also largely because of the face-to-face time we spent together that helped show us just how very strong we are. Business is done with people, not companies. And applying this concept to your own leadership style means the next time someone asks to schedule a conference call or video chat for your meeting, tell him or her you’d rather sit down in your office or grab a coffee instead. Trust me, the future success of whatever business endeavor you’re setting out to achieve will be better off because you did.

GINO BLEFARI is CEO of HSF Affiliates LLC. You can follow Gino on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.