If someone asked you right now to rate your business culture, what would you say?

Most real estate principals I work with answer the same way: “Yeah, it’s pretty good. Our team gets along well. We’ve got a good culture.”

Then I ask a follow-up question.

How consistent has your business been over the last 12 months?

And that’s when the story changes. “Well, we’ve had some inconsistent months.”

Here’s what I’ve discovered working with principals across Australia and New Zealand: when performance is inconsistent, there’s usually a cultural problem, not a performance problem.

Most businesses think culture is about having a good vibe. Being nice to each other. Maybe running a team-building day once a year where everyone does trust falls and feels motivated for a few weeks before old habits kick back in.

But that’s not culture. That’s just being friendly.

Real culture is a system. It’s a framework – something you build, measure, and review continuously, just like any other part of your business. And it’s the part most principals completely miss.

Let me share an example that completely changed how I think about culture: the All Blacks.

Over the last 115 years, they’ve maintained a winning record of around 70–77%—the best of any sports team in history. That doesn’t happen by accident. And it’s not because they magically keep finding more talented players than everyone else.

It happens because they have a cultural framework that’s been in place for decades.

They have clear core values that every player knows. These aren’t motivational words painted on the locker room wall. They’re real values that drive high-performance standards, guide decisions in pressure moments, and shape how the team communicates.

Accountability is built into their culture. It doesn’t come from the coach micromanaging every player. The team holds each other accountable to the standards they’ve set together. The team fundamentally drives it.

They have rituals that help them connect – regular practices that turn them into a tight-knit unit, not just a group of talented individuals who happen to wear the same jersey.

And they have a strong review process. They constantly ask themselves, “Is our culture still working? What needs to change?”

Now, I’m not saying you need to do the haka before every sales meeting. But you can absolutely use the same framework in your real estate business.

Step One: Create Team Connection

The foundation of culture is helping your team truly get to know each other beyond surface-level small talk.

I’ve been running this type of program with real estate teams for over 10 years, and every single time principals go through it, they tell me they learned things about their team they never knew before. Things that completely change how they understand what motivates each person.

That’s how real trust is built. That’s how performance standards rise across the business—not through micromanagement, but through genuine connection.

Step Two: Define Your Business Values

You need to define your values. But not values that sound impressive on your website. Real values—the specific behaviours you want to see every single day in your business.

And here’s the critical part: you do this with your team, not to your team.

When your team helps create the values, they’re far more likely to actually live them. When you dictate values from the top down, they become just another thing the boss said that everyone nods at and then ignores.

Step Three: Build Accountability Systems

I’m not talking about KPIs here. I’m talking about real accountability – where team members hold each other to the standards they’ve set together.

It’s not just you as the principal policing everything and playing bad cop. You need a framework to check in, measure, and review regularly—weekly and monthly, not once a year at an annual review where everyone’s forgotten what happened in February.

This is where most principals struggle. They think accountability means cracking the whip. But real accountability is peer-driven. It comes from the team, not from you constantly monitoring and correcting.

Step Four: Implement a Review Process

Culture isn’t something you set and forget. You keep reviewing it, refining it, and improving it – just like the All Blacks have done for over 100 years.

Regular reviews keep culture alive and relevant. They prevent it from becoming stale words on a poster that everyone walks past without noticing.

Here’s what most principals don’t understand: culture and performance aren’t separate things. They’re completely linked.

When you have a strong culture built on this framework, performance becomes consistent. Your team drives results instead of you constantly pushing them. The business runs smoother. People stay longer. You attract better talent because word gets out that your business is different.

When culture is weak – or when it’s just “being nice” without structure – everything feels like a battle. You’re micromanaging. Turnover is high. Performance swings wildly from month to month based on market conditions.

I’ve seen businesses completely turn things around – not by changing their systems or replacing people, but by building the right cultural framework.

Here’s what I want you to do.

Stop thinking culture is soft. Stop thinking it’s just about being nice or occasionally doing something fun with the team. Start treating it like a system—something you build, measure, and improve with the same rigour you apply to your sales pipeline.

Define your values with your team. Build real accountability frameworks. Create genuine connection points. Review it regularly and make adjustments.

Because culture isn’t separate from performance. It’s the foundation of it.

The All Blacks proved it over 115 years. And you can prove it in your business too.

As a real estate mentor specializing in systems for real estate businesses, I help principals move from inconsistent results to predictable performance through proven frameworks. Book a Real Estate Business Assessment Brainstorm Call and let’s discuss how to implement these cultural systems in your business.