Estate Agency Leadership After Covid: The Assumptions We Lost

For years, estate agency operated around a familiar understanding of leadership. The owner set the direction, managers controlled performance, employees followed instructions and success was largely measured through activity, results and the ability to keep everyone moving towards a target.

Then Covid arrived, and almost overnight, many of those assumptions were challenged. Businesses faced uncertainty they could not control, employees questioned what they expected from work, and leaders discovered that experience, authority and established processes did not necessarily provide the answers they needed.

The pandemic did not create the need for a different kind of leadership. It exposed the limitations of the leadership many organisations had come to rely upon, and six years later, as estate agency faces further disruption through technology, artificial intelligence and changing employee expectations, those lessons are becoming increasingly relevant.

In his book Organizational Leadership, John Bratton challenges an important assumption that has influenced leadership thinking for decades. We often study leaders by focusing on their individual characteristics, their confidence, personality, intelligence, communication style or ability to influence others. This approach assumes that effective leadership comes primarily from the qualities of the person in charge. Find someone with the right attributes, give them responsibility and expect the organisation to follow.

Bratton argues that focusing too heavily on individual leaders can obscure the wider causes of organisational dysfunction and crisis. Leadership cannot be separated from the environment in which it happens, the relationships between people or the structures that influence their behaviour.

For estate agency, that is a significant distinction. A talented branch manager might struggle in a business with poor communication, conflicting expectations and a culture of constant pressure, while the same individual could flourish in an organisation built around clear direction, trust and shared accountability. The difference is not always the person. Sometimes it is the environment we expect them to lead within.

Before the pandemic, many traditional workplace models were built around assumptions that physical presence meant productivity, seniority provided authority and effective managers needed to supervise people closely. Established routines created a sense of predictability, even when they did not necessarily produce better performance.

In estate agency, these assumptions were particularly visible. Morning meetings, prospecting targets, branch activity reports and constant oversight became familiar ways of demonstrating that a business was being managed effectively. There is nothing inherently wrong with those practices, and clear operational discipline remains essential. The problem comes when we assume that managing people's activity is the same as earning their commitment.

Covid challenged that thinking because leaders could no longer rely on every familiar routine or established solution. They had to communicate through uncertainty, adapt to changing circumstances and recognise that employees were experiencing the same disruption in very different ways. The question shifted from how effectively someone could control their team to how effectively they could maintain trust, direction and collective confidence when the answers were not immediately available.

One of the most valuable ideas in Bratton's work is that leadership needs to be understood across three connected levels: macro, meso and micro. Rather than looking exclusively at the individual leader, this framework considers how wider circumstances, group relationships and personal interactions shape what happens inside an organisation.

The macro level considers the wider social, political, economic and other forces affecting organisations (STEPLE Factors). Covid demonstrated how quickly external circumstances can challenge established strategies, operating models and expectations.

For estate agency, these pressures now include changing consumer behaviour, economic uncertainty, employment expectations and the growing influence of AI. Strong leadership requires understanding these changes rather than assuming the future will behave like the past.

The meso level examines teams, organisational relationships and patterns of collaboration. It recognises that business performance depends not simply on individual talent, but on how people communicate, make decisions and work together.

An estate agency might employ brilliant negotiators yet still struggle because departments compete rather than collaborate, managers discourage initiative or important decisions never move beyond the owner. These are organisational leadership problems, not necessarily recruitment problems.

The micro level focuses on interactions between individuals, including motivation, identity, expectations and the relationships between leaders and employees. It recognises that people are not simply resources to be directed, but individuals whose experiences influence how they respond and contribute.

For agency owners, this means understanding how conversations, feedback, trust and everyday behaviour affect confidence and performance. Leadership is not simply what you communicate. It is also how people experience being led by you.

The changes that followed Covid are supported by more than personal observation. In March 2025, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reported that the pandemic accelerated flexible working and technology adoption, while organisations continued to face challenges around productivity, employee engagement and wellbeing. That does not mean every estate agency should abandon traditional working arrangements. It means assumptions about where people work, how performance is measured and what employees need from their leaders deserve more careful examination.

The pressure on managers is equally revealing. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that global manager engagement declined from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, suggesting that many of the people expected to motivate others are themselves struggling to remain engaged. Meanwhile, the CIPD's Good Work Index 2025 found that employees with more positive views of their managers were more likely to feel effective in their roles and less inclined to consider leaving their organisations.

These findings are not specific to estate agency, and Covid is not the only factor influencing them. However, they reinforce Bratton's central argument that organisational performance is shaped by relationships, working conditions and context, not simply the personal qualities of whoever happens to be in charge.

Consider an independent agency owner who has built a successful business through personal determination, market knowledge and an ability to solve almost any problem. Those qualities helped establish the agency, but as the team grows, the owner becomes increasingly involved in every decision, difficult conversation and operational challenge.

The business appears successful, yet the people within it have never developed the confidence or authority to operate independently. When circumstances change, the agency struggles because its strength has been built around one individual rather than the collective capability of the organisation.

That is the difference between having a strong leader and building a strong business. Bratton's contextual approach reminds us that leadership is not something one person simply delivers to everyone else, but a process shaped through relationships, structures and shared action. For the modern estate agency owner, the priority must move beyond being the person with all the answers. It becomes about building the right conditions for people to think, contribute, challenge and take responsibility.

This shift in leadership thinking is closely connected to what we explore through the EAX 18 Cores Business Accelerator, our structured 12 month development programme for independent estate agency owners who want to build stronger, more sustainable businesses.

Through the programme's Alignment, Operations and Performance workshops, we challenge how businesses establish direction, develop accountability and create the conditions for people to perform. The focus is not simply on making owners better at managing their teams, but helping them build organisations that can operate with greater confidence and less dependence on one individual.

The Performance workshop, led by Rob Brady, brings leadership psychology, coaching, communication and accountability into practical business development. Combined with a focus on organisational alignment and stronger operating systems, it reflects an important principle: improving leadership requires improving the environment in which leadership takes place. For owners who recognise these challenges in their own businesses, the EAX Business Accelerator provides the opportunity to examine their approach and turn better leadership thinking into practical change.

The greatest lesson from Covid was not that traditional management had become irrelevant or that every established leadership practice needed replacing. It was that confidence, authority and experience alone cannot protect an organisation from uncertainty, and that people and their relationships matter more than many businesses previously acknowledged.

Before your next leadership meeting, ask whether your business encourages people to contribute or simply expects them to comply. Consider whether decisions are guided by collective understanding or individual authority, and whether the environment you have created helps your team develop or keeps them dependent on you.

Choose one decision you currently control and create an opportunity for your team to take greater ownership of it. Give people the context, expectations and support they need, then observe how they respond when leadership becomes something they participate in rather than something that happens to them.