10 Leadership Lessons from 10 Years in Glover Agency

When I started working for Jeff Glover, I was 18, fresh out of high school, with zero real estate experience. Ten years later, I run the operation behind Michigan’s #1 team, and we’ve grown from about 100 homes a year to well over 1,000. Almost everything I know about leadership, I learned in a decade at the Glover Agency.

Here are the ten lessons that shaped me most.

1. Flip the switch, because the leader is the keeper of the culture. It doesn’t matter what happened on your drive in; what matters is where you are right now and who’s counting on you, and your people win or lose depending on how well you control your emotions. Until you master your own mindset, nothing else on this list matters.

2. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” It’s the most common phrase out of Jeff’s mouth, and what it taught me is to ask whether I’d really tried to solve a problem myself before running to someone else. The year we sold 500 homes, two of our three admins resigned the same afternoon, I spent the next nine months as the only operations person, and the lesson stuck: we almost always give up before we’ve truly tried our all.

3. You earn respect by showing people who they’ll become alongside you. At 18, I thought people should do what I said because Jeff put me in charge, until an agent told me he’d never take business advice from a child. The fix wasn’t ego; it was making my agents the point, and that same agent has since told me how much our work together changed his business.

4. Nothing is unattainable if it’s truly what you want. Jeff has never cast a vision he didn’t mean, and there’s no magic pill that gets you to the next level, only commitment and grit. If it doesn’t require hard work, it’s probably not worth it long term, and if you don’t feel it in your bones, it’s not going to happen.

5. It’s less about the journey and more about how you respond. Nine times out of ten, the way you thought something would go looks nothing like how it actually goes, because things change, people leave, and markets shift. It’s not what happens to you, it’s how you respond to it, so embrace the chaos and path changes as part of the journey.

6. There’s no such thing as snow days. In Michigan, that’s a real test of mindset; average agents use an inch of snow as a reason to stay home and forget their contacts, while Jeff puts on his snowsuit. Early on, I drove two hours through storms muttering complaints under my breath, but I always showed up, because a snow day is a mindset challenge, and no excuse should stop you from hitting your goals.

7. Use the sponge method. When I became Jeff’s executive assistant, he made me sit across from him and listen to every phone call, with buyers, sellers, and agents alike. After a year of that, I could have those same conversations without him in the room and took over all his negotiations, so when you hire someone, keep your closest people around you instead of expecting them to pick it up overnight.

8. Quality shows up in the quantity, but quantity can also push out the quality. Recruiting is a numbers game, but culture is what makes or breaks an organization, and when we lost touch with ours, we lost a couple of top producers. It came back to one rule: What you do for one, you have to do for all, and protecting the culture mattered more than honoring one producer’s split when we restructured pay to save the company.

9. Treat prospecting and accountability like an appointment. In all the years I worked beside Jeff, there wasn’t a day he didn’t prospect, and it never mattered if he’d signed three contracts the night before. He still personally runs a 7:30 a.m. accountability call with our agents, and on the West Coast, that’s 4 a.m. his time. He’s never once canceled it, because the ones who win put it on the calendar and keep the appointment.

10. Lead people into their own unreal life. This is the one that means the most to me. Jeff didn’t hire the leaders we have today; he developed us over the years and gave us the chance to fight for who we could become, never wanting it for us more than we wanted it for ourselves. So the question worth circling in your notes: who’s guiding you toward your unreal life, and who are you guiding toward theirs?

The throughline across all ten is simple: master your mindset first, then pour into the people counting on you.

If you’re building a team or growing into a leadership role and want to talk through where you are, I’d love to hear from you. Call or text me at 248-719-5292, email me at taylor@liveunreal.com, or visit gloveragency.com. Reach out anytime, I’d love to help you build toward your unreal life.