You Can Train Compliance. You Can’t Train Someone to Give a Sh*t.

Years ago, my business partner An Deckers kept coming back to the office talking about a young woman who worked in a sushi takeaway near us. Her name was Marija Mikneviciute and An’s initial interest had absolutely nothing to do with recruitment. She simply encountered the same person several times and was struck by how good she was with customers. Marija was young, joyful, engaging and seemed to take genuine pride in what she was doing, so eventually we approached her about coming to work with us at base property specialists.

There was one fairly significant gap in her CV: she knew absolutely nothing about property. In fact, she was living with her mum at the time and hadn’t even experienced renting a home herself. None of that particularly concerned us because the qualities that had caught An’s attention were the ones we considered much harder to teach. Marija joined us, became a key member of our team and stayed for nearly five years before we eventually supported her when she decided to pursue her real passion for linguistics.

She remains one of my favourite examples of something I’ve believed for a very long time: you can teach people an extraordinary amount, but there are some things you need them to bring with them. This came flooding back during a recent Viking Chats conversation with trainers Clare Yates and Jo Bourne. We were discussing recruiting people from outside estate agency, particularly from hospitality, when I rather inelegantly summarised my recruitment philosophy: you can’t teach someone to give a sh*t.

It isn’t particularly sophisticated management language, but I still think it’s true.

We need to stop calling them soft skills

Jo made a point during our conversation that I’ve heard many times but which still deserves more attention. Property businesses talk about communication, listening, empathy and curiosity as “soft skills”, when in reality they are some of the hardest and most commercially important skills our people possess.

Think about what an experienced property manager actually does when something goes wrong. They may need to explain an uncomfortable truth to a landlord who doesn’t want to hear it, calm a tenant who is understandably upset, understand the difference between somebody venting and somebody raising a serious complaint, negotiate between parties who want different outcomes, identify the relevant facts and eventually recommend a sensible course of action. There is very little that is “soft” about any of that.

You can teach someone the legal requirements surrounding a deposit. You can train them on a company’s maintenance process and show them how to operate the CRM. All of that knowledge matters enormously, particularly as regulation becomes more complicated, but knowing the rule and being able to handle the human situation surrounding it are not the same capability.

Clare described the problem beautifully at the beginning of our conversation. There is plenty of training that shows somebody the technical side of something but still leaves them unable to use that knowledge practically. We sometimes confuse transferring information with developing somebody’s ability to do the job.

The distinction matters because our industry is moving towards a world where information itself is becoming remarkably easy to access. AI can already help somebody interrogate guidance, understand terminology and locate relevant information in seconds. The scarce skill increasingly isn’t knowing where a fact lives; it’s understanding what to do with it when there’s a human being sitting on the other end of the telephone.

Hospitality has understood this for years

I’ve joked for a long time that we should forget National Service and make everybody spend a year working in hospitality instead. I don’t actually intend to start campaigning for compulsory shifts behind a bar, but there is something behind the joke. Properly trained hospitality staff learn lessons remarkably quickly that can serve them throughout their careers. They learn that the customer in front of them matters even when they’re tired, that everybody on the team occasionally needs help, and that noticing things, communicating well and taking pride in delivering a good experience are all part of doing the job properly.

Crucially, they also learn that technically completing a transaction isn’t the same as doing the job well. Clare used the example of ordering drinks in a bar. One person hears “a beer and a white wine” and immediately reaches for whatever is nearest. Another asks what sort of beer you like, what style of wine you prefer and perhaps recommends something you wouldn’t otherwise have tried. Both people can accurately claim to have served you a drink, but only one has really provided service.

The same distinction exists throughout agency. Two negotiators can register the same applicant. Two property managers can respond to the same maintenance report. Two agents can carry out the same valuation. What differentiates the experience isn’t always the technical process being followed; often it is the interest somebody takes in understanding what the person actually needs.

That was what An saw in Marija. She didn’t need to know whether Marija understood tenancy law because we could teach her tenancy law. What was much harder to teach was the natural inclination to care whether the person standing in front of her had a good experience.

Sometimes experience is the problem

None of this means experience is undesirable. We’d be in a fairly peculiar place as an industry if we decided knowledge accumulated over years suddenly had no value. Experienced people who combine technical expertise with curiosity, judgement and genuine customer focus are incredibly valuable. The problem comes when experience has reinforced the wrong behaviours.

We’ve made several hires over the years who arrived with impressive CVs, substantial agency experience and supposedly excellent track records, only to discover that what they’d actually spent years becoming very good at wasn’t what we wanted them to do. In those situations, unpicking bad training can be considerably harder than training somebody from scratch.

Imagine somebody has spent five years working in an agency where tenants are treated primarily as a troublesome burden. They haven’t necessarily consciously decided that tenants don’t matter. They’ve simply absorbed hundreds of tiny signals from the environment around them. The language colleagues use, the way complaints are discussed, whose interests receive immediate attention and whose can wait until tomorrow gradually establish what “good” looks like.

Put that person into a business that regards the landlord as its client but the tenant as a valued customer and you aren’t simply teaching them a different process. You’re asking them to reconsider a professional instinct that has been reinforced thousands of times.

The same applies commercially. If somebody has been taught that winning an instruction means doing whatever it takes, dropping the fee, overvaluing the property or telling a prospective landlord whatever they want to hear, it can be difficult to suddenly turn them into an expert adviser prepared to have uncomfortable conversations. At both Base and The Depositary, we want people willing to challenge when challenge adds value. We want advisers, risk managers, partners and advocates rather than order takers, and sometimes that requires considerably more than teaching somebody a new script.

Culture trains people every single day

This is why I think environment ultimately matters even more than formal training. You can send somebody on the best course in the country and bring them back into a business where everybody around them behaves badly. Eventually, one of two things will probably happen: either they’ll become frustrated enough to leave or they’ll start replicating the behaviours they see being rewarded.

Culture is training that happens whether you’ve budgeted for it or not. Every time a manager congratulates somebody for winning an instruction at any cost, they’re training the team. Every time somebody treats a tenant dismissively and nobody challenges it, they’re training the team. Every time a mistake is concealed because admitting it would result in a bollocking, they’re training the team.

The reverse is equally true. When an experienced property manager takes the time to show somebody why they handled a difficult conversation in a particular way, that’s training too. When somebody admits they got something wrong and the response is to understand and learn rather than simply assign blame, the organisation is teaching people how it expects them to behave.

Good formal training can accelerate all of this. Jo and Clare both talked about making learning collaborative, practical and enjoyable rather than relying on what Jo memorably described as “death by PowerPoint”. But the most brilliant workshop in the world cannot compensate indefinitely for an environment teaching the opposite lesson for the other 364 days of the year.

Technology should make human skills more valuable, not less

There is another reason I’ve been thinking about this more as we’ve built The Depositary. The assumption surrounding technology and AI is often that more automation means humans become less important. I think that fundamentally misunderstands where technology should be applied.

Good technology isn’t there to replace the human. It’s there to remove work where the human adds little or no value. Take moving data from one system into another. Nobody can migrate a date of birth or meter reading brilliantly. The information is either transferred correctly or it isn’t. Having somebody manually copying that information doesn’t improve the outcome; it introduces another opportunity for an error while giving an intelligent human being a thankless, repetitive task they will understandably hate.

I’ve said before that where a person adds no value to an outcome, all they add is risk. That doesn’t mean the person has no value. It means we’ve put them in the wrong part of the process.

The more technology can handle the repetitive administration surrounding a tenancy conclusion, the more valuable the remaining human contribution should become. Property professionals should be spending their energy in two areas where they genuinely make a difference: expertise and relationships. Expertise means applying knowledge, spotting risk, recognising the unusual case and exercising judgement when the answer isn’t obvious. Relationships mean listening, explaining, negotiating and maintaining trust between people who will not always agree with one another. Neither of those is a soft skill.

There is a temptation when introducing technology to concentrate almost entirely on speed. If a process took 40 minutes and now takes four, fantastic. We naturally measure the improvement because it is visible and easy to quantify, but speed alone isn’t enough. If the underlying culture treats customers badly, automation can simply help the business deliver a bad experience more efficiently. If nobody listens properly to the tenant, making the response instantaneous doesn’t necessarily make it useful. If a property manager lacks the confidence to challenge an unreasonable landlord, giving them better software doesn’t suddenly produce better judgement.

Technology and people development therefore belong in the same conversation much more than our industry sometimes acknowledges. The best operational businesses I’ve encountered aren’t choosing between great people and great technology. They’re using technology to remove the work their people shouldn’t have been wasting time on in the first place, then investing in those people so they’re exceptionally good at the work that remains.

That is certainly what we’re trying to achieve with The Depositary. Our ambition to make tenancy conclusions easier and faster isn’t about removing the property manager from the process. It’s about reducing the administrative burden so that when human involvement is required, it can be thoughtful, knowledgeable and useful.

Recruit for what you can’t easily teach

If I were building an agency team again tomorrow, technical knowledge would certainly feature in the recruitment process. Depending on the role, there are positions where experience and qualifications are essential. But I’d still spend an enormous amount of time looking for the things that are much harder to teach.

Does this person listen? Are they curious? Do they naturally want to solve problems? Can they admit when they don’t know something? Do they take pride in doing something properly when nobody is watching? Most importantly, do they actually care about the effect their work has on another human being? You can build an extraordinary amount on top of those foundations.

Marija arrived at Base knowing virtually nothing about our industry and became an important part of the business because the qualities we couldn’t easily teach were already there. We could teach her the property bit.

As technology takes more routine work away from people, I suspect this becomes more important rather than less. The future property professional shouldn’t be valued because they can manually complete 17 administrative tasks that software could perform more accurately. Their value should lie in the things software still struggles to replicate: judgement, experience, trust, empathy and the ability to understand another human being.

We absolutely need better training in this industry, and Clare and Jo are right about that. But perhaps we also need to become considerably clearer about what we’re trying to train. Teach the legislation, the process, the systems and the technical knowledge people need to do their jobs safely and professionally. Create an environment where they continue learning from the people around them every day. Then recruit people who give a sh*t in the first place.