Inspired by bestselling author and journalist Charles Duhigg’s research on how the best students and teachers excel.
With the new school year starting, parents and kids are adjusting to new routines and fresh classrooms. But the research on how people actually master new skills is not just for students.
As some of you know, beside my business I also teach at the community college, bachelor, and master level for the School of Business and Real Estate. Whether I am standing in front of a lecture hall of graduate students or sitting across from a broker trying to scale an office, the pattern is identical: it is tempting to believe that leadership means handing people all the answers.
It turns out, that is the exact opposite of what great teaching—and great leadership—looks like.
The Power of the “Flounder”
Charles Duhigg recently highlighted a study examining physics students that should make every manager pause.
Before giving a lecture, instructors handed students complex, unstructured problems. Predictably, the students struggled, bombed, and got frustrated. But after they went through the lecture and took the exam, those same floundering students vastly outperformed everyone else.
Why? Because early mistakes force our brains to pay closer attention.
Duhigg pointed out that the best educators do two counterintuitive things:
- They let students struggle first.
- They ask leading questions instead of handing out answers.
When instructors were restricted to asking “What else?” and “Describe to me how that works” with no explanations allowed their students learned significantly more than those sitting through traditional lectures.
When you give an agent or student the answer immediately, you save five minutes. But when you force them to grapple with the problem, you build capability that lasts.
Productive Struggle Is Not Aimless Drowning
Here is where I need to be precise, because “let them flounder” can easily be misread as “leave them alone.”
Notice what those physics instructors actually did. They did not throw students into a graded exam and walk away. They handed out hard problems in a classroom, before the lecture, where bombing carried no cost beyond a bruised ego. The struggle was real. The stakes were not.
That distinction is everything for a sales organization.
Productive struggle happens inside a container you built on purpose:
- Role-play the listing presentation in a Monday sales meeting before the agent runs it live.
- Have a newer agent draft the pricing strategy for a mock scenario, then walk you through their reasoning.
- Send them into a real appointment—with you in the room, staying quiet.
- Let them build the CMA from scratch and defend it to you before it ever reaches a seller.
Aimless drowning is handing a six-month agent a $2M relocation client, a nervous seller, and a competing offer situation, then congratulating yourself on developing talent when it falls apart.
The container only works if people believe a bad answer is survivable. If your agents think a wrong guess in front of the team will cost them status, referrals, or your respect, they will stop guessing. They will wait for you to talk, nod along, and learn nothing. Psychological safety is not a soft add-on to this approach—it is the mechanism that makes it work. Struggle produces learning only when the person is not simultaneously managing fear.
Practically, that means saying out loud what most leaders assume is understood: “I want you to take a swing at this. If you freeze up or get it wrong, that is the point of doing it here instead of in front of a client.“ Then, when they do freeze up or get it wrong, respond with curiosity instead of correction.
When to Give the Answer Immediately
There is a second failure mode worth naming, which is applying Socratic questioning to everything and calling it coaching.
Some things are not judgment calls. They are facts with legal consequences. Run a quick triage:
Just tell them. Fair housing language. Agency disclosure timelines. Contract deadlines and contingency mechanics. Earnest money handling. Advertising and licensing rules. Anything with a statute, a form field, or a fine attached. Asking “What do you think the disclosure requirement is?” is not developing an agent it is a compliance incident waiting to happen with extra steps. Give the answer, give the source, and move on.
Ask the question. Pricing strategy. How to handle a seller anchored to a Zillow estimate. Whether to counter or hold. How to reopen a stalled negotiation. Prospecting approach. Time-blocking and business planning. Reading the room in a listing appointment. These are judgment muscles, and judgment is built by reps, not by transcription.
The simple test: if being wrong creates liability, teach it directly. If being wrong creates a lesson, let them find it.
There is a timing dimension too. Mid-crisis is not a teaching moment. When a deal is actively falling apart at 6pm on a Friday, solve it. Coach it Monday, when the pressure is off and they can actually hear you.
Stop Being the “Expert” and Start Coaching
There is a trap high-performing leaders fall into: we think our own expertise automatically makes us great teachers.
Duhigg cited an experiment involving golfers. When skilled golfers tried to teach their putting technique, they struggled to explain what they did instinctively—and their own putting actually got worse. Meanwhile, less-skilled golfers with strong teaching backgrounds produced far better results in their students.
Being a top producer is not the same as being a great developer of talent. The goal of leadership is not to show people how smart you are; it is to create the environment where they teach themselves.
4 Ways to Upgrade Your Own Learning Curve
Whether you are onboarding a new hire or sharpening your own skills this quarter, Duhigg highlights four research-backed habits that separate top performers:
- Tackle the hard material first. In studies of elite violinists, the best did not log more total hours—they spent nearly twice as much time on the hardest passages. Re-reading your notes feels comfortable; effortful practice drives actual growth.
- Use the Protégé Effect. Tell someone they will need to teach next week’s meeting on a core skill. Even if they never teach it, the expectation of explaining it forces deeper retention.
- Change your environment. Studying in different locations breaks reliance on environmental cues and builds stronger mental scaffolding.
- The Benjamin Franklin Method. Read a great presentation, pitch, or essay. Put it away for a few weeks, try to rewrite it from memory, and compare your version to the original to see where your thinking was weak.
You Are Never Too Old to Master New Skills
Adults often assume they cannot learn as quickly as they used to. Duhigg notes that someone in their 60s holds about six digits in short-term memory compared to seven in young adults—the difference is negligible.
The real reason learning feels slower as we age is that adults stop experimenting. Kids absorb knowledge by trying things and failing; adults try to look smart and avoid mistakes. When researchers had 80-year-olds learn three distinct skills at once, their cognitive scores improved to mirror people decades younger.
Which brings the whole thing full circle: the reason your agents stop experimenting is usually that somewhere along the way, experimenting stopped feeling safe. That part is on us.
Question
Where are you jumping in too quickly to rescue your team with the answer, instead of asking the question that lets them figure it out?
And the follow-up: have you built a place where they can be wrong without it costing them anything?
Resources
Read Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg.
Winning the day is not about having all the answers. It is about building a team capable of finding them—and giving them somewhere safe to practice looking.
What’s Possible?
