Lessons from top MDRT Performers

This is a message for the managers and field leaders of our industry. The agents reading this will benefit as well, but what I want to address today sits squarely at the feet of leadership. Because after more than four decades in this profession, I have come to one conclusion that I believe with complete conviction: your results are largely decided before the first training session, before the first joint call, before the first policy is written. They are decided at the point of hiring.

That is not a dramatic statement. It is simply what the evidence shows in my own branches, in the agencies I have studied, and on the stages of the Million Dollar Round Table where I have had the privilege of addressing some of the finest professionals in our global industry. The principle is consistent. The managers who build high-performing teams do not do so by accident. They do so because they are disciplined about who they allow through the door.

The Problem We Keep Inheriting

Let me describe something that will feel familiar to most of you reading this.

A manager has a vacancy. The branch needs bodies. There is pressure from above, from targets, from the calendar. So the manager moves quickly. Someone is referred. The conversation goes reasonably well. A contract is offered. And within six months, that person has gone quiet, stopped showing up, or left the business entirely.

We have all seen it. Many of us have lived it. And here is what concerns me most: we tend to blame the agent. We say they lacked commitment, or they were not cut out for the industry, or the market is simply difficult right now. What we rarely do is hold the mirror up to the process that brought them in.

This is the central problem. We are producing poor results at the back end because we are making poor decisions at the front end. And until we are honest about that, the cycle continues.

What the Lessons from Top MDRT Performers Actually Teach Us

I have had the honour of presenting at the MDRT Annual Meeting in Los Angeles and, most recently, at the MDRT Annual Conference in Miami, where my session was titled “Improve Your Hiring, Supersize Your Results.” That session was designed for managers and executives and the room was full, because this is a problem that crosses borders, companies, and career levels.

What I shared in Miami, and what I want to share with you now, is this: when you study the managers behind the most consistently high-performing teams, the ones producing MDRT qualifiers year after year, you find a pattern that is not about charisma or luck. It is about discipline at the point of selection.

The lessons from top MDRT performers are not primarily about closing techniques or product knowledge. Those things matter. But they are downstream of a more fundamental truth: great producers were identified and selected with intention. They came into the business through a structured process that screened for the right character, the right appetite, and the right readiness before any training began.

Recruiting is to the manager what prospecting is to the agent. If your agent is not prospecting consistently, their pipeline will dry up. If you are not recruiting with discipline and structure, your branch will quietly decline even as you busy yourself managing the people already in it.

The Framework: Four Disciplines of Principled Hiring

I want to give you something practical. Not a theory to admire, but a framework to apply. There are four disciplines that separate managers who build sustainable teams from those who are constantly rebuilding.

First: Define the profile before you advertise the role.

Most hiring problems begin here. We know we need someone, but we have not clearly defined who that someone is. What is the minimum standard of resilience we require? What is the previous experience that signals relevant aptitude? What character traits have consistently predicted success in our specific environment? When you can answer those questions specifically, not generally, you begin with clarity instead of hope.

Second: Treat the selection process as seriously as you treat a major case.

We teach our agents to approach client engagement with structure, preparation, and discipline. We tell them to qualify before they present. We tell them not to skip steps. And yet many managers rush through the recruitment conversation as if urgency is a virtue. It is not. A disciplined selection process with structured interviews, realistic job previews, and genuine evaluation is an investment in everything that follows. A good beginning really does make for a better ending.

Third: Assess for the right things, not just the obvious ones.

Confidence is visible in an interview. Resilience is not. Work ethic is claimed by everyone who sits across the table. Accountability is demonstrated only over time. So the question becomes: what evidence are we looking for in the selection conversation that points toward those qualities? This requires us to develop our own interview discipline, asking questions that reveal character rather than just personality. And it requires us to be honest when the evidence is not there, even when the candidate is likeable, and the branch needs the numbers.

Fourth: Onboard with the same intention you recruited with.

Recruiting and onboarding are not two separate events. They are one continuous process. The research on infant mortality in our industry, that is the loss of new agents within their first twelve months, consistently points to a breakdown not in the agent, but in the structure that received them. A new entrant who is recruited with care and then dropped into an unstructured environment will struggle not because they lack potential, but because the system failed them. The discipline of principled hiring must extend beyond the first ninety days.

The Standard We Owe Our Industry

I want to speak plainly here, because I feel this responsibility deeply.

Every time we hire without discipline, we damage more than one career. We damage the client who was served inadequately by someone who was not ready. We damage the branch that invested time and money in someone who was not suited for the role. We damage the industry’s reputation in a region that still has significant room to grow in insurance adoption. And we damage the individual themselves, a person who left another career, told their family they were building something new, and then found themselves without support in a role they were not properly set up to succeed in.

We have a responsibility. Not just to our targets, but to our people. And that responsibility begins at the moment of hiring.

The managers I respect most in this industry, the ones whose names come up in conversations about sustained performance, about developing MDRT qualifiers, about building agencies that outlast their own tenure, are managers who treated the front door of their branch as something sacred. They were not reckless with it. They were thoughtful, structured, and unapologetic about their standards.

Where to Begin

If you are reading this and recognising your own branch in what I have described, I want you to hear this without judgement: the pattern is common, but it is not permanent. The discipline of principled hiring can be built. It can be systematised. And it will pay dividends in ways that extend far beyond your next recruitment cycle.

Begin by auditing your current process. Ask yourself honestly: do I have a defined candidate profile, or do I largely know it when I see it? Do I have a structured interview framework, or do I rely on conversation and instinct? Do I have a formal onboarding plan, or do I assume the environment will shape the new agent over time?

Where the answer is no, that is where the work begins.

Improve your hiring, and you will supersize your results. Not as a slogan but as a structural truth. The output of your branch is a direct reflection of the quality of your input decisions. That is the principle. That is the discipline. And it is available to every manager in our industry who is willing to apply it consistently and with intention.

The results you want are waiting on the other side of a better process. Build the process.