Steve Hovland's Team Culture and Shared Habits of Top Producers — How to Build a Winning Team (Part 2)

Part 1 of this conversation covered the personal habits Steve Hovland built that allowed him to sustain high performance without burning out. Part 2 is about what happens when you try to transfer that framework to a team, the challenges, the breakthroughs, and the patterns Steve has noticed among his best producers.

Building a personal habit framework is one thing. Building a culture that supports those habits for a whole team, people with different backgrounds, different motivations, and different baseline relationships with their own well-being, is a different challenge entirely.

What Steve Learned About Transferring Habits to a Team

The first thing Steve discovered when he tried to share his personal practices with his team was that framing mattered enormously. Producers who heard "here's my morning routine" as a suggestion about lifestyle received it as optional lifestyle advice. Producers who understood that certain habits were directly correlated with their production performance took them more seriously.

The reframe that worked for Steve: he stopped talking about habits in terms of wellness and started talking about them in terms of performance inputs. Sleep isn't important because it's healthy, it's important because the research shows it's a direct driver of decision quality, emotional regulation, and verbal fluency, all of which matter enormously in a phone-based sales environment. Exercise isn't a lifestyle choice, it's a mechanism for managing the physiological stress response that rejection triggers. When the conversation shifts from values to variables, producers engage differently.

Steve also found that he couldn't mandate the habits, he could only model them and create the environmental conditions that made them easier to adopt. This is a leadership truth that applies far beyond habits: you can't force internal change with external pressure. You can create conditions that make change more natural.

The Shared Characteristics of Steve's Highest Performers

They protect their mornings. Without exception, Steve's top producers have consistent morning routines that include physical activity and some form of intentional mental preparation. The content varies, some exercise, some meditate, some journal, but the structure is consistent. They don't start reactive. They start prepared.

They have clear financial goals that matter to them personally. This sounds obvious, but there's a meaningful difference between producers who have a production goal handed to them and producers who have a life goal that their production serves. Steve's highest performers know exactly what income they're working toward and why, a house, a family trip, financial independence, a specific milestone, and that personal why sustains them through difficult stretches in ways that a quota never could.

They manage their own energy rather than just their time. Steve's strongest producers don't just manage their calendars, they think about when during the day they're at their sharpest and schedule their most important work accordingly. Phone conversations with the best prospects go in the morning, when cognitive function and emotional energy are highest. Administrative work, data entry, and lower-stakes calls happen in the afternoon. This simple scheduling discipline produces meaningfully better conversion rates from the same total time.

They're coachable, genuinely, not performatively. Steve's best people actively seek feedback rather than tolerating it. They listen to their own recorded calls. They ask after a role-play what they could have done better. They're not defensive when a manager points out a pattern in their conversations. This characteristic is both a cause and an effect of their performance: their coachability made them better faster, and their results gave them enough security to stay open to growth.

They have life outside the agency they're genuinely invested in. Steve's strongest producers almost all have meaningful commitments outside of work, families, hobbies, communities, creative pursuits. This isn't coincidence. People who have a full life outside work tend to have more emotional stability and resilience at work. They're not asking the job to fill every need, which means they can engage with it more healthily.

What This Means for Your Agency

Look at your current top producer and your current struggling producer. What does a typical morning look like for each of them? Is there a difference? The pattern Steve describes almost always holds: the way someone starts their day is predictive of how that day goes.

Introduce the language of "performance inputs" into your next team meeting. Rather than talking about motivation or attitude, talk about the specific inputs, sleep quality, morning preparation, physical activity, that drive the outputs you're measuring. This reframe gives producers something concrete to optimize rather than just an exhortation to try harder.

The Bottom Line

The team that performs most consistently for Steve Hovland isn't the team with the best raw talent. It's the team with the best habits, personal practices that create the conditions for high performance to be sustainable rather than occasional. Those habits can be cultivated. They can be modeled. And they can become the defining characteristic of your agency's culture if you're willing to lead from the front.

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