Many of the leaders in the mortgage broker industry have abandoned their posts as commanding generals and they’ve taken up arms to go back to full time originating or they’ve become a full time medic on operational issues just to keep the doors open and the business alive. Coaching the team to success has become an after thought to many of these leaders and a majority of them seem to be yelling “Affix Bayonets” to their staff as their only coaching/survival strategy.
I’ve learned coaching one’s team to success starts with our own perspective on we view our current environment and future opportunities. How do you read the following statement?
OPPORTUNITYISNOWHERE
Many of you will have read this statement as “Opportunity Is No Where” and this is correct. But it can also be read as “Opportunity Is Now Here”. It’s the same statement with two different perspectives. Once we get the right perspective on the market we can then take actions to get our team focused on the future and implement our game plan to help them succeed. I’ve come up with five specific strategies I use in my game plan to coach my team to success. If you repeat these five things on a monthly basis in 2009, you’ll see extraordinary results in your team. The strategies are as follows:
CARE: We’ve got to genuinely care for our team members’ success
How do we care? Ask open ended questions that engage team members in conversation. I often get caught up in the day to day so I’ve scheduled time into my calendar to make sure I engage team members with questions about their life, challenges they face and I try to make it known that their personal success is important to me.
Other ways you can show team members that you care about them is to remember special days like birthdays, anniversaries and other special holidays. You can find for a complete listing of days to celebrate at www.Holidays.net. Put a reminder on your calendar to buy some special note or thank you cards in bulk and take some time each week to write 1 or 2 cards to those on your staff.
OPPORTUNISTIC: Help your team to leverage their talents and skills for more opportunities
Every three or four months I do a 30-45 minute sit down performance review and ask my individual staff members how they are doing in the key areas of their job responsibility. It’s not anything fancy. I just draw a line down the sheet of paper get their feedback on how they feel they’re doing. I then offer my own feedback on what I think they should be leveraging in regards to their unique talents to improve their results.
During this meeting I also try to uncover what they really like to do and then I look for opportunities in our company for them to do more of those types of activities that they really enjoy. It’s called “workforce alignment” in the corporate world. In a small business it’s called “keeping the team engaged”. If we don’t capitalize on their strengths and maximize their talents we won’t keep them engaged. A great coach seeks out opportunities and shares ideas to move a team member beyond where they’re at today. Start with just one thing they enjoy doing and then find a task or activity related to it that will help them team do better as a whole.
ACKNOWLEDGE: Recognize and reward successes big or small
Recognizing team members is a challenge for a large portion of today’s small business leaders and managers. In the book Emyth Revisited, written by Michael Gerber, there is a statement that I believe to be quite profound and it revolutionized my thought about people. The statement is “there’s only one thing people do predictably and it’s that they act unpredictable.” We as leaders and coaches fall into the category of “people” and so do our team members.
The only way I’ve found to eliminate my failing to recognize big or small successes in my organization was to systemize it. I had to put it on my calendar as an appointment. It may sound sad to some people that I had to time block team member acknowledgement activities but to me it was mandatory. I also delegated some of the responsibility to make sure the system worked because there was a system in place not because I worked all the time. I gave my assistant instructions to put 5 note cards on my desk each week that would prompt me to acknowledge the team members and to advise me on special occasions. By doing this I didn’t miss the opportunity to engage, coach and inspire the team and acknowledge their personal and professional growth and development.
An absentee coach that doesn’t recognize their team with rewards, gift cards, plaques, trophies, time off and bonuses is missing a huge opportunity to build a culture in their company that will keep a team together. Start today and create your own system to acknowledge your team members’ successes during office meetings, in a monthly or weekly companywide email or memo. At minimum set a reminder in your calendar to call your top players to acknowledge a recent achievement or write a personal note to show them they mean more than just numbers to you.
CHALLENGE: Hold the bar higher than your team will hold it
Challenging times require everyone to improve and give their very best. Those that don’t answer the call and improve become a liability to the team and need to be “career planned” to another line of work. When times get hectic it’s easy to stop doing the things that were once considered vital to your business. Regularly reviewing life and business plans, production goals and establishing critical indicators to the team’s success are often the first to go.
As a coach you’ve got to come to the game with a game plan. You’ve got to know it inside and out. You’ve got to know the plays you want to run, the tactics you need to leverage and the strategies to implement that will help you coach the team to victory. As a coach that is your primary responsibility. Sometimes we get so caught up with the little things like getting the team on the bus, disciplining players and putting out operational fires that we miss what our real role is in the game. We’ve got to give perspective and insight. The players play the game but we orchestrate it. We call the plays and challenge the players to play their very best.
Jim Rohn, an American business philosopher, once said “an apple tree reproduces apples. Don’t expect to get pears from an apple tree.” If a team member is not performing we need to make sure we’ve given them adequate training and once we’ve verified this and they still don’t perform we must find someone else who can take their spot. Challenging a team member means we have others on our roster that can step up and take their spot if they decide not to perform at the highest level. If we don’t have anyone on our roster pushing the others to perform they will become complacent and our production results will reflect this. Look at your team’s and answer the following question “Is the team capable of winning the championship in our league (city, county, state)?” If not, you’ll most likely need to bring in a few “Free Agents” who are performing elsewhere but are looking for a change.
HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE: Spend time reviewing their goals and give them feedback
There’s an old saying that says “what gets measured gets done”. Setting specific goals with your team members to establish benchmarks of performance will be critical to the team’s success. If it’s true that people act “unpredictable” as Gerber says than we need to establish a system that creates more predictable results. Weekly production report and monthly sales reports are often considered “micro management” but I’ve seen them work so don’t give up on the idea just yet.
A quarterly performance review is something I’ve found to be the best strategy to coach top performers. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, used a similar strategy in guiding his top performing executive managers to put together one of the most successful organizations of all time. Most top performers have written goals already so you can simply meet with them on a quarterly basis and ask them how they’re doing and how you can help them achieve their goals faster. Other team members may need more structure in more of a prescriptive coaching style by you giving them specific benchmarks to meet.
In conclusion, the best advice I’ve heard on coaching your team came from Phil Jackson, a NBA coach who is regarded as one of the most successful NBA coaches of all time. I heard him say said that he coaches each player differently and that he tries to coach them based on who they are vs. how he would like to coach. Quite humbling for a guy who’s won 9 National Championships and had a significant amount of success in his career as a coach. Maybe we should all C.O.A.C.H. our teams in the very same way and use the strategies I listed above as the tactics to meet the needs of our team?
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