No one enjoys doing performance management, but it’s the only way to identify and handle issues with your people that affect your business. In order to take some of the pressure and pain out of this process, today I’m going to share with you some very effective methods for staying on top of performance management in a way that is positive and supportive for everyone.
Your goal is to help your people reach their potential without hitting them too hard with their shortcomings. You have to talk about listings, sales and income – that requires hard people management skills. It’s developing your soft people management skills that will make discussing those numbers more productive and less challenging.
Your business should be based on a simple set of values, and everyone who works for you needs to know them. In our business those values include:
• We believe in people and their dreams
• We renew our energy
• We innovate and constantly improve
• We work for your time and space
Each week we ask our people to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on their performance at each of these values. We then review why our values are important, discuss why some of their ratings are lower than they should be, and propose ways that they can get back on track.
We also use more traditional tools, like SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), each month during team meetings. We use these evaluations to help our people make the most of their strengths and opportunities rather than placing emphasis on weaknesses and threats, and to review their numbers so we can help them stay on course before they get too far off.
Numbers of listings is, of course, the most important number for measuring results, but it helps to also look at their numbers of appointments and market appraisals. We use a system of acronyms – LAP, MAP and BAP – to post these numbers to every calendar appointment we book in order to quickly evaluate numbers of listings, appointments and market appraisals we have done during the month, and identify where improvements need to be made.
These are simple systems that can help you keep track of performance so you can guide your people to stay consistent, see and address problems they may be having, and coach them on improving their success rates.
As you progress in your business, make sure you look into our Josh Phegan Company membership, training events and coaching opportunities.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.