Q. How can my team and I have better one-on-one meetings? – Ali Oksuz, Century 21 Brighton Le Sands
A. I would say consider a five-step framework.
STEP 1: CHANGE YOUR APPROACH
How you think – your mindset and beliefs – controls how you behave. For example, if as a principal or sales manager you believe that your job is to hit them over the head yelling, ‘Where are the sales and listings?’, you will probably not get the best from your sales agents. Conversely, if you believe your job is to guide and develop your team in order to help them close more listings and sales by providing different ideas and strategies to achieve their goals, you’re going to behave like a coach. A coach is someone that you as a leader must become. Change your behaviours.
STEP 2 : CREATE THE ENVIRONMENT
Once you’re clear as the coach, your real job is to pull every ounce of potential from each person on your team. You’ve then got to create an environment each week that’s conducive to coaching. Have a plan and agenda to lay a foundation for your one-on-one meetings that the team feels is beneficial and will get value from. For many agents, if they don’t feel they get value they will eventually consider it a total waste of time.
STEP 3: TRANSFORM THE CONVERSATION
Here are a couple of keys to keep in mind in your weekly one-on-one conversations:
Celebrate the small steps, for example making 20 calls per day or a breakthrough targeting expireds.
Don’t just celebrate each week the sales or listings; celebrate the small steps, for example making 20 calls per day or a breakthrough targeting expireds, and so on.
Long-term success requires short-term focus. And the fastest way to improve performance is to help your agents set weekly process-orientated goals and then reinforce small, incremental improvements. Follow through after each one-on-one meeting with an Action Plan for the next one with some of the ideas and strategies you discussed.
STEP 4: EMBRACE MISTAKES AS COACHABLE MOMENTS
Building a highly productive team can be achieved through the identification and perfection of seemingly small things consistently done right over time. However, we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. So, as you’re evaluating your agents and giving positive reinforcement, it’s also important to take note of mistakes as well – but keep in mind the objective here is not to criticise; it’s to coach.
STEP 5: WORK ON THEIR BIG DREAM AND GOALS
Help them get what they want, and they will help you get every one of your goals. Find out what is their 10- or 15-year dream. This is the most important step as it will connect not just their dream but also the activities, actions and behaviour needed as an agent to reach it. Also, as you help them step by step towards their dream they will see you as a mentor. Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want”.
