Are you utilizing a team score board? If you are following the Leadership Engagement Process you know the following steps are important to engaging your team?
Step 1 is for every position to know the company mission and the mission of their job.
Step 2 is for every position to know their number. Ensuring each team member has a one number they are personally responsible to measure is very important. You should give them one specific goal based on this number.
Step 3 is for every position to know their score. The Leadership Engagement Process utilizes a team scoreboard.
This scoreboard is imperative in engaging your team members. Real Estate Managers, Brokers, and Realtor leaders can not effect behavioral changes their staff unless the staff member knows what the target is for every day, week, month, and quarter.
Your scoreboard should be broken down into three parts a top, a middle, and a bottom.
The top of the scoreboard should be your manager's team goals. Remember, team goals are your manager’s target.
The middle of your board should be your profitability numbers. What numbers are directly affected by the managers numbers? These profitability numbers let your team know, very transparently, but selectively, if the business is meeting the Brokers goals.
The bottom of the scoreboard should be your production goals. Production goals are your individual producer’s goals. Production goals are the output goals you are asking your producers to strive to meet.
You should sit down with your Managers and set their goals based on the output they believe their team should be able to produce. It is okay from month to month to change numbers. It is also okay to have different goals set for similar positions.
Since your team is engaged in the company mission and their personal mission and they know which numbers are important to their position they will appreciate the coaching and direction of setting specific stretch goals that they should hit each day, week, month and/or quarter.
Having a team score board is motivational because of three specific motivations it draws upon.
The three types of motivations that Realtors feel with a team score board include:
1. Achievement
2. Recognition
3. Competition
1. Achievement
2. Recognition
3. Competition
Achievement: Research shows achievement is a tool for coaching and motivating. Achievement is a great motivational tools for introverts, specifically. If you have any team members that are more introverted, then they will benefit tremendously from the score board. They will be working to achieve and build strategies to meet the managers expectations
Recognition: Recognition is a great tool for introverted team members and extroverted team members. If you, as the leader and manager, lack in handing out recognition having your team's numbers on a board and walking through the numbers with your team offers public recognition for anyone who is hitting their goals. If everyone is off your team members will at least get the recognition of working hard and being closer to their goals.
Competition: Based on some of the most modern psychology competition can be good and bad for business. Not understanding competition as a manager can actually be demotivating. It is important to know who and how your teams are competing. The wonderful thing about the scoreboard allows your team to compete on goals across teams, departments, and individually.
Your scoreboard should allow your managers and you to coach to individuals to compete towards individual achievement. I am basically saying do not let your newest sales person try to compete with the sales star you have on your team who has been out producing everyone for the last two years. Instead fule their competitive urges at helping to meet their team's goals or not to let a close peer beat them by 2 deals this month.
Motivation is a tricky topic to discuss among Realtors and Managers of Realtors because everyone is motivated by different things.
This is true. Organizational Behavior is a tricky thing, as well, because everything impacts the performance of your team differently within the company’s culture. Pick up any organizational behavior book and you will see that people are motivated by intrinsic motivators and extrinsic motivators.
The reason the Scoreboard is important is because it taps into both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations at the same time. It ties the motivators together and allows each person to process the motivations internally based on external results that are displayed to the entire team.
The most important thing a Real Estate Manager does with the Scoreboard is the weekly company meeting.
In this meeting you must do a couple of things that ensure that the scoreboard is in full operation:
- Start the meeting with something positive and inspirational - This sets the tone of the meeting as positive and inspirational. I personally prefer to utilize customer testimonials. It is a good rally when your team reads them off to each other.
- Affirm something positive together- Reading together creates unity among your team for the meeting and gains buy in among your team members.
- Review your progress towards goals for the current month. Weekly meetings are important to the overall accountability of the scoreboard. Make your managers give manager numbers, you give the profitability numbers, make your producers know their numbers.
- Offer some training - this should develop weak areas within your team, you may also utilize this time as workshop time to develop some part of your business. Just make sure if it is workshop time that someone is taking notes and documenting the progress to your teams.
- Affirm the company’s mission - Make sure everyone reads the company mission in unity
- Offer a positive reading or quote - read it out loud to everyone to give them something to ponder.
- Call to action - Gain commitment and buy in from your team to complete goals, or set expectations for the next week. This is truly your opportunity to redirect the troops.
The above seven steps to running a team meeting are the steps I utilize in every team meeting. I teach this to coaching clients and insist they utilize it. The process works. After about 10 to 12 months of running meetings this way, it may be wise to revisit the structure and even give your team a week or two break, this process can become taxing over long periods of time versus energizing. I would gauge the team’s state to determine if your team meetings eventually need a quick vacation. Once the vacation is over it is back to work.
I have found that having these weekly team meetings surrounding the scoreboard are like becoming your team's personal trainer and their coach all at one meeting. The process of holding people accountable mimics the personal trainer and people often reach plateaus. The plateaus become visible in the weekly meeting and you’ll want to change up the workout to help.
From experience don’t. When the plateaus become visible, take a week's vacation from the process. Come back to the team meeting with a slightly new structure or format. Don’t push your team in these meetings instead celebrate. Use the meeting and the scoreboard to build momentum each month.
The scoreboard becomes an important part of the Leadership Engagement Process after your team is engaged in step 1 and step 2. `
If you are unfamiliar with the Leadership Engagement Process you can download my Quick six page reference guide now: Click Here. `
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Nathan is the Senior Property Manager for US Revi Rentals a numbers driven property management firm in St. Charles, Missouri. Nathan holds an MBA with an emphasis in accounting from Keller Graduate School of Management and a B.A in Nonprofit Management from Lindenwood University. In addition to his degrees, he holds a Missouri Real Estate License and a National Apartment Leasing Professional (NALP) certification. He is currently a member of SCORE which is a nonprofit organization that serves to mentor start-up and growing businesses. Lastly, Nathan wrote the book Leadership Coaching as a Strategy for Employee Development and has been a guest speaker and facilitator at national conferences on the topics of leadership.