Tips to Really Be There for Your Team
In an earlier article, I spoke with Anne-Marie Ellison, Managing Partner of ERA King Real Estate, who shared some insights on how she successfully coached 32 real estate agents to grow their business on average of 22% year-over-year.
We discussed her well-executed plan that inspired consistency and encouraged her agents to develop positive behaviors to grow their business. She also explained how an important software system called 3 Data Pulse has served as the “the backbone” of their company and has been a “game-changer” on how they run their business. You can hear the full interview with Anne-Marie by clicking here.
“It’s created consistency in the information so that the data is easy to digest and we get a big picture idea of what’s really going on with our entire agent population.” ~ Anne-Marie Ellison
Being 100% dedicated and focused on a goal you and your team have set out to achieve, like coaching agents to grow there business 22%, can be difficult as a leader or manager as you often have other obligations and responsibilities in day-to-day life. Anne-Marie shared some great tips for leaders to help them be there in every aspect of their lives.
Stay Consistent
For Anne-Marie’s coaching agents, they met once a month to go over their key performance indicators, prospecting, and goals. However, the rules were that they keep the meeting no matter what and always talk about the same things each meeting.
Anne-Marie chose one full day a week (Thursdays) to meet with her coaching agents. This would make sure she was in that mindset and “fully there” for them in the meeting. Each meeting would start at the top of the hour and end 45 mins later, leaving 15 mins to record the previous meeting notes and prepare for the next meeting, using the 3 Data Pulse system.
As leaders, we set the tone for each and every interaction we have with our team and by not cancelling the meetings or moving them around, it shows each person that you are just as invested in their business and success as they are. By talking about the same items each meeting, this generated anticipatory behavior that helped Anne-Marie’s agents know what to expect every single time they met.
Pro-Tips to Keeping Things Consistent:
Choose one day out of the week you can focus on this one mindset
Keep the meeting no matter what - use virtual meeting tools if you aren’t able to meet in person
Have a consistent structure for every single meeting that will not change
Leave time between meetings to record the insights from that meeting and refresh your memory of the upcoming meeting with the next agent
Use software that can record the meeting information and send automatic reminders between meetings.
As a leader, keeping things consistent and recording meeting insights in a central system benefits us by freeing up the mental energy that it takes to create a new agenda every meeting; having to find a new date and time to reschedule meetings if they aren’t kept; and trying to remember from a month before what was discussed.
Use Time Activation
Some may call this Time Blocking but Anne-Marie whose read, listened to, and attended a number of classes about time management, has termed Time Activation and follows this to help her manage her time and energy.
Time Activation as she explains it, “is where you assign a date and time to accomplish something. When you assign a time to accomplish a project, a task, or a meeting, you move that item off of your to-do list and do away with the mental angst you have of getting that thing done.” As leaders, we have so much on our schedule and can easily be running around in circles or get in the habit of rescheduling meeting after meeting, which can stress us out. It’s important to be intentional with your time so you can be there for your team.
Here’s how Anne-Marie manages time activation:
At the beginning of the month, schedule your “big items” - big meetings, absolutely have to’s, often those are things you don’t have control over their time (i.e. Board meetings, doctor appointments, etc.)
Each Sunday or the start of the week, schedule out your meetings, and work backward from those to schedule a time to work on anything you need to prep for those meetings. (i.e. if you have a sales meeting on Wednesday, schedule a block of time the afternoon before to finalize the presentation.)
Schedule your “busy work” so that there’s nothing left on your to-do list. (Anne-Marie color codes busy work as yellow which is labeled “Banana” in the Google Calendar.)
By scheduling out the workload on our to-do list we alleviate the stress or worry we have to get that project done. We don’t have the mental angst, as Anne-Marie says, that can develop when we just keep running that to-do list in our head. We therefore can be present for others and be confident that we can get the work done.
Keep Your Personal Commitments
A key factor to leaders being there for our team members is being there for ourselves too. If you have a doctor's appointment or you know working out helps you decompress or process ideas, this helps our team members too. Anne-Marie shared that it’s really important to her that she makes sure she shows up for her son and he has her full attention while she’s with him in the afternoons. Make sure the schedule these and keep your commitment to you.
By staying consistent with your commitments, even your personal ones, and using time activation, we are better able to be there for our team and ourselves too.
Final Thoughts
Often as managers, brokers, or leaders of any kind, it’s sometimes difficult to manage our time, energy, and resources to avoid being spread too thin when we are working with our teams. This means we have to implement systems, processes, and techniques that allow us to free up energy-sucking activities to be there on a human-level for our people.
