Know Your Mission!
You may not need to fire that employee, just yet. Coaching can play a significant role in turning around employee performance.
Personally, I love working with challenging employees. Employees with a bad attitude, employees hired for the wrong role, employees who do not have the skills to do the job, employees who are disengaged, bring them on!
In my book, Leadership Coaching as a Strategy for Employee Development, I explain the importance of resisting the temptation to blame your staff for poor performance.
It is your responsibility, as the manager, to get results. The first time you blame your staff member, for your poor performance, you will start the “Cycle of Resistance” and significantly impede your ability to succeed.
Think about this, would you rather have one hundred percent of your own effort or one percent of one hundred people’s effort?
What is a Mission Statement?
It is important to understand the Leadership Engagement Process ( You can obtain my, Leadership Engagement Process, Quick Six Page Reference Guide HERE) if you are going to really coach your team member to performance. The first step in the process is coaching your team member to understanding your company’s mission and their personal mission.
You need to help them answer two questions:
Question 1: What is the job/role of the company?
Question 2: What is my job/role with the company?
Let’s face it, other duties as assigned, only applies to significantly engaged employees. It is important for your team to know exactly what role they were hired to fulfill in relation to your overall mission.
If you are not familiar with mission statements, just look to answer the following questions. What does your company seek to do? What does your company strive to do it?
Lastly, how are you going to accomplish what you seek and strive to do?
A mission statement may look like this: XYZ, LLC. seeks to provide Realtor services to the luxury home market. XYZ, LLC. strives to provide information, guidance, and support to these homeowners. XYZ, LLC. will accomplish this by offering seminars, on-line training, and one-on-one consultations to luxury homeowners, to ensure they understand the most important decision they are going to make buying or selling their home.
A mission statement for your team member my look like this: Nathan Bush seeks to provide buyers agent services to XYZ, LLC. Nathan Bush, Strives to provide information, guidance, and support to XYZ, LLC.’s luxury home buyers. Nathan Bush will accomplish this by creating seminars, delivering seminars, and working one-on-one consultations for luxury home buying clients.
Keeping your team members mission statement simple yet direct provides clear communication for both you and them. It would be wise to have a well written job description to accompany your newly written mission for your team member.
Job descriptions provide further clarification as to the expectation of the role.
As the Job description provides clarification to the role for your team member, your vision statement provides further clarification of your company’s mission.
Tom Wright at www.executestrategy.net has a great article about writing vision statements entitle, “How to write a Good Vision’ Statement.” In his article he says, “The vision statement is the anchor point of any strategic plan.”
Your team must not only know the company’s mission and their mission, they must also know their audience. Your job, after coaching to the mission, is coaching your team members on understanding the company’s and the team member’s specific audience.
Who specifically do they sever? When your team member is coached on understanding their audience, they understand who they are communicating with when they are performing their job.
I know, an audience, really? If you are asking yourself, what does an audience have to do with a buyer's agent job? Everything!
What is an Audience?
Google the word audience and you will quickly find the definition. An audience is a regular public that manifests interest, support, enthusiasm, or the like. Hmmm….. Teaching your staff who their audience is, is important!
Anyone who has interest, support, enthusiasm or interacts with your team is their audience. Your staff is trying to build a professional brand, right? How do they want to be viewed by everyone?
The Huffington Post has a great post on professional brand, to check it out CLICK HERE
Coaching your team to understand their mission is the first step in the 6 step process of coaching your team.
In, my next post we will work though the understanding of Step 2 in the Leadership Engagement Process. Step 2 is to know your numbers.
======================================================================== Nathan is the Senior Property Manager for US REVI RENTALS a numbers driven Property management firm in O'Fallon, 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.