Coach Technology® was designed to help people target, plan, track, evaluate, and encourage employee performance

Relevance, Clarity and Commitment: Hallmarks of Effective Action Plans

By IsaiX | September 4, 2008

Written by Steve Gregory for the September 3 2008 CSTD E-Newsletter

“The most important thing we do as coaches is communicate. If you can’t get your message across or hear what the athletes are saying, I don’t think it works.” – Bob Bowman, coach for Michael Phelps, winner of eight Olympic Gold Medals, Beijing.

Mary meets Jack to discuss his sales performance. They dissect his previous month’s results and discover that, for the third month in a row, Jack has missed performance expectations relating to both sales numbers and required activity, and that he has failed to “do what he said he would do”. They look forward and choose key actions. Jack makes a new commitment, cognizant now of the consequences of failure. In Mary-s opinion, the meeting went well.

Fast-forward two weeks. Jack submits his resignation. In his exit interview he claims that Mary didn’t support him.

Sales Managers like Mary address the poor performance of salespeople daily. In most sales environments, performance is easily assessed: you made your sales target or you didn’t. Often, the feedback is instantaneous. This transparency and the relative ease of assessment of results, enables Sales Managers to confront performance issues swiftly.

In Jack’s case, Mary acted as so many Sales Managers do, jumping on the gap in performance with helpful coaching. But what was the specific nature of the coaching that was delivered?

Topics: Coach Technology® Blog | No Comments »