[MUSIC] Hello again and welcome back. This video is the first part of a two part segment, on a establishing effective one-on-one coaching sessions. In this first part, we're going to discuss the importance of having one-on-one meetings with your employees. Identifying the key elements that go into a Coaching Agenda, as well as how to construct an effective coaching agenda for your team. Okay, let's begin. In this video, we're going to talk about the key elements of a Coaching Agenda and how to put one together so that it works for your team. So when I'm talking about a Coaching Agenda, I'm talking about a literal document, something that you and your employees have. That you both use as part of your coaching one-on-ones, okay? So a Coaching Agenda is consistent, you look at the same buckets of information topics each time you meet, all right? Now, a couple of things I want to say about that, how frequently should you meet? And that's a great question. First of all, how frequently you should meet has everything to do with the cadence of your business. And what I mean by that is, if you run in a very fast paced business, you might need to meet with your employees once a week. If your business isn't that super fast, but still things change pretty rapidly throughout the month, maybe you need to meet with them once every two weeks. If it's more cyclical if there's more time in between project completion, and transactions, and things that impact their performance, then maybe once a month. I really don't recommend you extend your one-on-ones beyond 30 days. When you get outside of 30 days that you've spent time with people one-on-one, things start going the wrong direction pretty quickly. So we want to set up a practice of meeting with our folks consistently. And, the best way to do that, if your schedule allows, is to give each person on your team a dedicated day and time, right? So Tuesdays at two or Thursdays at eight. Sometimes for those of us who manage people, we can't be that consistent and you know what? That's okay, but then what we need to do is make sure that either once a week or once a month we are getting those times booked on our calendar so that they are honored. When we have booked time, with our team, we must keep those commitments. Managers who delay, cancel reschedule one on ones on a regular basis lose credibility for the process. It looks like you don't care, it looks like you don't value it. It looks like the time that you commit to your employees is not as important as a meeting that you might have to go to. And I know I've said this in previous courses, there really is no other time that is any more important than spending time with your employees. So when you've made the decision to coaching people on a regular basis, you've got to really be able to commit to the time that you book with them. So we want to schedule one-on-ones, we want to schedule those one-on-ones based on the cadence of our business. And then we want to be consistent in how often we follow through with those commitments that we made. Then once we meet with our employee, we want to use an agenda. An agenda has clear areas that we're going to talk about each time we meet. So I have an agenda that I know we will share with you as a part of this course and it's very general but it at least these get people thinking. And what we want to always make sure we include in our agenda is elements of their work that can be reviewed on a regular basis. So some of the things that I typically put on an agenda, previous action items and updates. What did we talk about last time? What were the deliverables? When were you going to have it done? And how well did you do that? Okay, the second key element. Key Performance Indicators. What are those key measurements, by position that you were looking at to determine the health and viability of the production of the position? Those should be on a coaching agenda and reviewed every time you meet. Hot projects or current projects, things that are on their plate that they are working on right now that they may need advice from you on, coaching from you on. Things that you know that they are working on and maybe they haven't told you about yet need to go here. Personal Goals, what's something that they are working on to develop themselves. It could be reading a book, it could be taking a class what are they working on to help develop their own skill set and their own thinking. Then we want to identify what their action items are and what their commitments are for the upcoming week or month, depending on how frequently you meet. What will they anticipate getting done and when will they have it done by and anything else that they need from you. There should be a section on here that says, manager support or cost for manager. What do they need from you to help them perform, right? And then the construct of the conversation we will talk about further, but in terms of consistency of practice I hope you can see that if I have one on ones with every employee. I meet with each person consistently and I always use the same agenda items for every employee. Look at how clean that is, look at how consistent that is and then really notice how amazing it is if I get to a performance review. And I have all of these previously completed coaching agendas, right? Look at how amazing that would be and how much easier life would be [LAUGH] you had that. So in our next video, we're going to talk about how to roll this out to your employees, and also what to expect of them through this consistency practice. In summary, consistent one-on-one meetings are so important and things to remember, right? That the frequency of how often you meet with people has a lot to do with the needs of the business, you know that best. If you have a really really fast paced business, you might need to meet with folks once a week. If your business is in longer cycles, then you might be able to stretch that out to once every two weeks, or once a month. And keep a consistent time, dedicate a date and time or at least book the appointments way out so that people can rely on the time that they're going to meet with you. Secondly, we want to make sure that we use a consistent agenda. We want to always go back to our previous meeting discussions as it relates to action items and updates. We want to review our key performance indicators, the projects we're working on. Any advice or recommendations that we've made and we want to revisit personal goals. Those development things that people are doing, the commitments they've made, any benchmarks or due dates that they've had. So keeping in mind that we want to have consistency in our practice and meet with people one on one and we also want to make sure that we're using a consistent agenda.
