Tag Archives: coaching

Grow Your Own Leaders

Title: Grow Your Own Leaders in your direct sales team

All you need to do to grow your own leaders in your direct selling team, is some seeds, fertile soil, and water.

Add a dash of sunshine and you’ll have a brand new leader of your own in no time!

Ok…it’s perhaps a little more work than that but it’s infinitely rewarding to lead other people to become great leaders.

Like a gardener, it’s more important to regularly tend to your garden than to do a big lot of work twice a year.

Sow Leadership Seeds

Let’s start with seeds. It’s important to plant seeds for leadership in your direct sales team. People have to desire it before they will step up to become a leader. And it’s up to you to plant those seeds:

  • How easy do you make leadership look? Make it look doable. Show how much support there is in the company or the wider organization.
  • Make your leaders meetings, leader retreats or other special events exciting. Make them something that people want to be part of.
  • Talk about the extra cash you can make as a leader.
  • Help your team members to see themselves as a future leaders. Make them realize they could achieve leadership too.
  • Remind your team that you struggled at the start too, that it’s normal and that things do become easier.

Create Fertile Soil for Leaders to grow

Motivation is the fertile soil for the seeds to grow in.

At least 80% of success in the direct selling industry is about mindset. You have to provide ongoing motivation to help your team to believe in themselves. You can use motivational YouTube clips, provide a positive affirmation for the week ahead and generally show a positive and encouraging attitude in your team communications.

It’s also important to recognize achievements along the way. Don’t just celebrate the big milestones, but also the smaller steps and achievements. This is not only a great boost for the people being recognized, but provides motivation for the other team members to gain achievements as well.

Water your seedlings

Now that you’ve planted your seeds in fertile soil, you need to water them. You need to coach your (future) leaders. Coaching is not a talent but it’s a skill that can be learnt. Here are a few quick pointers:

  • GROW – In your coaching conversation think of the acronym GROW. It stands for Goals, Reality, Options, Way forward. These are the points you want to discuss with your team member in coaching conversations. Check the article on GROW for more information.
  • Have leadership as a vision but help team members stay on track with weekly (smaller stepping stone-) goals to prevent procrastination.
  • Keep in touch in between coaching calls. You can use emails, text messages, and quick 5 minute ‘powercalls’.

Give your seedlings Sunshine

Now it’s time to make sure your seedlings get some sunshine.

A great way to do this is to set-up focus groups. You can do this in Facebook or Slack or whatever means of team communication you use.

Make sure this focus group is separate from your main team group. It’s important that this is an exclusive group and feels exclusive to the members. I only open ‘entry’ to the focus groups once per quarter.

In the focus group you would provide more posts, more training, more recognition, more competitions, more motivation. And you encourage motivation and learning across the focus group among members themselves.

Tend to your garden

You need to continue to tend to your garden to help your seedlings to grow into confident party plan leaders.

To do this provide extra training. You can do some weekly short training sessions for your focus group, eg. 15 minute videos on a variety of topics that they will need to get to leadership. Ask the group what they need and organize a quick Facebook Live to talk through the topic.

Continue to provide ‘normal’ training for all your team members as well but make sure you don’t overload your seedlings with too much of a good thing.

Your future leaders also need goals and challenges to help them to grow. To do this you can set weekly challenges with prizes. This encourages regular activity and it encourages team members to try new things they might otherwise skip.

Examples of weekly challenges are to put up 5 promotional posters, sell as many special bundles or promotional items as they can, share weekly affirmations, or create and share a vision board.

Fertilize your future leaders for growth

Boost your seedlings’ growth with some fertilizer: hold annual retreats for ‘rising stars’.

On these retreats you need to blow their minds with great training. It’s also important that give them a taste of leadership events they would attend as leaders so they want to become leaders – fuel that desire so they will be motivated to achieve leadership.

Gardening Tools

Finally, I’d like to list some of the tools that you can use to help grow your new direct sales leaders:

Happy growing!

Stop Your Coaching Conversations from Rambling On Forever

Stop your coaching conversations from rambling on forever

Have you started coaching a team member? Are you finding that your coaching sessions are rambling on for too long? That they are fun but you can’t remember what you agreed upon? Do your coaching sessions end without an action plan?

Yes? You need GROW!

GROW is an acronym for Goal, Reality, Options (and Obstacles), and Way forward (or what will you do?). It’s a simple model that will help you to structure your coaching conversations to prevent them from becoming long rambling chats that don’t result in anything. And as much as you might enjoy catching up with the person you’re coaching, that’s a separate activity.

As a business person you must guard your time as your most valuable resource. And the best way to this is to use a defined structure. As a bonus, you’ll find that the person you’re coaching will also get more value out of a coaching call when you’re using GROW.

Goal

Start the conversation by looking at the goal that they are looking to achieve. Any goals that this person is setting must be SMART goals. Yep, another acronym: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. To ensure it’s a SMART goal, ask a questions like: “How will we know that the goal is achieved?” “When will we know the goal is achieved?” “How does this goal fit with overall career objectives?” By answering these questions you pretty much automatically make it a SMART goal.

Reality

In this part of the conversation you help them explore their current reality or situation. Questions like “What steps have you already taken towards this goal?”, “What was the result of this?” or “What is happening now (with whom? When? Where? How often?)” During this phase, obstacles, and sometimes solutions, present themselves. This then naturally leads to the next step.

Options (and Obstacles)

Once you have a goal and a picture of the current reality, you need to look at the options to achieve the goal. Help your team member to brainstorm but don’t do it for them. Asking questions like “What else could you do?”, “What if this obstacle was removed, what could you do then?”, or “What do you need to stop doing to achieve this goal?”, “What are the advantages and disadvantages of that option?”, or “What obstacles stand in your way?” will be helpful to get them started.

Way forward

From the previous brainstorm some viable options or first steps should emerge. Now you help them to establish how they will achieve the goal. Use questions such as: “What will you do (and when?)”, “How will you keep yourself motivated?”, or “When will you review your progress?” In this step you also decide when to get in touch again to review the progress.

Groundhog Day

I have been using the GROW model in my coaching conversations for nearly a decade. In the beginning I used to tear my hair out as coaching session after coaching session felt like the movie Groundhog Day. The goal was the same as last month, so was the reality. And another month had gone by without any progress.

Now that I’ve learned how to use the model properly my time management and the results are so much better!

Coaching for direct sales team leaders.

So although GROW is great model to structure coaching conversations, there are 3 things to keep in mind to get the most out of it:

  • It’s super easy to slip into “expert mode” and tell them them what you think they should do. However if you do that, the person you’re coaching has no ownership over the process or the goals. Which means they have no real motivation to achieve the goals and do the work. So to make sure they own their goals and plans, you must let them come up with ideas. This also takes the pressure off you to be the expert with the magic answers.
  • Nurture them along the way. It’s important to frequently touch base to keep people on track in between coaching sessions. You could, for example, schedule a quick “power call” (3 to 4 minutes) to encourage them and see how they’re tracking. You can also use text messages or Facebook to check in with them. If you ask people to “keep you posted” and put the ball in their court, chances are you won’t speak to them until the next session. However, if you take the initiative and check in with them, they feel valued and encouraged and you keep them accountable. I found this makes a massive difference. 
  • When you’re coaching multiple people it becomes even more important to improve your efficiency. Group people with similar goals and realities together and do a group coaching session. Group calls save you time and they also improve accountability and motivation. Bonus!

Once you learn how to use the GROW model, your coaching sessions will no longer ramble on forever without any results. You will find that the reality will keep changing as they are growing and working towards their goals. Coaching sessions will not feel like Groundhog Day but become exciting as you can celebrate wins and set new goals, whether they are small and modest or big and hairy.