Set goals
Having a multifaceted communications platform and employees who are enabled to both serve customers and dialogue with management are two main ingredients in setting up your company for future success. But platforms and people are resources. You can’t properly utilize them without goals and a defined direction for the company.
Romero and his leadership team attempt to fashion goals that are achievable without being overly conservative. It’s a balancing act between handing your people adequate challenges for their skill levels and knowing how much is too much.
“I set goals that are achievable,” Romero says. “I don’t want to say they are conservative, but they are goals I believe we can accomplish. It doesn’t do anybody any good to tell everyone that you’re going to triple production. It doesn’t make any sense. But people will rally around goals that they believe are achievable.
“We focus on trends and realistic expectations, and we push ourselves, but [we] do it in a realistic way. Agents can individually set their own goals, and we work with them to set those and help achieve them. Some of those goals can be way out there, but we work with them to help them achieve it. I never want to tell anyone that they have a wrong goal, but we’ll be realistic with them about what we know with regard to the goal’s attainability, and then work with them to make it happen.”
Still, facing an unpredictable market, you need to have checks and balances in place that allow your goals to adjust and, in turn, allow your employees to be flexible and able to react quickly to market changes. And you need to continue promoting an open dialogue between the workers on the front lines and your team in the front office.
Adjustable, adaptable goals start with creating metrics that can accurately measure progress against your goals, followed by dialogue and group analysis of ways to improve performance.
“You need to monitor and measure your goals if you want some flexibility in there,” Romero says. “You have to look at, say, if it has been X amount of time and we’re at Y as far as progress goes, the first question you teach people to ask is, ‘Why do you think that is? Why do you think we’re not where we need to be?’ People usually know why, and then the question is, ‘How do we get back on track?’ But people throughout the company have to know that you’re watching the level of progress against your goals and that you care about achieving them.”
The essential ingredient in paving the way for your company’s future, particularly if you’ve been navigating some of the same murky waters as Century 21 Award, is to know what you want your company to be and what your ultimate goals are for the business. Without an end target of some kind, everything you do — communication, open dialogues, building of customer relationships, recruiting the best and brightest people — it will all add up to your company spinning its wheels. You’ll have a shed full of the best tools, but you won’t find yourself building anything with them.
Sometimes, setting those goals can be difficult, and the best direction you can give your people is little more than an educated guess. But you have to more forward with the information you have, even in an uncertain economy.
“Although we don’t know what is going to happen, we just have to base our decisions on the past performance of the market,” Romero says. “You can’t get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going. So you at least have to tell everyone, ‘This is where we’re going; this is where we want to be.’”
How to reach: Century 21 Award, (619) 471-2000 or
www.century21award.com
