Ask These 5 Questions to Increase Accountability

If you are an Executive Assistant, one of your duties should be holding the team accountable to their goals.

If you are doing it right, it’s going to feel like nagging to you. Sorry, but there’s no way around that.

I can however, make it feel a little less like nagging and a little more like coaching. The key is in asking the right questions.

First, you should be collecting the data weekly on a form that every team member fills out. If you need one, you can use this Weekly Accountability Form. This post might also be helpful to you: How the Real Estate Assistant Keeps Track of the Team’s Numbers

Then, YOU determine if the goals have been met. It should be very black and white if the goals were met or not. If the agent’s goal is to make 100 contacts a week and they make 89 contacts, then the goal wasn’t met. You will be tempted to give the agent a pass if something came up during the week that sounds like a good reason for not reaching the goal. For instance, the agent was in a fender bender and they had to take their car to be repaired. It’s easy to let the agent skate, because yes, dealing with car repairs takes up time. But that’s life. And life will always find a way to disrupt us from achieving our goals. The question is, do we let that happen? And that’s why it’s very black and white whether the agent met the goal or not. Because the only way to reach the unit or volume goal is to reach the weekly contacts goal – come hell or high water.

So what happens if the agent falls short of their 100 contacts per week goal? Let’s face it; they don’t need YOU to tell them they didn’t reach their goal. They already know it. And they know they allowed it to happen. So here’s where the coaching moment comes in.

Here are several questions for you to ask the agent to get to the root of the problem and identify trends over time:

“How did you do this week?”
“How do you feel about that?”
If they didn’t accomplish their goal, “What got in the way of you achieving your goal?”
“What do you think you need to do better?” or “What could you do differently next time?”
“Is there anything I can do to help you?”

If needed, you may also remind the agent how long it has been since they last met their weekly goal. Because let’s face it; how long are they going to continue to let this go on?

It may be helpful to be prepared with some numbers such as how many contacts, appointments or closings you are up or down compared to this time last year. There is power in numbers. It’s easy to brush off the feeling that they are not doing as well as they would like, but it’s impossible to ignore something like, “We took 50% less listings this November as compared to November of last year.” Or, “By this time last year we had closed 83 sales. As of today we have closed only 67; that’s a 19% decrease in sales so far this year.”

Can you see yourself asking these questions of your agent? If you haven’t been asking these questions, I wouldn’t be surprised if your agent thinks these are pretty good. Sometimes they need help coming to the realization that what they are doing isn’t working and it could certainly help them if you have suggestions of your own to make after you ask if there’s anything you can do to help them. It could be as simple as checking their email for them during their lead generation time or just making sure they are working for 30 minutes and then taking a 10 minute break and getting right back to lead generation after the break.