INTEREST
Want to build office performance?
BUILD AN EFFECTIVE LEARNING STRATEGY AND CULTURE
Jasmine Platt Founder, Real Estate Leaders
As a real estate manager, your job is to build salespeople’s capability and performance. Yet the biggest challenge in the industry is how to do that. Managers work hard to plan for and run sales meetings and trainings, yet are often left disheartened when they don’t see the behaviour change they were hoping for that lifts a salesperson performance. They’re left questioning what the heck to do to ‘jolly up the troops’.
The reason training and sales meetings don’t often lift results is partly to do with the absence of strategy - and partly to do with psychology. When it comes to strategy, most managers don’t have (and don’t even know that they should have) a solid, well-considered strategy for making learning and development stick. In their absence, efforts to lift the game can be like throwing mud at a wall and “hoping something sticks”. What managers often miss with this approach, is that true learning (i.e. behaviour change) requires buy-in. Your salespeople need to want to learn - and put in the work to apply what they learn to their daily activity. You can’t just achieve that by telling them they ‘should’. In this article I explain how you get their buy-in by building a learning culture. I also share seven practical strategies for how to begin that process. So, to get you started on building a learning culture, let’s first answer what a learning culture is – and isn’t – and why it is important?
What a Learning Culture is – and is not A training culture is not a learning culture. A training culture uses training as ‘the solution’ to performance problems. This
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The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand
tends to ignore factors significant to performance, including motivation. A learning culture, by contrast, is a set of organisational values, practices and processes that encourage employees – including yourself, your salesforce and support team – to focus on personal mastery and continuously learn and add new skills – in the name of achieving their own goals.
Seven practical strategies to start to build a learning culture 1. Initiate a Development Programme for them – and yourself – to build capability To begin engaging with them, it helps to share your intentions with your salespeople to get better at supporting them. This demonstrates intent, your commitment to them and your own learning. Share that you’ll be doing this by working with them to develop an individual Development Plan, linked to their goals. Start with your own Learning and Development plan, so you understand the process and can begin building your own competency in areas you currently lack fitness before engaging them. 2. Develop your own coaching competency Coaching is one of the most important skills of sales managers.
