To achieve our corporate goals, we need to get the best people on our team then get the best out of them. With many demands on our time it can be challenging to figure out where best to invest our time with each one of our direct reports.
The salespeople we support use a tool called KARE (Keep, Attain, Recapture and Expand) to divide up their clients and prospects and build a cookbook that maximizes their return on their time and energy.
When we’re building our leader cookbook KARE is a great lens to plan and analyze both our team and the proactive activities we need to do regularly to support them.
- Flipping KARE to a leadership context we get:
- Keep them on pace
- Attain a new team member
- Recapture motivation
- Expand a team member’s skill set
Keeping on pace is more than giving strokes. Especially for high performers, who often feel unloved and/or taken for granted, keeping them on pace is investing our time on coaching and regularly reviewing their progress toward their personal goals. Once we’re at 80% of a goal it’s best for us to adjust that goal out slightly so we don’t end up coasting. High performers want us to challenge their goals and keep them stretching.
It may feel strange to focus on attaining new team members, especially when times are tough. If we consider that a phone interview is a leader’s version of a prospecting call and a face-to-face interview is our version of a sales call we get significantly less practice at those than our salespeople do. When we don’t regularly practice our Attain skills those muscles atrophy, which increases our chances of going offside when we do get a chance to interview a potential team member.
Some believe that motivation is purely internal, is either on or off and cannot be influenced by outside forces. Whether that’s true or not, all of us will have our motivation wane through out the year. When we understand each team member’s personal goals, we have an opportunity to recapture their motivation by coaching them around achieving their personal goals and setting up regular check-ins to continue supporting their motivation until they are back on pace.
While coaching is supporting a team member in being successful in their current role, mentoring is supporting a team member in being successful in a future role. Either way setting up our cookbook so we are consistently expanding our team member’s skill sets whether through role play or situational delegation, we reduce time to self-sufficiency and create a more engaged, productive team.
Until next time… go lead.
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