7 Strategies to Set Expectations with Your Team Members for Success

So often team leaders set up their teams without setting expectations. This leads to frustration for both the agent team member as well as the team leader. Clear cut expectations are necessary to ensure everyone knows what you expect from them every day, week, month, quarter and year.

Having clearly communicated guidelines for each member of the team also means that they will have greater clarity, daily behaviors and ultimately sales success.

When you lack clear expectations team members end up creating their own set of work behaviors that may or may not be in sync with what you expect of them. For example not having told your team that you expect they work from your office and not home is a very common issue. This is easy for the team leader to have assumed it was obvious that the agents need to come to and work from the office everyday but it was not stated at the front end of the hiring process so the team members are not coming into your office and instead are working from their home office, not coming in and benefiting from the energy of everyone and then sadly not producing.

Another misguided expectation is not having a written agreement with job duties and expectations clearly delineated for all parties to understand and agree upon during the interview stage. Many assumptions get made and once the relationship is underway it becomes seemingly harder to reign in everyone and get your procedures and expectations communicated. It’s not too late to make the changes and get everyone on track and successful. Avoiding the communication because it’s a tough conversation is not okay either because we have to be leaders and lead. The situation only gets worse and the conversation becomes to harder have when you wait too long.

Here are some effective strategies that you can employ to communicate expectations and get the highest performance from your team:

• Have a written team member agreement that spells out all your expectations to your agent from commission plan payouts to how to conduct an open house in a team listing. Include the details for everything and have it signed.
• Communicate what the hours of work time are and where the job is to be done
• Outline within the team member agreement the daily, weekly and monthly expectations for number of calls made, # of listings and # of sales per month.
• Use a weekly one on one checklist with each agent that includes tracking and measuring of their prospecting, calls, appointments, conversions, and actual listing and sales activities. Share goals and results and hold agents accountable at a weekly team meeting where everyone is required to attend and all hear the same messages.
• Have required in office hours and call days/events that everyone participates in for success.
• Review expectations and minimum production standards regularly and address any performance issues timely to ensure expectations are upheld and everyone is in position to succeed.

Not keeping current or communicating with your team your expectations will have your team members running around doing their own thing and ultimately lowering their success rate. It also doesn’t help the culture you are trying to build within your team.

Having an upfront conversation about the expectations you have for being hired onto your team and staying a productive team member must be had and reinforced regularly. It’s the type of communication your team needs to thrive and generate results for themselves and for the good of the team.