Phillip arrived at the appointed time. “I think I am ready,” he announced. “You asked me to think about where we will be, what our target is.”

He described in some detail the three goals his team had set, what success looked like. It was my turn.

“So, now that you have painted this picture of the future, what habits will serve you? What do you need to do every day, every week that will deliver consistent results?”

It took Phillip some time to get cranked up. “My team is a sales team. Our job is to be in the field talking to prospective customers, every day. We sat down yesterday and looked at how much face time we really have with customers. We were shocked when we mapped it out. Only forty five minutes a day, on average for each of the five days last week.”

“So, what do you need to change?” I asked.

“I know it doesn’t seem like much, but we are going to try to double our face time. Ninety minutes per day spent with prospective customers.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“We have been in the rut of just waiting for the phone to ring, so we haven’t been thinking very far into the future. We have been just reacting. As a team, by 5:00pm on Friday, every week, we will have met and shared our appointment schedules for the following week. We are going to keep a rolling calendar 7 days into the future. The target is to get seven hours of face time scheduled by Friday for the following week.”

“Good,” I said. “I will see you here on Friday. I would like to sit in and see how this works for you.” -TF
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Our next Leadership Program begins on February 26. Visit www.workingleadership.com for details.