You made it through the holidays. You’re getting ready to start the second best run for new groups (see How to Build an Annual GroupLife Calendar). Now is a great time to evaluate the performance and readiness of your coaching team.
First Key: Evaluate Your Coaching Team
You’re really looking for two things. First, you’re looking for fruitfulness. You want hundred-fold players that are actually doing to and for your leaders what you want your leaders to do to and for your members. It’s as simple as that. After all, this is not a role that you want to fill slots just to have a certain number of coaches.
Second, and this is just as important, you’re looking for fulfillment. It’s not enough to find people that are fruitful…but unfulfilled. You really want both. You really need both. Coaches who are fruitful and fulfilled stay in their role for a long time.
Why not run a simple yes/no evaluation on how closely your coaching team members match what you’re looking for? You can see that it’s pretty easy to determine whether they’re fruitful, right? Did their groups survive? Are their leaders flourishing? Do they have chemistry? You can think up the right questions.
Second Key: Invite the Right People to Continue
Once you’ve determined fruitfulness, you’re ready to move on to testing for fulfillment. So…what about fulfillment? If they need both, how can you test for fulfillment? Here’s how I do it. Once I’ve determined whether they’re fruitful, I simply ask them “what it feels like to know that their effort, their engagement in the lives of the leaders in their huddle has made a difference?” Sometimes I’ll say, “4 of your 5 new groups are continuing! How’s it feel to know that you made that kind of difference? Is it something you’d like to continue doing?”
The ones that are both fruitful and fulfilled get asked if they’d like to continue.
Third Key: Thank the Participants That Aren’t Both Fruitful and Fulfilled
Thank the participants that aren’t both fruitful and fulfilled and ask them if you can count on them in the future. It really doesn’t matter which component they didn’t have. You don’t want one or the other. You want both. If they don’t have both…thank them for playing…and move on (FYI, this point prompted a great comment and The End in Mind for an Effective Coaching Structure, a follow-up that you can read right here).
Need More?
Need more help with this? A couple key articles are Coaching FAQ: What Are the Ingredients of An Effective Coach? and How to Build an Effective Coaching Structure (a four part series).
