ProgressIt ® --Supporting Your Inner Coach

	Ever wondered what your people do after a learning event?
	Ever wanted to justify the investment in developing your people?

Our nine-week follow-through service ProgressIt ® provides this essential information. It keeps you closely in touch, allowing you to support your people without becoming a progress chaser or having to schedule excessive face-to-face meetings.

ProgressIt ® delivers a Business Benefits Report after nine weeks explaining how people applied their learning at work. Follow these links for more information on making the best use of ProgressIt ®

Goal Setting · Responding to updates · Making comments
Business Benefits Report · Tell Me More!

  Goal Setting

Assume some of your direct reports attend a learning event using the ProgressIt ® service. At the close, they each select up to three goals for applying their learning. For example

	"Spend half a day a week on strategic thinking"
	"Talk to each team member at least once a day to find out how they are doing."
	"Call at least three new existing clients a day"

These goals can by modified, suspended or changed over the nine-week period, if this seems appropriate to the individual.

Sometimes people want to select longer-term goals, beyond the nine-week limit of the ProgressIt ® service. In this case, we encourage them to break the goal down further into some practical results that they can aim for over the nine-week period.

We encourage people to select SMART goals, ones that are:

Stretching
Measurable
Acceptable
Recorded
Time Limited

You can encourage your participants by meeting with them before they attend the learning event to discuss some possible development goals.

  Responding to updates

Five reminder e-mails over nine weeks invite participants to update their progress at the ProgressIt ® web site. They can do this at any other time they choose.

When participants update their progress, they also decide whether to inform their Associates they have done so. As the person's line manager, you will normally be one of three possible colleagues or Associates to receive notification of a ProgressIt ® update.

When you receive an e-mail stating that your direct report has made a ProgressIt ® entry, you can choose whether or not to respond. You stay informed, while avoiding pressure for more time consuming face-to-face updates.

We encourage you to make at least three or more responses during the nine-week period. However, with several participants on a learning event, all using the ProgressIt ® service you could receive quite a few progress notifications. There is no need to respond to every one since we don't want to swap the pressure on you for more meetings with a mass of new e-mails!

It may be enough sometimes just to know that your people are making progress in applying their new learning. Until you visit the web site, though, you will not know what precise progress has been made. The notifying e-mail merely announces an update and offers a quick link to the relevant web page. When you read the latest progress, you can decide whether to add a comment.

  Making comments

What should you do when you receive notification that a participant on a learning event has updated their progress toward a chosen goal?

Since the person wants to share their latest progress, they would probably also welcome your comments, however brief. Support them in various ways:

Encouragement
Do it in your own words, some examples might be:

	"Good, shows you're moving forward. Interested to see how things go."
	"Keep it up"
	"I'd like to hear more about this when we next meet."
	"People have already noticed a difference in how you are coming across."
	"Book a time for us to discuss this next week."

Advice
Do it in your own words, some examples might be:

	"Please put it on the next team agenda, may be we can all help"
	"I'll set up a meeting with the supply chain manager on this"
	"Call Brant he says he'd like to support you on this one."
	"I always do my presentation rehearsals in front of a mirror, I find it works well for me."

Information
Do it in your own words, some examples might be:

	"There's a pitch coming up next month when you can practice presenting with more passion."
	"Assessment reviews are now scheduled for May-your coaching style needs to be up to scratch by then!"
	"Please add the re-location schedule and its impact on our clients to the new briefing schedule you are experimenting with next week."

Sometimes just showing you are talking an interest in their progress may be enough to encourage them towards their goal.

  The Business Benefits Report

Nine weeks after the learning event, we provide a Business Benefits Report. This helps answer that perennial question: "what business benefits have we had from this investment?"

The report collates all the progress reports of participants on the learning event showing how they applied their learning at work. Where participants achieve a goal, they also indicate what they have learned as a result.

MLA makes no comments on any individual, though we provide an Executive Summary.

  Tell Me More!

You can use the ProgressIt ® service for an MLA learning event or, by negotiation for one provided by another organisation.

To discuss any aspect of ProgressIt ® please call Norma Power at Maynard Leigh Associates, 020 7033 2370

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