Membrain Elevate, our newest offering, launched recently. I want to give you an insider view into how our teams test everything we build before we offer it to the public, so I spoke with our Head of People Growth and Operations, Nina Werner. Nina has been piloting Elevate to support routine coaching across all our teams and leaders.
At Membrain, we believe in the power of shared language to support a healthy culture. Precise language also helps develop clarity and specificity of meaning. For instance, when a sales project we’ve been working on is complete without a sale, we don’t call it a “loss.” We call it an “archive.” This reminds us that the relationships we build aren’t just “wins” and “losses” and that a particular sale isn’t dead just because the other party made a different choice at this time. It could reopen at any time, and the relationship is valuable regardless of what happens to the transaction.
For the same reasons, we have our own language for routine coaching conversations.
“The words ‘performance review’ is language we don’t use,” says Nina. “That’s not representative of what we’re doing.”
Instead, we started calling them check-ins. But we’re a Swedish company with employees worldwide, including both Sweden and the US. Our Swedish leadership team’s accents sometimes sound funny to our US employees. In this case, the way Nina said “check-ins” sounded like “chickens,” but over time, we started calling them that instead.
It sounds silly, and it is. It sounds fun, and it is. Making the switch to the word “chickens” in place of “check-ins” creates a fun, cohesive shared language for our teams and reminds us through our words that the Membrain “chicken” is no ordinary check-in. It combines progress updates, coaching sessions, and relationship-building time.
So that explains chickens… but what about the cockpit? In its early incarnations, Elevate was called the coaching cockpit, referring to the aviation term for where the pilot and copilot sit and can see all the relevant information about their plane and the flight. We manage our chickens inside of Elevate’s main dashboard therefore, referring back to this older incarnation of the tool, we have our chickens in the cockpit.
“We’re in a privileged position to be working in and knowing the operational ins and outs of the product we’re selling,” explains Nina. “Most companies develop a solution that doesn’t solve their own problem. Membrain solves ours.”
By using it inside our own company with our employees, we’re able to more deeply understand the problems it solves, how it solves them, how we can continually make it better, and support our customers when they start using it.
One of the things our teams have found in using Elevate is that it lives up to its promise to provide a better context for coaching conversations. It makes it easy to see historical data and previous performance, but it also provides context for the individual’s goals and what they are working towards. The coach and the individual work together to define and record these goals, and then Elevate keeps track of them.
Elevate provides a simple, clear, and fully operational way to best use one's coaching time.
But it’s more than that. Because Elevate is connected to the rest of Membrain, goals and tasks become automatically operationalized within the individual’s workflow. Now, instead of coaching conversations being a separate set of goals that an employee must apply in their own way, they become immediately part of the employee’s daily, weekly, and monthly workflow. This makes it easier for the employee to track and execute on, just as it makes it easier for the manager or coach to keep up with them.
We’re not just coaching our sales team in Elevate. We’re coaching everyone on our 30-member team in it. Custom metrics make this easy. Individuals can set numerical goals with their coaches, but they can also set other types of goals.
For instance, a metric may be to learn a new skill, complete a specific task, or follow up on a specific conversation. Metrics can be offered on a scale where the team member ranks how close they are to completing the task along the way, providing useful context for coaching conversations.
This provides “non-equivocable clarity on what you are aiming for,” in Nina’s words, and the ability to track progress effectively, no matter what your goals are.
“In a world that is extremely metrics-driven,” says Nina, “Elevate provides the graphs, the numbers, and the data insights that leaders need, and that’s important. But it also creates a space for in-depth conversations, dialog, and feedback opportunities beyond metrics.”
They enable our leadership to get to know each individual on their teams, how they function, what they need, and what they’re working toward. This creates a texture that enables both parties, the leader and the team member, to be more effective in their relationship and work.
Elevate is not a cure-all for team coaching, Nina emphasizes. No technology is a complete solution in itself. It’s important to take the time to establish the trust, openness, and culture of coaching, and systems that support your teams and organization. But Elevate does provide a simple, clear, and fully operational way to manage coaching conversations across time and ensure that every individual and every team leader is equipped with what they need to know to make the best use of their coaching time.
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn
From north to south, east to west, Membrain has thousands of happy clients all over the world.
