All of my active coaching clients (and their designated team members) receive an automated email on Friday morning, directing them to a Google Forms landing page, where they can complete a weekly progress report.

We call that The Extreme Weekly Tracker.

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The questions they answer are:

• What were my most significant accomplishments last week?
• What were the main things I would like to have achieved but didn’t?
• What tolerations, obstacles or roadblocks do I need to address and how?
• What issues or challenges am I facing right now?
• What are the biggest “wins” I can make next week?
• In what way (if any) could Coach Barrow help me right now?
• Any other notes or comments?

Lat year, I had about 40% compliance on completing the tracker – that has risen to an average of 60% completion year to date – perhaps an indicator of initial enthusiasm amongst the new clients who have started their coaching journey in the last 2 months.

It has made a big difference to my Mondays.

What used to be a day working ON my business has become a day largely responding to the trackers and I’m currently looking at reorganising my schedule to compensate.

The good news is that, for those clients who diligently complete the tracker every week:

• they have an opportunity to get closure on the each week’s “wins” and frustrations;
• they have a record of their marginal gains to which they can refer in the darker moments;
• they can ask me for help;
• it allows me to keep a close eye on progress – to get to know the ins and outs of their business and, hopefully, be a better coach for them.

What’s not to like about that?

Which had me thinking the other day – wouldn’t it make sense for all owners and managers to be connected to their teams in a similar fashion?

I’m constantly told that the pressures of work and time prohibit a lot of the team communication that we know is essential for effective progress.

I understand that “downtime” in dentistry is lost billable time, that huddles are tough to organise, that team meetings don’t take place as often as they should.

So – given that most people are staring at a smartphone at some stage during the day – why not have your own internal weekly tracker?

It’s pretty easy to set that up nowadays in Google Forms (so I’m told by my support team) or you might just use a simple social media platform like WhatsApp to achieve the same outcome.

All problems exist in the absence of a good conversation – if you haven’t got the time, use the technology.