The CoachAccountable Blog

Metrics are where the rubber meets the road.

Build a habit, measure a KPI, track a rating, reach for a goal.  I’ve already said plenty on why Metrics, so let me now focus on why Metric Templates.

Metric Templates allow you to template out common Metrics that you’ll be guiding our clients with, meaning you save a few seconds and clicks for each setup.

This is a nice upgrade for coaches.

But the really exciting new possibility here?  Making one or more Metric Templates available to your clients, something they can use to set up a game of something worth tracking.

This, too, saves ’em a few seconds, which is cool.  But the real magic is how you can now effectively showcase a set of things they might want to track and play at.

When you create a collection that is client facing, you are saying in so many words “Here are things you might find worth moving the needle with.  Set in motion whichever you’d like, and I’ll be here to support you in making meaningful progress in those areas.”

That’s a great dimension to the service you offer, and a very distinguishing one at that.

Make some Metric Templates and share ’em with your client, then let ’em know what’s on offer and they’re free to help themselves.  Slick.

To get you started, I’ve put together a Resource Package full of Metric Templates that you can peruse and install.

When you add thumbnails to your Metric Templates, it all comes together as a very compelling collection for your clients:

Choose as many as you like to create however many desired.

Do this well, and your clients will be inspired by all the things you can support them in making progress on.

More importantly, they’ll be delighted to continue working with you for the coming weeks and months as they make that progress.

Metrics are a phenomenal tool for bringing visibility into client performance over time, and constitute the creating of a game worth playing at (and a goal worth playing for) during the course of a coaching relationship.

By virtue of tracking things on a routine basis, a record builds that make it possible to spot trends, revealing coachable insights around what’s working and what’s not.

Because of this, it’s not uncommon to track Metrics for a year or more.  There’s value in doing so, but at the same time that means more past performance is apt to be less relevant to how things have more recently played out.

To make it easier to focus on more recent performance, it’s now possible to set the Display Options for a given Metric to show only a select, sliding window of the most recent past.  When setting up a Metric, reveal this setting by clicking the “Modify display options…” link, like so:

You can choose to show the most recent days or data points.

When set, the Metric graphs that display to you and your clients will be suitably focused on whatever window of recency you choose, turning something that looks like this, for example (a Metric that’s been diligently tracked for almost a year):

Kinda hard to see specifics… how are things lately?

into this:

Ah, that’s clear! Nice!

What Happened to the Past Data?

It’s all still there.  Whenever there’s enough history in a given Metric to warrant the cutting off of the further-back past, you’ll find a “view all” link just above the right side of the graph.  Simply click that to reveal the whole history, and again to toggle back to what’s more recent.

The Best of Both Worlds

The ability to display only the most recent data allows you to have your cake, and eat it too: you’re able to track important things over long spans of time, AND get a clear picture of how things have gone more recently.

Enjoy!

One of the more powerful features of CoachAccountable is its ability to genuinely change behavior and nudge clients into good habits and regular performance.

This all happens through a very simple practice: the routine check-in.

The routine check-in allows clients to report on WHATEVER KPIs, practices, habits, etc. that they’re working on, prompts them to do so on regular basis, and has the accumulated results appear in graphs that reveal the trends and tell the story.

By popular request, here’s step-by-step video tutorial on how to create these tracking regiments, complete with full automation that will make is easy for your clients to show up regularly.

Enjoy!

I wrote earlier about why Metrics are awesome.  Now I’m going to go into the more nuanced version of why Metrics are so powerful when used as part of group coaching.

In other words, why Group Metrics are awesome.

Group Metrics are when you’ve got a coaching group in which all members (or some, you can have individuals sit excluded as appropriate) are working at the same Metric.  Examples include:

• A group fitness program in which members are each tracking their weight and or daily exercise.
• A sales team in which all members are pulling towards an office-wide sales goal.
• A real estate team concerned with tracking performance measures such as number of appointments, showings, and touch points.

In each of these cases, individuals each have their own numbers to report for a given Metric, which in turn contribute to the collective performance of the group.  That group performance is calculated as either the sum or the average of all of the individuals.

A CoachAccountable Group Metric enables you to manage that this detailed tracking gets done, see overall performance as it unfolds, and optionally enable the group participants themselves a transparent view into group performance, or even the individual performance of other group members.

Let’s look at a few examples in turn, to examine the ways by which this can enrich group coaching and foster higher engagement & performance.

» Continue reading “Why Group Metrics Are Awesome”

In the two previous posts we’ve covered the basics of using Worksheets within CoachAccountable, and how to wield their Form-Based variant.

Now let’s look to the next level of power in using Worksheets: setting them up to have your clients’ answers feed into their Metrics.

This is a bit abstract, so let’s consider a concrete example to see how this is useful.

A quick warning before we dive in: the ideas to follow are the stuff of putting a lot of features of CoachAccountable together to make elaborate, sophisticated setups to serve your coaching clients.  It is cool stuff, but requires a certain familiarity with some of the basic building blocks of the system, like Actions, Courses and Metrics.  If you’re familiar with these things already then you’re set, and might be delighted to learn of the fancy, integrated and automated setups that are possible.  If you’re NOT familiar, you might want to learn those basics first (though reading on here may serve as good motivation for that learning!).

Right then, let’s dive in.

» Continue reading “Piping Worksheet Answers Into Metrics”

Metrics: one of the most powerful parts of CoachAccountable, allowing you to do things in your coaching that are otherwise not possible with just spreadsheets, email, or even online shared docs.

They’re also somewhat complicated and thus tend to be intimidating thing to learn.

This 15-minute tutorial video will teach you the ins-and-outs of setting up Metrics for your clients, and teach you how to integrate them into your coaching style:

If you don’t use Metrics in your coaching yet, perhaps now is the time to start.

For reference, here’s the narration transcript:

» Continue reading “Be an Awesome Coach with CoachAccountable Metrics”

Metrics remain one of my favorite pieces of the entire CoachAccountable system: they make progress real, reveal hidden insights, and cause clients to be engaged at a very high and regular level.

Over the two years of using and learning how other coaches have used them I’ve come to recognize 4 distinct flavors of Metrics that are commonly employed: Cumulative, Measurement, Rating and Binary.  Each flavor has its own characteristic setup, and each best fits its own separate set of outcomes worth tracking.

I invite you to take a minute to acquaint yourself with these 4.  Do so not only to enjoy a nice tutorial on their setup (and thus on Metrics in general), but more importantly to gain ideas how to more broadly help and serve your own coaching clients.

» Continue reading “Four Types of Metrics”

This is one I’m excited about.

One of the serious wins of Metrics is that they makes progress evident: they turn a set of numbers into a tangible experience of how things are going, with a satisfying visualization of results relative to a target.

One of the other serious wins of Metrics is that they make it dead simple for your clients to track that progress at regular intervals, thus eliminating much of the tendency to forget as well as keeping goals regularly within their awareness between coaching sessions.

Those two major wins have been combined: now when your client replies to a Metric reminder email with their number for the day, they’ll get back an email response which shows them their freshly-updated progress in graph form, like so:

Visual feedback comes right back to your client when they report progress via email.

It’s an effect that I’ve already enjoyed while testing, and one which I think many clients will benefit from.

Why?  Because it’s satisfying to get that feedback right away, and that satisfaction motivates further effort towards next data point.

As a single coach, my experiences can run a reasonable size of the gamut of all possible coaching scenarios, techniques, and structural setups.  Still, there’s no question that my familiarity falls well short of the 100% mark: there are a ton of ways of doing things that I’ve just never considered.  Thus it is delightful with other coaches share with me what they’re doing in their practice, insomuch as CoachAccountable might be able to help.

The Delightful Collaboration Series is accounts of when users of CoachAccountable reach out to me and say things to the tune of “Hey, this is nice but can you make it do…”.  On these occasions I get a glimpse into the coaching practices of others, and get familiar with [potential] uses for the software that I hadn’t considered myself but would be a big win for someone else.  I take these as suggestions of how I might tweak or build upon the current CoachAccountable.

» Continue reading “Delightful Collaboration I – Long Term Goals & Progress”

CoachAccountable Metrics are a powerful tool for measuring results over a span of time, yes, but beyond that, there’s magic in the measuring.

To illustrate, I give you PushupTober: a month of doing pushups regularly.  For the whole month the game is to do a single set, done once per day.  Starting at a manageable (but for most people will still make you sore) 15 pushups on day 1, and climbing to a goal of 45 pushups at the end of the month.

» Continue reading “Metrics in Action: PushupTober”