This summer has flown by and it was awesome! I went to Paris for the first time and loved it. What an amazing city and culture. The most white bread I’ve eaten in years and I loved every bite. Now I’m buckling down and scheduling for the fall and thinking about you – this topic of follow through has been a theme with many of my coaching clients (and not necessarily because they are the ones not following through).
Whether you like it or not, as a leader people are watching you. They are watching what you say, how you dress, how you handle stress, how you handle success and pretty much your overall behavior.
I’m not mentioning this to make you paranoid but to help you leverage your modeling to increase your team’s productivity, loyalty, and morale. The leadership behavior I want to discuss is follow through. What do I mean by follow through?
Joe told his struggling worker that he would be monitoring his documentation completion weekly until he was caught up and consistently productive. After two weeks Joe stopped requesting the documentation because other issues came up. As a result, the employee went back to not meeting performance expectations.
Sandy promised to introduce her employee, Tom, to a contact that would be a key connection in completing his project assignment. Despite Tom’s reminders, Sandy never got around to making that introduction.
Juanita was charged with putting together a sub-committee to address safety issues in her department. Three months later, after an initial push to recruit members and schedule a meeting date, Juanita dropped it and the first meeting never happened.
Let’s look at the consequences of not following through using these same fictitious examples. Joe’s worker continues to struggle because he didn’t have enough accountability to form the habit of timely documentation. His view of Joe is that Joe doesn’t think this issue is that important since Joe dropped it. The worker continues to under perform.
Tom is frustrated with Sandy for not connecting him with this important contact and without any intended malice, he acts out and talks badly about Sandy to his colleagues.
When the department head decides that another subcommittee needs to be formed to address an important issue, the new committee chair decides she has too much to do and only half- heartedly tries to pull a committee together. She is not concerned about getting reprimanded because Juanita still hasn’t had her first safety committee meeting.
It is challenging to follow through with everything and even the best leader’s make mistakes and drop balls. The best thing you can do when you recognize that you haven’t kept a promise, met your stated goal or you let someone down, is to acknowledge it openly. Be clear that you messed up and are sorry. I’ve met several leaders who struggle with this and would rather ignore the mistake and hope it goes unnoticed. I promise you, it is not unnoticed. Besides, if you are modeling the behavior you would like to see in others, what would you want from your team?
As my personal trainer says as I attempt to do more than 3 pushups at a time, “progress, not perfection”!
In what areas are you already following through, both professionally and personally? Where do you struggle in either keeping your word or following through? What’s the impact on your team?
I wish you a happy start of fall and let me know how I can support you in your leadership journey!
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) and not pretending you are super human without flaws