Manila, 10 June 2021 — How good are your follow-up skills?

Story

It happened in 2004. The story is as old as time and plays out every day in businesses, organizations, and projects across the world. Whether you are a leader who is influencing people for change, or a manager who is looking for the best solution, you know that to ensure results, you need to follow up with people.

In 2004, Marshall Goldsmith, an executive coach, made waves among his large circle of business readers with a research paper that showed how much better the results were that executives achieved when they followed up multiple times with people. He gave that effect a name. “Leadership is a Contact Sport,” he wrote, explaining that “The Follow-Up Factor” is decisive for higher performance.  

What I took away from the Contact Sport metaphor is that as leaders, we need to keep playing the game in the match until the result is achieved. That means staying in constant contact with the other players on the field or court — your own team as well as the other team — for as long as it takes: play after play. You might agree and say yes of course. But in our workplaces, that’s not always as easy as it sounds.

Challenge

When we say that Leadership is a Contact Sport, it reminds us that having a shared vision, while great, is not enough. Having great values is not enough either. Nor is having the necessary resources including capable and engaged people, and enough time and budget. No, it comes down to executing together. And not just executing for one fine moment, but to keep executing until the job is done. 

As we double-click on the Contact Sport metaphor, we are reminded that in many sports we get sweaty and smelly. And in some sports,  muddy too. That’s often what it takes to get valuable things done. Referring once to your great team vision may feel good, yet what Goldsmith called The Follow-up Factor isn’t about feeling good. It’s about doing what it takes to get things done. And that’s where many leaders today feel challenged. Following up persistently makes you feel, at least metaphorically, sweaty and muddy. Is that really necessary, you might ask?

I’d say yes, and here is why. In our workplaces today, being overwhelmed by too much information and too much distraction is the new normal for many. People tend to have short attention spans and a limited ability to focus for longer periods. These challenges can affect everyone on the team. Values around communication have changed too. With more informality brought into workplace cultures, the practices of punctuality and accountability for timely responses and results are at risk of falling by the wayside. Taking all of that into account, it’s clear that the practice of follow-up that Goldsmith advocated in 2004 has never been more necessary and challenging than today.

Question

Unpacking this challenge raises a number of questions. What does effective follow-up look like? When to follow up with people? How to follow up? Should you mix up your techniques for following up? Are there approaches that work across the board? And, a question I get asked frequently, how many times should you follow up? 

For many leaders I work with, the practice of following up with colleagues repeatedly is a challenge that definitely takes them outside their comfort zone, for a variety of reasons. How does that work for you? On a scale of 1-10, what score do you give yourself for effectively following up with people to ensure you get the desired results?

Here’s a challenging question for you. How many times should you be able to follow up with the same person(s) in your workplace to get something that’s important done? I’d love to know your answer, based on your experience.