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Follow-up is the most protracted part of the process of changing for the better. It goes on for 12 to 18 months. Fittingly, it’s the difference-maker in the process. Follow-up is how you measure your progress. Follow-up is how we remind people that we’re making an effort to change, and that they are helping us. Follow-up is how our efforts eventually get imprinted on our colleagues’ minds. Follow-up is how we erase our coworkers’ skepticism that we can change. Follow-up is how we acknowledge to ourselves and others that getting better is an ongoing process, not a temporary religious
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The first lesson: Not everyone responds to executive development, at least not in the way the organization desires or intends. Some people are trainable; some
aren’t. It’s not because they don’t want to get better. At the eight companies where hundreds of employees have gone through my leadership development training, I asked the participants at the end of each session whether they intended to go back to their job and apply what they had just learned. Almost 100 percent said yes. A year later I asked the direct reports of these same leaders to confirm that their boss applied the lessons on the job. About 70 percent said yes and 30 percent said the boss had done absolutely nothing. This 70/30 split showed up with statistically elegant consistency in
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When I drilled a little deeper to find out why executives would go through training, promise to implement what they...
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answer was incredibly mundane and, again, reflective of human nature. They failed to implement the changes be...
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This taught me a second lesson: There is an enormous disconnect between understanding and doing. Most leadership development revolves around one huge false assumption: If people understand, then they will do.
The results were astonishingly consistent. At one end of the spectrum, when leaders did little or no follow-up with their subordinates, there was little or no perceived change in the leaders’ effectiveness. At the other extreme, when leaders consistently followed up, the perception of their effectiveness jumped dramatically. My conclusion was swift and unequivocal: People don’t get better without follow-up. That was lesson three.
The Hawthorne Effect posits that productivity tends to increase when workers believe that their bosses are showing a greater interest and involvement in their work.
Becoming a better leader (or a better person) is a process, not an event.
The first question is always, “How happy are you?”
How many times did you try to prove you were right when it wasn’t worth it? 12. How many minutes did you spend on topics that didn’t matter
or that you could not control?
road. The questions Jim asks me each evening deal with the stuff that’s hard for me to do—that requires discipline. They’re not petty or shallow to me. They matter. The nightly call is my form of enforced follow-up. (By the way, after I review my questions with Jim, he reviews his questions with me!)
But injecting Jim into the mix—a friendly sympathetic human being whom, on the one hand, I do not want to disappoint (that’s human nature) and who, on the other hand, provides constant encouragement and input—brings it more in line with the follow-up process I’ve been describing here.
I know lots of busy adults who, no matter where they are, call their aging parents at the end of each day to see how they’re doing.
Your only criteria for picking a coach are: One, it shouldn’t be a chore for your coach to get in touch with you (and with cell phones that’s no longer an issue). You never want to have some technical problem as an excuse for not following up. Two, your coach should be interested in your life and have your best interests at heart. You don’t want someone yawning through your checklist as you answer whether you flossed or remembered to take your vitamins. For example, Jim Moore is an old friend, also from my home state of Kentucky. We enjoy talking to each other. It’s not a burden for us to call
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You can now listen to people’s answers to your questions without judging, interrupting, disputing, or denying them. You do this by keeping your mouth shut except to say, “Thank you.”
1. Pick the one behavior that you would like to change which would make a significant, positive difference in your life. For example, I want to be a better listener. 2. Describe this objective in a one-on-one dialogue with anyone you know. It could be your wife, kids, boss, best friend, or coworker.
For example, you say, I want to be a better listener. Would you suggest two ideas that I can implement in the future that will help me become a better listener? The other person suggests, First, focus all your attention on the other person. Get in a physical position, the “listening position,” such as sitting on the edge of your seat or leaning forward toward the individual. Second, don’t interrupt, no matter how much you disagree with what you’re hearing.
These two ideas represent feedforward.
4. Listen attentively to the suggestions. Take notes if you like. Your only ground rule: You are not allowed to judge, rate, or critique the suggestions in any way. You can’t even say something positive, such as, “That’s a good idea.” The
only response you’re permitted is, Thank you.
You can do feedforward with as many people as you like. As long as people are providing you with good ideas that you can use or discard (but which don’t confuse you), feedforward is a process that never needs to stop.
Even if we behave within the normal parameters of politeness and etiquette in the workplace, we think we have an obligation to be totally honest in every discussion. For some reason, when we’re “engaged” in frank talk with another person, we interpret this to mean that we are locked in a debate. Because we like to succeed, we assume we have to win the debate. We think we have a license to use every debating trick to win, including bringing up the past to bolster our side of the “argument.” Is it any wonder that even in the least toxic environments, honest well-intentioned dialogues devolve
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The best thing about feedforward is that it overcomes the two biggest obstacles we face with negative feedback—the fact that successful people in dominant positions don’t want to hear it (no matter what they say, bosses prefer praise to criticism) and that their subordinates rarely want to give it (criticizing the boss, no matter how ardently he or she tells you to “bring it on,” is rarely a great career move).
Let’s say you want to do a better job of listening. It’s possible that a coach can explain to you how to be a better listener. The advice will be true, supportable, and impossible to dispute. But it will be generic. It’s much better to ask the people around you, “What are some ways I can do a better job of listening to you?” They’ll give you specific, concrete ideas that relate to them—how they perceive you as a listener—not the vague ideas a coach would give. They may not be experts on the topic of listening, but at that moment in time, they actually know more about how you listen, or don’t,
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It works because helping people be “right” is more productive than proving them “wrong.” Unlike feedback, which often introduces a discussion of mistakes and shortfalls, feedforward focuses on solutions, not problems.
If you study successful people, you’ll
discover that their stories are not so much about overcoming enormous obstacles and handicaps but rather about avoiding high-risk, low-reward situations and doing everything in their power to increase the odds in their favor.
Rule 1. You Might Not Have a Disease That Behavioral Change Can Cure
Sometimes feedback reveals a symptom, not a disease.
Basically, we want a sweater because we think it will make us happier. Miswanting occurs when we discover that what we wanted did not make us happy.
Rule 5. There Is No Ideal Behavior
Helping people achieve long-term positive behavioral change.
How often we’re rude to people, how often we’re polite, how often we ask for input in a meeting rather than shut people out, how often we bite our tongue rather than spit out a needlessly inflammatory remark.
I have learned a hard lesson trying to
help real people, change real behavior in the real world. There is no “couple of weeks.” Look at the trend line! Sanity does not prevail. There is a good chance that tomorrow is going to be just as crazy as today. If you want to change anything about yourself, the best time to start is now. Ask yourself, “What am I willing to change now?” Just do that. That’s more than enough. For now.
will be to listen to me and act on my suggestion. Please don’t. Just nod your head and pretend you’re listening. If you’re as smart as I thought you were when I hired you, you’ll ignore me and do it your way.”
their staff should be exactly like them—in behavior, in enthusiasm, in intelligence, and most especially, in how they apply that brainpower.
Most bosses are smart enough to know this and therefore resist the temptation to hire only mirror images of themselves.
Time and time again, an employee would come to Steve with an idea. Being a debate champion, Steve’s first reaction was to go into debate mode and shoot holes in the idea. The employee’s reaction, as a direct report, was to shut down in the face of the verbal onslaught from the boss.
Two people, two different perspectives. Steve thought he was having an open debate. The employee thought that he had just been blown away.
“What’s wrong with it?” he asked. “What’s wrong with me expressing an opinion, and someone else expressing an opinion, and we have a healthy debate? I love that.”
said, “Well, yes, but you are the boss—and they aren’t. You were the star debater at college—and they weren’t. This isn’t a fair fight! All you’re doing to them is saying, ‘You lose. I win.’ Their odds of beating you at this game are zero. So they opt not to play.”
“That’s not true,” he countered. “I have someone on staff who loves it as much as I do.” “That’s the problem,” I said. “Sometimes your debating style works, particularly with people who enjoy arguing both sides of every issue and don’t back down from the verbal jousting. If everybody on your staff was like this one person, you wouldn’t have a problem. Unfortunately, 99 percent of your team is not like that guy. Your one success is not being replic...
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He apologized to everyone for the mistakes in his past, and promised to do better in the future. He routinely invited people to voice their opinions in meetings, and thought once, twice, three times before challenging them. (Nothing wrong with challenging people. His goal was to open up the dialogue, not become a doormat for every silly opinion.) He followed up with people, reminding them that he was trying to improve in this area. Lastly, he asked them for suggestions that could help him get even better.
If you manage your people the way you’d want to be managed, you’re forgetting one thing: You’re not managing you.
I was meeting with a chief executive recently, listening to him express puzzlement that his employees did not understand the company’s mission and overall direction. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I’ve spelled it out for them in meetings. I’ve summarized it in a memo. See, here’s the memo. It’s very clear. What more do the employees want?”
“By e-mail,” he said. “It went to everyone in the company.” “Okay,” I said, “but my hunch is that the method of distribution is all you know about this. How many people actually opened the e-mail and read the memo?” “I don’t know,” he said. “Of those, how many do you think understood the memo?” “I have no idea,” he said. “Of those who understood it, how many believed it?” He shook his head. “Of this dwindling group of believers, how many remembered it?” Another sorry head shake.
“You thought your job was done when you articulated the mission and wrote the memo—as if it were one more item on your to-do list for the day. You checked the box, and you moved on. Next.”
