Episode #293: Leaders Who Fail To Follow Up, Fail Their Business

Companies spend considerable time and treasure to improve the business. Ideas are generated and projects initiated. New hires are brought in to expand the business. Training is delivered to raise skill and ability levels. All of these types of activities need leadership. Why then are leaders so poor at doing the follow up? Everyone is busy, but the leader’s job is to translate all of that busyness into results and outputs. In Japan, a big part of this problem is the incomplete self-awareness about the true role of the leader.

I have seen this same scenario so many times over the years. We gather for the offsite or a similar innovation session. We break into groups and start brainstorming ideas to drive the business forward. We spend hours digging out creative ideas, debating the priorities, getting them down on to large sheets of paper and sticking these sheets up on the wall. We take our colleagues through the findings and then listen to their summation. Then we wrap it all up with some stirring words from the boss and we all go home or to the pub. Nothing ever comes of the ideas. Why? The leadership are unable to take all that genius and implement it into the business. The paper fades over time, along with our memories of the effort we put in.

Being able to find new staff in Japan is like finding hen’s teeth at the moment. The new entrants are brought into the company, but the on-boarding process and mindsets have not been updated from the days when staff were many and jobs were few. It is a different world today. The proper care and attention to get people into the warm bosom of the firm hasn’t been carefully thought through. Within three years they have moved on to greener pastures somewhere else. The leader left the process to others and didn’t inject themselves sufficiently into the fray. Why? They didn’t see that part of the role as central to their job and by the way, they have been busy, busy, busy working on many other projects.

The team are sent off for training, they return after some time and resume hostilities just as before. But without maximising the learnings. The team members were only told that “the details of the training are with HR”. That was the extent of the leader download about the training. The staff have no clear idea about why they are going, what they are expected to do during the training and thereafter. The consequence is the uptake of the new methods is poor to zero.

This is unthinkable really, but it is very common. The difficulty with training is that it rests on the premise that we can get people to come out of their comfort zone and adopt new ways of doing things. Instead, they emerge from the training room initially fired up, but return to their desk and go back to the tried and true methodologies of the past. Time and treasure are lost yet here was a supreme engine fully available to drive the business forward.

The leaders need to set up for the changes they want to see. That means a full briefing to the staff on how great they are doing already, how we can all do better, together identifying some areas to work on in the training and specifying what they will do with the training when they get back, in order to make the most of the opportunity. Are these types of briefings standard operating procedure in your firm? If not, the best time to do this was yesterday, and the second best time is today. Let’s stitch this into the fabric of how people are managed at your shop.

The other bit of stitching needed is for after the training. We revert to our old habits quickly and we also have to do battle with the forgetting curve. People forget 50% of what they learnt in an hour, 70% in a day and 90% in a week. We have to create new habits and that means immediately using what was taught. This requires some leader help because, when left to their own devices, our staff will drift and lose the necessary change momentum.

So the boss needs to get busy and inject themselves into the follow up. Check that they are doing what they learnt, by interviewing them immediately after the training session about how they are going to using the training. We had told them before the training that we would want to hear this from them, so they should be prepared for this question.

At regular intervals, we need to get feedback on how their application of the new information is being incorporated into their new habits and ways of working. This is critical to build the new habit. Keep checking because it is easier to keep doing the old than to adopt the new and people get distracted so quickly.

Leaders have follow up duties, which must be high priority items in their daily To Do lists. If they are not included in the scheduling, then the chance of these vital tasks being completed plummets and they move across to the realms of delusion and fantasy.

Somehow we think all of these things are being done automatically without any intervention from us, the boss. Wrong. They only happen because the boss makes the time to see them happen. When we understand these facts, then we can change our behaviour as well to do our real job of leading. What gets checked gets done.