Lesson Learned #10 – Follow Up and Follow Through

Here recently I’ve been able to interview quite a few people to hopefully join us. One of the common questions I get asked is “What is it that you enjoy most about your job?” My answer is typically twofold:

1. I get to help lead our non-profit JobFit organization which helps to teach high schoolers, college students, and career changers.
2. I get to work across a wide breadth of different topics. Most days are back-to-back meetings/tasks and they span a wide variety of items. I personally really enjoy that kind of work at the moment.

Focusing in on the second one in this post, I find that I’m often trying to stay on top of “all the things“. Task lists, emails, chats, taking notes, jotting a few items down in my phone…

As I’ve written previously about managing your time, I schedule time on my calendar to follow up on emails or to knock out specific items.

The real challenges I face are:

• How do I constantly prioritize my time to be on the most important things for the business?
• How do I ensure that I’m keeping open lines of communication with my team so they have the latest information and actions needing to be taken?
• How do I follow up with relevant items to ensure they’re done as needed and on time?

If you were on my team, you’d know that one of my quirks, pet peeves, whatever you want to call it is along the lines of:

• If we agree on a date, you should hit or exceed the date. IF something comes up and you can’t hit it… communicate ahead of time if the date is going to be missed.

To me, it’s a core expectation. That if we agree about something and you don’t hit it and don’t communicate… it’s a fundamental failure.

My dad recently gave me a book by Tony Dungy called “Uncommon” (4-stars). One item he speaks on early in the book is Trust.

I don’t hang around with people I can’t trust. … I have to have people I can trust implicitly, because I’m not going to spend my time checking on them. I don’t want coaches or players who are not going to represent us well…

It ties back to the “Let your Yes be Yes” lesson.

To be 100% clear… I messed up on this just here recently. I told our CEO I’d do something thinking I had a few weeks… then on a given Thursday (weeks before I had been thinking) he asks, “Matt, are you ready for this afternoon’s meeting” …

WELP, still learning 🙂

I spent the next couple of hours rallying to get the item together. Fortunately, with the help of multiple people, we were able to pull it off.

So… the fork in the road that I feel I’m at in this moment is both:

• How do I help others follow through better?
• How do I not micro-manage but, rather, emphasize both trust and accountability more?

First, on helping others follow through better – I use these two tactical tips daily.

1. If you are using Microsoft Outlook, when you send an email that requires a follow-up by a certain date, use the Follow-up feature where you can set a date. Once you set that date it will create a Task in your To Do lists so that on that date you can follow-up if it hasn’t already been completed.
   
   If the due date is Jan 31st, 2029… set it for the 30th so you have some time to review it and follow-up with the person you sent it to. (ref: Microsoft How To)
   
2. If you happen to be using Microsoft Teams, consider only keeping Chats that you have active conversations or actions with. All the rest, Hid them.
   
   You can Right Click on any chat and click “Hide”. I discovered this a year or more ago and I’ve gone through and hidden any chat that I don’t have a current outstanding item in.
   
   For example, say we’re just catching up on the day… we come to a logical end. I’d likely Right Click > “Hide” so that it’s not in my list anymore. At first, it probably takes 15-30min to go hide all your chats because it caches quite a bit. BUT once you have it caught up, I use it kind of as a working queue. Anyone I’m waiting on a response from or they’re waiting for me for something. (ref: Microsoft How To)

Second, how do I not micro-manage and continue to foster trust and accountability more?

This one is a journey for me. I know that often Micro-Management is considered a negative, but isn’t truth that sometimes it’s required because of the topic at hand?

You may be uniquely capable of walking through that specific item, or it may be of sensitive nature, or it may have to do with an employee, and you should pay close attention to the details.

That all said, the Tony Dungy voiceover above is lingering with me a lot at the moment – People around me I can trust. He goes on to add the below snippet which expounds his basis some to be more about allowing & enabling people:

If we haven’t allowed our players, subordinates, or children to grow into those values and learn to be accountable for themselves, then we have done them a disservice.

At the end of the day, my current modus operandi is focused on trying to be intentional in how I keep on top of my tactical tasks, schedule time to think through & develop strategy items. At the same time, I’m trying to grow in patience as the people and team(s) around me develop in their own methods of doing that exact same thing.