Follow Up and Through, The Keys to Unlocking Workplace Frustration

“Success comes from taking the initiative and following up... persisting... eloquently expressing the depth of your love”- Anthony Robbins

Many years ago, as a young professional, I became aware of how important it was to have an office culture that was rich in genuine feelings of opportunity, engagement, and expectation, not because I was surrounded by it but because I wasn’t. Luckily for me, instead of letting feelings of abandonment and isolation frustrate and force me into quite quitting, I looked at and accepted the challenge to raise my own positive feelings by taking the reigns of every situation that I found myself in. I didn’t have the benefit of knowing more than I learned in school about follow-up and follow-through, but I was experiencing the nightmare of not having enough of it in my career.

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Key Emotional Reasons

Psychologist David Rock would agree that there are tremendous emotional factors that you must contend with around the topic of expectations which is essentially what follow-up and follow through is all about. The facts are, as Rock would relay them are as such:

• Whenever there is an anticipation of a great reward our brain gets flooded with dopamine
• Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of desire and greatly improves openness, curiosity, interest, focus, and memory.
• Dopamine also causes happiness and results in high performance everywhere.
• Managing expectations is the key to sustainable performance and outcomes.

Basically, we can all ride the dopamine rollercoaster with a little help from our friends who set powerful and reasonable expectations that always get executed. The result will be that we are all happier and have greater faith in mankind. What’s not to love about that!? But when there is no follow-through or follow-up in professional relationships it’s one of the worst feelings in the world.? Not only is promise abandoned; but hope is easily diminished. The unfinished business may leave permanent scars on someone’s ability to carry on or try again, replacing diligence and consistency with confusion and bewilderment. ?The bottom line is that people will easily feel let down, despondent, and probably a little lost.

Most master networkers prevent all of the aforementioned damage by managing expectations well, with the appropriate follow-up and brilliant follow-through consistently. They understand who they have to be despite the environment around them to enjoy a fruitful professional life and career.

"It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow through."- Zig Ziglar

My friend's follow-up and follow-through are so much more than just the simple carrying out of a promise or meeting an expectation. It’s not a fantastic implementation strategy nor is it the carrying on of business as usual. It’s having the character, commitment, and discipline to bring the right action into effect in the right way when needed. It’s how you show your initiative, persistence, eloquence, and love for what you do, who you get to do it for, and so much more.

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Follow-Up Creates Winning Behavior

I was super excited and nervous the first time that I got to compete for The NYC Transit Authority Pension Fund. I was only 26 years old and just two years into my career in financial services and I’d already started to dream about the improvements I could make to my life with a commission of well over 500k! I could set aside enough money to go back to grad school. I could maybe set us up in a new home so that we could stop renting and begin to save for our future much sooner than I anticipated.

I was so excited that I worked day and night for two weeks straight organizing my proposals and practicing my pitch. If I won, this deal I would immediately be elevated to senior status in my office. At just 26 years old, I would have engineered one of the biggest client acquisitions in my company's over 100-year history which would have elevated me to rock star status at the home office!? This was a really BIG DEAL!! I mean I was in the ring with the big boys at Shearson Lehman, Merrill Lynch, and Smith Barney just to name a few.

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Preparing the Follow-Up

My immediate supervisor thought that I was wasting my time and chasing a pipe dream, but I didn’t want to disappoint my client, the shop steward who saw so much talent in me. He believed genuinely that I could be good for the union members on his team and everyone in the city. His energy and faith really fueled mine and the anticipation and exhilaration were both at all-time highs for me. The hope of fulfilling my dreams of being a super successful financial advisor so young in my career was thrilling. I was super grateful to my client that helped give me this shot and just imagining the benefits of this amazing opportunity and what it could mean for me professionally was enough to inspire tremendous effort.

But no matter how excited I was, even before the presentation, I began to realize this sinking feeling in my stomach that all was not well. As I was preparing to execute on the ‘promise’ that my client saw in me and laid before me, the truth of it all began to come to light. The distance in knowledge and experience that I would have to quickly close to legitimately deserve a shot at this kind of opportunity simply was not within my capability. The more I learned the more I realized that not only was I outclassed by the competition but that my company, at its best, couldn’t compete in this very narrow slice of the market. I blame my pigheadedness here on my mother but, that’s another story.

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The Follow-Through Crucible

Nevertheless, I persevered and nervously made the presentation. Afterwards, I began to get feedback from the procurement team who had been patient enough to watch and hear me fumble through the worst 30 minutes of my life. ?I could see clearly what all of the issues were and felt almost embarrassed for wasting their time. It took me a couple of days to get over the total failure and disappointment that I felt, not to mention the “I told you so” looks that I got from my mentors and senior leaders around the office. When I was able to pull myself back together I resolved for myself to surround myself with other talented advisors and learn the tricks of the trade and large transaction business from them directly. Instead of sitting back and licking my wounds, I came out swinging.

I set tons of informational interviews and dinners with anyone who would give me that time of day. And, I got so good at following up that I was able to consistently generate opportunities for others, opportunities that they could never imagine. I realized that I didn’t have to have all the experience or even talent of others if I could just get them in the room with people who knew what to do with their gifts, I could help them make their career magic happen and that would be even more fun and fulfilling to me. I became so good at business and relationship development that was able to win extremely high levels of trust than my expertise would suggest. Armed with this new superpower I learned how to organize more opportunities for our corporate team than anyone else because I took the time to learn lessons that others wouldn’t. I wore the scars of the worst and biggest failure of my professional life, boldly and proudly telling the story to anyone who would listen as I leveraged my experiences for amazing success for myself and others as I became a hub of opportunity.

With the lessons learned from this and so many other experiences I know get to teach leaders the importance of creating an environment for their teams that can generate tremendous energy and harness it for the benefit of all stakeholders by asking and finding answers to just a few questions:

How can I patiently learn what I need to know about the motivational triggers of each person on my team without injecting my thoughts into the conversation too soon?

What do I need to do to create a diverse and sustainable work culture and environment that asks, “How can we?” much more often than it says, “This is impossible.”

When my team is operating at high dopamine levels already, how do I know when to step on the gas and eat up my competitors or when to lay back and put things on cruise control while we rejuvenate for our next big push?

When things have been going well for quite a while how do we continue to grow from here?

Embedded in my program “The 9 Steps to Professional Relationship Mastery” is everything that professionals need to know to become masters of follow-up and follow-through and so much more. Feel free to take a look and ask any questions that come to mind.

-Coach Powell 703-201-4267