Follow Up

Follow up

If there was one thing which distinguishes great managers from good, in my opinion, it will be ‘Follow up’. There are many ways to distinguish between the two but ‘Follow up’ is an essential ingredient in the success formula to be a ‘Great’ manager. This is the distinguishing quality because it does not come naturally to us. This has to be consciously developed, thought about, kept in mind and the quicker we learn about this, the faster we climb the ladder of success in corporate.

All of us are daily dealing with our colleagues/subordinates making promises to complete assignments, or help us with certain jobs. We have a plethora of things on our calendar to finish, we have meetings to go to, we have clients to meet, we have jobs to complete, we have deadlines to meet and we have reviews to finish....the list is endless. When we complete the mindless act of round robin, we realise that some of things said in the last meeting have not moved an inch, the client meetings were fantastically good and we felt nice but we have not sent her the requested information and we also have not followed up on the proposal, we completed 95% of the job 5% is still remaining and the critical approval has not yet come in. We finished the review with the subordinate and agreed on a set of things to be done and both of us were just silent on the same till a quarter passed. The developmental promises made between us have not been fulfilled.

“Follow up” is an essential ingredient of our success framework. We need to make sure that if need to move to the next level then we need to follow up. We need to make sure that we get things done, execute flawlessly. We need to follow up with everyone else and we have to “Follow up” with ourselves. We keep on making false promises to ourselves. It is easiest to postpone things which no one knows about. Make sure to "Follow up" with yourselves.