Before the end of the year, a colleague of mine asked me to hop on a call to help him negotiate terms with an external partner.
I did, and believe the call was effective.
This week, after acknowledging how important my time is and how helpful I had already been, he reached out to me to remind him of the terms because he couldn’t find them anywhere.
The problem was he didn’t send a follow-up email to the partner to confirm the terms.
It’s easy to go from meeting to meeting, call to call with a loose idea of terms or actionables in your head. That is what most people do.
Similarly, you can go about your day communicating with whoever creates notifications to your phone… Or you can decide who YOU want to communicate and spend time with.
Great leaders follow through… And the first step to executing follow through is for the agreed upon game plan to be created and shared with all stakeholders.
Next time you start a call, ask yourself if you want to put it to everybody to ensure someone is responsible for taking notes and sending the follow-up… If that’s uncomfortable, then assume it’s on you.
Our brains naturally prioritise the squeaky wheel. So many deals and relationships rely on consistent communication. Even if you may have just had a call or meeting, the follow-up messaging will lead to more things getting done. And this way, nobody can ever tell you they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.
This may sound basic, but the fundamentals matter. There’s a reason Vince Lombardi never had a losing season… He started each year with the same phrase, “Gentleman… This is a football.”
