Why Your Team Isn’t Following Through – And What to Do About It

Category: Blog

January 10, 2022 | Mark Altman

Picture this: it’s January, and you’re working on building a more effective social media marketing strategy this year. So you call up your marketing guy – let’s call him Steve – and you say, “Steve, we need a content calendar. Can you pull that together for next week?”

“Sure thing, no problem,” he tells you.

It’s a week later, and you follow up: “Hey Steve, how’s the content calendar coming?”

Silence, and then, “Uhh, the content calendar. Right. I didn’t have time to get to it this week…”

Cue the frustration. Why bother having a team if you can’t rely on them to follow through?

Yikes. Time for a reframe.

When a team member tells you they forgot or didn’t have time to do something, do you believe they’re actively trying to disappoint or frustrate you?

Life would be a lot easier if we could simply control other people. Unfortunately, that’s not the case; however, as leaders, we can influence their behavior and better set them up for success.

How do we do that? We ensure that we are getting commitment, not simply agreement, from our team.

• Agreement = yes, in principal, I agree with what you’re saying
• Commitment = I agree and I am set up to follow through

When motivating your team to act – to get commitment – you must help them articulate tangible and specific benefits of following through. Knowing what they need to do is not enough; they must understand why they need to do it.

Often, leaders have a top-down approach when articulating their why’s, i.e., they share their own reasoning with their team, but the most powerful motivation comes from team members articulating the why’s themselves.

I was recently coaching a client to take a 20-minute walk in the middle of his day, and he asked me, “Okay Mark, but what’s the return on investment?” For me, the answer was easy. I get six major benefits from taking a walk during my workday:

• I get a break from screen time to clear my head.
• I get fresh ideas about things I’m problem-solving.
• Being outside in the fresh air is invigorating.
• My stress levels drop by virtue of stepping away from work.
• Things I may have forgotten pop into my head.
• I plan for how I’m going to spend more time with my loved ones.

All great reasons for me to take a walk, but even more powerful is drawing out the client’s own specific and tangible benefits of building this new habit.

So let’s rethink that conversation with Steve. Next time, you might try: “Hey Steve, I feel like we need a content calendar. What do you think?”

“Okay, yeah, a content calendar. That could be useful.”

“How do you think having a content calendar might be helpful?”

“Hmm, well sometimes we miscommunicate about when we agreed to post things. And I know we talked about creating more coherent themes for our newsletters and social media pages. So that might help us plan a little better. And if we had a content calendar, we might be able to better align our posts with events we have going on.”

“Awesome, you think you can have that pulled together for our touch base next week?”

“You got it!”

Next time you meet with your team, focus on helping them articulate the benefits of the work they do, or the habits they’re trying to change, and let us know how it goes.

And stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll discuss the most effective tool for translating motivation into action.

Enjoy this post? Contact us to empower your leaders and teams to build the confidence, develop the skills, and embrace the mindset to create lasting habit and behavior change.