One of the fundamental tenets of go-to-ism is to keep getting better and better at working with others. After all, in today’s high-collaboration workplace, your results are only as strong as the team behind them, right? It’s no longer enough to simply be the technical expert or the best at what you do—your success depends on others, just as their success depends on you.
But you have enough going on at work, right? It’s unrealistic to expect that for every single project—big or small—you will be able to convene and debrief (even digitally) on what went right, wrong, and average.
The trick is to bake that process into the kind of regular, ongoing conversations you are already having at work, formal or informal. It may feel awkward at first, but the results will speak for themselves, and you and those you work with will gain a sterling reputation for continuous improvement in the organization.
A good follow-up is going to be your secret weapon. They are too often ignored or underutilized, and in my opinion, the follow-up makes all the difference in terms of improvement for both teams and individuals. If you’re not making use of follow-ups in your communications with colleagues and/or direct reports—start now. And if you really want to take your follow-up to the next level, utilize what I call the “three part follow-up.”
The three parts are simple but powerful:
The three part follow-up is a way for you to apply the process of regular continuous improvement directly to the working part of working relationships.
Celebration and acknowledgment are the first step in the continuous improvement process because, without them, people start feeling beaten down and disheartened. They begin to wonder what the point is and perhaps question why they try so hard when no one seems to notice.
That’s a problem, because it’s really quite amazing how much people accomplish for each other at work. While lots of people find plenty of time to blame and complain when things go wrong, most do not take enough time to stop and appreciate each other when things go right.
The real go-to person makes sure to pause, celebrate, and thank people for what’s been accomplished. In the organizations I’ve worked with, I’ve seen so many official and unofficial ways to acknowledge people for the work they’ve done.
Official recognition. Some organizations are better at this than others. Sales organizations do a great job measuring and awarding specific goals, like dollar targets. So, they are good models of high recognition and thanks. But there is always so much important performance that cannot be easily measured. Nonetheless, it deserves official recognition and thanks.
How do you create a culture of recognition and celebration around that sort of valuable but hard-to-measure behavior? Of course, managers need to be aware of those dimensions of performance. In a sales environment, managers must ask salespeople to track their own performance, listen to random samples of calls, and recognize success in these areas despite the fact they are hard to measure.
In one organization in particular, every week, there’s a theme, key questions, or messages it is pushing salespeople to use on the phone. Everybody records all of their calls, and there is always someone to keep score on how well they do with those questions in their calls. Meanwhile, coworkers are encouraged (in between their own incoming calls) to listen in on their colleagues’ calls and to learn from each other. Along the way, coworkers are empowered to hand out “great question!” and “on message!” tags to each other. It is a simple form of peer recognition that has become central to that organization’s culture.
Whatever system you or your organization settles on, the important thin to remember is that it matters. People really appreciate it. And most organizations don’t do enough of it. So, wherever you are in the chain of command, do whatever is in your power to optimize these official channels of recognition and thanks.
Unofficial recognition. If you lack the authority to grant people time off or give them a special assignment, there is a way you can acknowledge their contributions. Get in the habit of saying “thank you.”
You might be thinking, “Really?” Yes, really. I’m afraid genuine thank yous have gone out of fashion. When we do say it, too often it’s in a perfunctory way.
A meaningful thank you can be especially valuable in our sideways and diagonal relationships. Too often, we get in the habit of feeling nothing but frustration with each other, usually because neither side understands the challenges the other faces. But just as complaining, blaming, and finger-pointing leave people with a bad feeling, thank-you leaves people with a good feeling. Appreciation yields the inverse of the “disdain breeds disdain” rule: if you demonstrate understanding and appreciation of someone’s contribution, you create a psychological incentive in the individual to give greater weight to your opinion. And that person will want to strengthen the weight of your opinion in the eyes of others. Appreciation and gratitude breed appreciation and gratitude.
Speaking of complaining, blaming, and finger-pointing, if you took all that and channeled it into continuous improvement, imagine how much better everybody would work together. Even in the most successful work interactions and transactions, where you can think of lots of things that went right, there are usually some things that could have gone better.
Every time you think, “I wish I had known xyz” or “Next time we should do abc,” those are opportunities to get better. Don’t miss them. Write them down, talk them through, and use the insights to improve.
Make the after-action review your standard operating procedure, even in the case of more informal or routine follow-ups. After-action reviews can focus on how a process runs or how a whole group dynamic can function better. Or they can be tightly focused on the actions of individual participants, who are expected to answer questions such as:
If you are engaging in a recurring process for a standing team, you might periodically conduct a stop, continue, start–style after-action review for the team and/or for each individual. That’s a classic continuous improvement technique used in innovation and manufacturing processes, among other things. The basic questions used in such reviews are:
Remember, the review doesn’t have to be long and involved. It can be quick and routine. The important part is that it becomes a habit.
Whether things go wrong or right, use the five Ws and H as a guide for conducting your after-action review:
If a deeper dive is necessary, ask:
The good news is, the more you do after-action reviews, the quicker and easier they become.
The final step of continuous improvement in your working relationships is to look around the corner for future opportunities to collaborate and to anticipate the next time you might have a chance to be of service to each other.
The main goal of looking around the corner after every work interaction is to proactively fill up your schedule, working with those people you really do want to work with as much as possible. They are your preferred customers, the people with whom you’ve managed to do good work and work well together. You know how to stay in dialogue and in alignment; you make good decisions together, get a lot of work done very well very fast together, follow good best practices and use repeatable solutions together, and make each other feel appreciated and continuously improve your working relationship. You want to plan ahead so you can reserve time for those people, and so they can reserve time for you.
Even if you don’t want to work together again, you should look around the corner together before parting ways. If you really truly want to avoid working with this person again, then it’s good to know in advance when they might be coming for you next. Whatever you do, don’t leave them wanting more from you. That means, don’t stint on your thank-you or the after-action review.
One way to be less available to work with people you do not want to work with is to be already engaged working with people you do want to work with. So, plan ahead. End every work interaction or transaction by looking around the corner for the next opportunity to be of service to each other.
As you keep getting better at working together with more people, you’ll be a go-to person for more and more preferred customers. And you’ll be a preferred customer for more go-to people. The goal is not to build a circle of friends at work or a professional clique that somehow excludes others. The goal is to have more preferred customers, the people you really know how to serve. And the goal is also to build up more go-to people, the people who really know how to serve you. Sure, these often turn out to be the same people. But it’s not a popularity contest. It’s not a quid pro quo.
You can never have too many go-to people, and you can never have too many preferred customers. It’s an upward spiral of people getting better and better at working together. I call it go-to-ism, or the art of being indispensable at work.