Borrow this Best Practice from Top Athletes to Multiply Your Impact and Success as an Contracting Company Owner

August 20, 2018
Category: Achieve Consistent Business Success,Be a Highly Effective Owner,Business Tips,Eliminate Problems and Fires

It’s well known in sports, that when athletes follow through and completely finish the motion of throwing, shooting, kicking, punching or swinging they get more power, more control and produce better results than when they fail to follow through.

This principle is the same for you as a business owner. Except in your business, “follow through” means seeing a goal or a task completely through to the desired end result. Improving your follow through can dramatically multiply your impact as an owner, increase the effectiveness of your team and ultimately, help ensure the success of your business.

Follow through is not a strong point for most business owners.

Yet, as important as follow through is, most owners find it hard to keep track of—and follow through on—the hundreds of moving parts in their businesses. So, if you’re having trouble with follow through, know that you’re not alone! But you need to make follow through a priority, because a lack of follow through is costing you tens of thousands of dollars, wasting hours of your time and causing you unnecessary stress and frustration.

Based on my business coaching experience, here are some of the most common and costly examples I see where follow through is lacking among business owners like you:

• You create an annual plan for your business, but getting too busy or distracted to implement it fully.
  The costs of not following through: You don’t reach your goals and improve your business.
• You delegate responsibilities to your management team members, but never follow through to ensure desired results were achieved.
  The costs of not following through: Important tasks and responsibilities you delegate to your team fall into the “delegation black hole”. These tasks never get completed, results suffer, and you end up doing the work yourself, adding to your frustration and stress.
• You implement new policies or procedures but don’t follow through to ensure they are being used and are working.
  The costs of not following through: Poor results, as well as more work, frustration, and stress for you.
• You get sales leads but don’t follow up sufficiently during the sales process. According to the National Sales Executive Association, 73% of sales people follow up with a prospect two times or less. And yet – here’s the kicker – 80% of sales happen after the 5th contact with the prospect. 80%! So, you need to follow up consistently with prospects until you get a “yes” or “no” answer.
  The costs of not following through: Thousands of dollars in lost sales.

Four ways you can improve your follow through.

1. Assess your current follow through

Walk around your business for a week with your “follow through radar” tuned in and keep track of all the ways you are not following through. I think you’ll be surprised at how many there are! Now, pick the two or three follow through problems costing you the most and fix them.

2. Delegate more clearly

In many cases, when your team doesn’t follow through on assigned responsibilities or tasks, unclear delegation by you is the root cause. Many owners delegate to their employees informally whenever they think of things that need to get done. You probably do the same.

You catch a member of your team on a job or as they’re heading out the door at the end of the day and you say: “While I’m thinking of it, I want you to do a better job of billing clients at the end of a job and you also need to keep better control of employees misusing equipment.” They shake their head and say “OK” and you’re both off to the next thing. Problem solved right? No!

What typically happens to these delegated items? Nothing! They never get done. In reality, your employee never accepted responsibility. In fact, they probably forgot what you said as soon as you left. They probably thought you’d forget by the next time they see you so they didn’t bother to add another task to their already over full plate.

To ensure successful delegation and follow through:

• Make sure the person you delegate to agrees to take responsibility for the delegated item.
• Clearly define: What they are going to do; How they will do it; When it will be done; and How they will let you know that the task is completed.
• Write it down and follow up.

3. Use a management system to hold your team (and yourself) accountable

Crazy busy-ness is another major reason for lack of follow through. It doesn’t matter if you have a $250,000 business or a $2,500,000 one, there are more things to do in your business than you can keep track of in your head. And if you have a management team responsible for different parts of your business, keeping track of all of the things that need to be done, by whom, and by when can be overwhelming!

You need a system to ensure successful follow through. The system should help you keep track of all of the projects going on in your business. The system should enable you to follow up regularly on progress and results. It should hold everyone accountable to get their work done.

As the management motto says, “Inspect what you expect!” Here are two things I have my clients do to track and hold their teams accountable:

First, set up weekly one-on-one meetings with each of your key people to review progress on their delegated goals and tasks. The benefit of formal weekly meetings is:

• You have a few meetings a week to manage your people instead of hundreds of meeting and interruptions on the fly;
• You’re evaluating what they’re doing which holds them accountable to get what you want done;
• You can coach them and adjust what they need to get done to ensure the results you want.

My clients find these weekly management meetings give them a huge amount of control, and reduce stress in the process

Second, create a system to keep track of the goals, key responsibilities and tasks you delegate. The tracking system will help you ensure responsibilities don’t fall through the cracks. And because everyone knows you keep track and follow up, accountability increase and results improve.

This tracking system can be as simple as keeping track on paper or more sophisticated like using a task management system, (like the task function of Microsoft Outlook or Todoist) or project management software (like Asana or BaseCamp).

4. Focus on end results.

The job isn’t done until you achieve the results you want. Yet time and again, I see owners and their teams declare, “Mission accomplished” because they implemented a new program or procedure instead of ensuring they achieved the desired result.

For example, let’s say you want to reduce accidents on the job by 25% and you delegate this responsibility to one of your management team members. They create a safety training program and deliver it to all of your employees. Then, they come to the next one-on-one meeting with you and tell you they’re finished.

Is this true? No!

The goal is to reduce accidents by 25%, not implement a training program. What if the program turns out to be unsuccessful? The bottom line: follow through until you ensure the end result is accomplished.

Implement these four follow through action steps now!

You’ll multiply your impact, get more done, improve your business results and reduce your stress and frustration. Not bad results for adding one new technique to your management tool kit!

Tweet