7 Ways to Be a Better Follow-Up Leader

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Leadership  

Greg, a team leader, is meeting with team members Tarun and Priyanka. “So, you’ll get that report done next week?” he said to them.

“Sure thing,” Tarun said.

“Great, see you next week. Have a good weekend.”

Greg gets up and leaves the room. Priyanka closes the door after Greg leaves.

“Why did you agree to get the report done?” asked Priyanka, who had just transferred to Greg’s team and had no experience working with him.

Tarun smiled. “Don’t worry about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Greg does this all the time. He makes these off-the-wall requests then totally forgets that he even asked us to do something. I used to burn the midnight oil stressing over meeting the requests—only to find out he didn’t even remember asking me. I learned to ignore the requests since they probably would never be brought up again.”

“So, you just say you’ll do it, then do nothing?” Priyanka asked.

Tarun got up and walked toward the door. “Yup, you’ll get the lay of the land here soon enough.”

“Um, okay,” Priyanka said as she got up to leave the meeting room.

*** *** ***

Tarun had been burned multiple times by seemingly important requests from Greg, only to find out that nothing would come of the hard work. …

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