Three Steps to Follow Up with High EQ
Imagine you are training a dog to "sit". A trained dog will sit after the owner says "sit". If the dog does not sit, the untrained owner will say "Sit! Sit! Sit!" At which point the dog may sit and then associate the action of sitting with the word "sit" repeated three times. Now every time the untrained owner wants the dog to sit, they will need to say "Sit! Sit! Sit" as opposed to "sit."
A manager following up with their team OR a team member following up with their manager also exhibit this same phenomena. If multiple time followups are utilized, the recipient will be trained to wait for multiple followups before providing a status update or sharing current progress. Each follow up will add temporary pressure to the recipient to complete the assignment, but concurrently may come off as nagging and eventually lose effectiveness, thereby necessitating additional followups. Today, we will discuss tools to utilize to follow up with high emotional intelligence, such that only one follow up is needed, if at all.
In an ideal case, team members will own their work, provide regular status updates, and finish ahead of schedule. In this case, follow ups are not needed at all. In all other cases, a follow up will be needed to make sure work is progressing as needed. To make sure the follow up comes off with the interest of both parties in mind, we need to follow up with high emotional intelligence, meaning to consider, understand, and elevate the feelings of the other individual before and while we follow up. We can follow up with high emotional intelligence by 1) investing in emotional bank accounts (explained in next section), 2) setting expectations before following up, and 3) leveraging others to follow up. If we can execute the three aforementioned activities successfully, only one follow up will be necessary.
The figure shows how these three tools can be used by the manager or the team member to follow up, where making emotional bank account investments is the most direct and largest channel that connects the two individuals.
Make Emotional Bank Account Investments
The concept of an Emotion Bank Account (EBA) comes from "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. An EBA is a measure of the relationship between two people. When the two people have positive experiences together, the value goes up. On the other hand, when two people have negative experiences together, the value goes down. A positive experience is defined from the perspective of each individual. Therefore, if a manager wants to increase the emotional bank account value with her team member, the manager needs to create joint experiences that the team member perceives to be positive. For most people, someone else pestering them with follow ups is a negative experience, thereby decreasing EBA. So following up multiple times will only withdraw from one's EBA with the other individual.
If a manager has high EBA with her team member, the team member will work hard and strive to not the manager down. The team member will care about the manager's output and raise concerns if needed. Once EBA reaches this level, one follow up could serve as a gentle reminder if necessary, but multiple follow ups are no longer necessary. If every individual within a team has high EBA with every other individual on the team, a team mentality will truly be established. This team mentality will cause individuals to want to help one another by having open communication and keeping one another in the loop. On the opposite end, if EBA is between two team members, communication will become more difficult, which may necessitate more follow ups, creating a negative feedback loop to further diminish the emotional bank account.
High EBAs make work flow, including follow ups, more fluid and easier to process. Tactically, we can make deposits to an emotional bank account by sharing experiences with our team members that are positive from their perspective. This means, if a team member enjoys talking about their own work, we should listen to them talk about their work and offer to help or provide guidance where relevant. If a team member has a specific coffee preference, we can pick them up a cup when we are getting our coffee. If a team member enjoys trying new food trucks / street food, we can have lunch with them in a new/different establishment. These experiences should happen regularly and organically, not only before we need something from them, which could be perceived as not genuine. Building EBA is not just about spending time or small talk, it is genuinely looking to optimize for the other person's experiences around us.
Set Expectations
As mentioned previously, following up is typically viewed as a negative experience for the recipient, thereby lowering the value of the emotional bank account. However, setting expectations before following up will make the experience less negative, because the recipient will expect a follow up at a given point. We can set expectations by agreeing on a time or milestone to check-in during the initial planning stages of the project. The check-in point could be in 30 minutes or in multiple weeks. This agreed upon time should be set at a specified milestone BEFORE the actual due date of the entire project. Another way to think about setting this check-in is, "At what point would we like a status update?"
If the team member is a proactive problem solver, they will honor this specified date and may even provide an update before we follow up. Conversely, if the team member is not proactive or potentially overloaded with many other tasks, they may not update organically. At this point, we will need to follow up. However, since we have specified a date and/or milestone beforehand, this follow-up will feel like an event that is supposed to happen, as opposed to feeling like a pestering follow-up. This distinction in the recipients feeling will therefore be a lower withdrawal, or potentially even net-neutral, from the emotional bank account.
Leverage Others
If we have been building our emotional bank account and properly setting expectations, but following up does not yield responses or status updates, our last resort should be to leverage others. We can think of leveraging others as a way to follow up multiple times without affecting our EBA with the team member. In order to effectively leverage others, we need to understand the relationships between our team members. Specifically, which team members have high EBA with one another and which team members have high EBA with us.
To further illustrate, let us example three people, the manager, the middle person, and the team member. In our scenario, the manager is trying to follow up with the team member, but has low EBA with the team member. However, the manager and the team member both have high EBA with the middle person. So the manager can leverage the middle person to help check-in with the team member. Since the two connections manager - middle person and middle person - team member both have high EBA accounts, the team member will feel invested to help the middle person, who is invested to helping the manager get the necessary information.
Closing Remarks
Setting expectations and leveraging others can be used as tools to make following up easier. Though to follow up with high emotional intelligence, we should invest time into the emotional bank account with our team members, which will build said individual's desire for listening to the first request. Conversely, not investing in the emotional bank account will lead to spending time on following up multiple times. And following up multiple times is no better than saying "Sit! Sit! Sit!" in order for our dog to sit.
