Helping Your PMs to Reach Their Development Goal - The Follow-up!
One of the biggest topics I address in my daily work is the development of strong product people. I help product leaders to understand the importance of people development and I’ve created all sorts of frameworks and canvases. My goal is to help them become the best coach their PMs have ever had. (If you want to learn more about that, grab a copy of my book.)
All these frameworks and canvases are great (at least I think so!) but there is one pretty simple thing that makes all the difference in your people development practice. And that is the follow-up.
Why follow-ups always matter—especially in the context of personal development
Change is hard. Learning new things is hard. It takes time and PMs are usually pretty busy. But it is important for them, you, and your company to make sure they become competent PMs quickly and further progress from there. Because if every single member of the team becomes better at what they do, your life becomes easier. The output, outcomes, and impact of each individual team member will increase. And the likelihood of success for your company increases as well.
But research (check out Marshall Goldsmith for more on this) shows that:
If you are not following up on these personal development topics, the likelihood of change or improvement is close to ZERO!
The cadence/rhythm of checking in matters. You need to be consistent to get the benefit of follow-ups.
Follow-ups don’t only have to be with leaders. They work when they take place with coworkers and peers as well. Consider asking your PMs to form small learning groups if you can’t find the time to do all of the follow-ups on your own.
We secretly all know that, but often tend to forget or not pay enough attention to it. My goal with this blog post is to remind you of the importance of follow-ups and to give you some helpful tips to make this easier for you.
Your base or prerequisites
First things first: You need a base, common ground, agreement, or commitment to follow up on. Here are the steps that should have happened earlier:
(Self) Assessment of the PM’s capabilities—see my PMwheel if you struggle with this part.
You should have had a meaningful conversation with your PMs about their personal development topics and goals.
You prioritized the various development topics, agreed on which one to work on first, and helped your PM to come up with a Development Plan on this topic. You could use the Future Self template (see graphic below) to guide that process.
You have offered your help for follow-ups and nudging. Ask them what type of support and friendly reminders they think they need and what they think is a realistic time frame. Remember to consider daily work, unforeseen complications, holidays, and so forth and then agree on your follow-up cadence.
End the conversation with something like: What can I hold you accountable for next time we talk?
Future Self Template
Start the follow-up
Once you’ve decided on a topic and a timeframe and given your PM some time to strive toward their goals, you’re ready to begin the follow-up process. Here are a few good questions to guide the conversation:
In our last 1:1, you decided you want to work on topic X. How do you see that now?
You mentioned that you want to work on these action items. Did you find the chance to start working on them? What action have you taken so far?
What has been going well, and what hasn’t? Why?
What is moving you toward your goal?
What is getting in the way?
If no action has been taken
Help them make the first step now. Don’t let them get away with saying they’ll do something “later” without specifying a timeframe or an action. Encourage them to take a small step, whether it’s putting a reminder in their calendar, scheduling a block of time for a particular task, or adding it to the agenda for your next meeting so they know they’ll be accountable.
Make sure they are committing themselves to something. Great questions to achieve this are:
How committed are you, on a scale of 1–10, to taking each of these actions?
If it is not a 10, what would make it a 10?
What will you commit to doing? (Nothing now but reviewing later is an option)
What’s one thing you could do today to help you with this action item?
What do you think: Will this fit your daily routine?
If you’re saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?
If they are stuck
Being stuck is not necessarily a bad thing! It’s actually already a big win if they figure out they are stuck and the follow-up process helps to surface that. Ask them what would help them get going again. Or you can help by offering support.
What can I do to support you better? What can I do more or less of? Why?
What can I do to help unblock you? Where can I support you best? Why?
Ask if you should change the cadence/cycle of your follow-ups.
If they are not moving forward on an action item, offer some new perspectives to their problem by asking:
What else could you do or what different kinds of options do you have to achieve this goal? Sometimes training can be supplemented with a book, an online course, or a mentor and it’s a much better way to learn.
What are the principal advantages and disadvantages of each option?
If I handed you a magic wand, what would you do with it?
BTW: most of these coaching questions come from Chapter 7 of my book. If you want to learn more, get your copy here.
If they have taken some action
Ask them how it feels to amplify their feeling of success/completing a task. Help them understand how much closer that has gotten them to the overall goal. If you can, point out that others have already noticed the progress or change.
Make sure they leave the session focused on the next action item on their list!
If they are getting close to wrapping up on that topic
Ask if they want to create a new Development Plan/or redo the FutureSelf exercise to start looking into a new topic.
A few other tips for successful follow-ups
Here are some mental models that can help you make the conversation meaningful for your PMs and encourage them to reflect on their progress.
Tame your advice monster: Find the balance between asking and telling (see the illustration below). It’s natural that product leads want to tell their direct reports how to get things done instead of letting them work it out for themselves. They love to give advice and are always focused on getting results ASAP. Make a point of identifying your advice monster and taming it. The next time your PM asks, “Hey, what do you think I should do about this?” put your advice monster back in its cage and don’t fall into the trap. Instead of offering advice, ask them first what they think they should do, then tell some stories or give some examples and ask if that gave them some new ideas.
Keep the dialogue going: Remind your PMs about their personal development outside the scheduled follow-up sessions as well. You could end a product team meeting by reminding everyone to make sure to work on their next action item. Some companies schedule reminders for that via Slackbot or other automated mechanism. And once this pandemic is over, you might want to use the quick “hi” at the coffee machine to ask how things are going in terms of their learning activities.
Don't shy away from hard conversations if necessary: Unfortunately, many leaders try to ignore the issue of poor performance and hope it will go away. But that is never the case. And if an employee is repeatedly missing their own development goals and action steps, you need to have a serious conversation with them. If you struggle with that, consider this quote from Dan Stillman’s book Good Talk: “Organizations are limited by the conversations they don´t have.” So make sure you talk about why they have missed out on personal development lately. Some ideas onhow to prepare such a session can be found in my book STRONG, Chapter 8, Monitoring Performance and Giving Feedback.
Don’t be afraid to delegate: Remember you can delegate follow-ups to other team members as long as you make sure they still happen (and if everybody involved likes the idea of a learning group). You’ll also want to make sure people are capable of peer coaching. Be sure to send them a link to this blog post so they know how to guide the conversation.
Summary
I know we’ve covered a lot here. So, if you only take away three things from this post, remember the following:
Follow-ups are an easy way to make sure people development happens.
You need a base/start/development plan first that outlines a few action items. The Future Self is a great template for that.
You don’t have to run every follow-up session yourself; you just have to make sure they happen.
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