The Follow-up Factor in Leadership
Leadership is not just for leaders anymore. Top companies are beginning to understand that sustaining peak performance requires a firm-wide commitment to developing leaders that is tightly aligned to organizational objectives — a commitment much easier to understand than to achieve. Organizations must find ways to cascade leadership from senior management to men and women at all levels and to create 100 million new leaders throughout our society.

Though leadership is largely defined as “working with and through others to achieve objectives”, it sometimes seems there are as many approaches to leadership development as there are leadership developers. One increasingly popular tool for developing leaders is executive coaching. To ascertain what works better, leadership development programs in eight major corporations were reviewed. Although all eight companies had the same overarching goals — to determine the desired behaviors for leaders in their organizations and to help leaders increase their effectiveness by better aligning actual practices with these desired behaviors — they used different leadership development methodologies: offsite training versus onsite coaching, short duration versus long duration, internal coaches versus external coaches, and traditional classroom-based training versus on-the-job interaction.

Rather than just evaluating “participant happiness” at the end of a program, each of the eight companies measured the participants’ perceived increase in leadership effectiveness over time. “Increased effectiveness” was not determined by the participants in the development effort; it was assessed by pre-selected co-workers and stakeholders.

Time and again, one variable emerged as central to the achievement of positive long-term change: the participants’ ongoing interaction and follow-up with colleagues. Leaders who discussed their own improvement priorities with their co-workers, and then regularly followed up with these co-workers, showed striking improvement. Leaders who did not have ongoing dialogue with colleagues showed improvement that barely exceeded random chance. This was true whether the leader had an external coach, an internal coach, or no coach. It was also true whether the participants went to a training program for five days, went for one day, or did not attend a training program at all.

The development of leaders, the study concluded, is a contact sport.
The study approach The eight companies whose leadership development programs were studied are:

• An aerospace/defense contractor: 1,528 managers (ranging from midlevel to the CEO and his team) received training for two and a half days. Each person reviewed his or her 360-degree feedback in person with an outside consultant. All received at least three reminder notes to help ensure that they would follow up with their co-workers.
• A financial-services organization: At GE Capital, 178 high-potential managers received training that lasted five days. Each leader was assigned a personal human resources coach from inside the company. Each coach had one-on-one sessions with his or her client on an ongoing basis (either in person or by phone).
• An electronics manufacturer: 258 upper-level managers received in-person coaching from an external coach. They did not attend an offsite training program. They were then each assigned an internal coach who had been trained in effective coaching skills. This coach followed up with the managers every three to four months.
• A diversified services company: 6,748 managers (ranging from midlevel to the CEO and his team) received one-on-one feedback from an external coach during two training programs, each two and a half days long, which were conducted 15 months apart. Although there was no formal follow-up provided by the coach, participants knew they were going to be measured on their follow-up efforts.
• A media company: 354 managers (including the CEO and his team) received one-on-one coaching and feedback during a one-day program. An external coach provided follow-up coaching every three to four months.
• A telecommunications company: 281 managers (including the CEO and his team) received training for one day. Each leader was given an external coach, who had continuing one-on-one sessions with his or her client.
• A pharmaceutical/health-care organization: Johnson & Johnson involved 2,060 executives and managers, starting with the CEO and his team, in one and a half days of leadership training. Each person reviewed his or her initial 360-degree feedback with an outside consultant (almost all by phone). Participants received at least three reminder notes to help ensure that they would follow up with their co-workers.
• A high-tech manufacturing company: At Agilent Technologies Inc., 73 high-potential leaders received coaching for one year from an external coach, an effort unconnected to any training program. Each coach had one-on-one sessions with his or her client on an ongoing basis, either in person or by phone.

Each company customized its leadership development approach to its specific needs. Five of the eight focused on the development of high-potential leaders, and between 73 and 354 participants were involved in their programs. The three other companies included almost all managers (above midlevel), and involved between 1,528 and 6,748 managers. The degree of international representation varied among organizations. At two companies, almost all of the participants were American. Non-U.S. executives made up almost half of the participants in one company’s program. The other five had varying levels of international participation.

Some of the companies used traditional classroom-based training in their development effort. In each of these companies, participants would attend an offsite program and receive instruction on what the desired characteristics were for leaders in their organizations, why these characteristics were important, and how participants might better align their own leadership behavior with the desired model. Some companies, by contrast, used continuing coaching, a methodology that did not necessarily involve offsite training, but did rely on regular interaction with a personal coach. Some companies used both offsite training and coaching. Along with differences, there were commonalties among the programs. Each company had spent extensive time reviewing the challenges it believed its leaders would uniquely face as its business evolved. Each had developed a profile of desired leadership behaviors that had been approved by upper management. After ensuring that these desired leadership behaviors were aligned with the company vision and values, each company developed a 360-degree feedback process to help leaders understand the extent to which their own behavior (as perceived by co-workers) matched the desired behavior for leaders in the corporation. All eight placed a set of expectations upon participants. The developing leaders in these eight companies were expected to do the

following and evaluated accordingly:

• Review their 360-degree feedback with an internal or external consultant.
• Identify one to three areas for improvement.
• Discuss their areas for improvement with key co-workers.
• Ask colleagues for suggestions on how to increase effectiveness in selected areas for change.
• Follow up with co-workers to get ideas for improvement.
• Have co-worker respondents complete a confidential custom-designed “mini-survey” three to 15 months after the start of their programs.

Each participant received mini-survey summary feedback from three to 16 co-workers. Colleagues were asked to rate the participants’ increased effectiveness in the specific selected behaviors as well as participants’ overall increase (or decrease) in leadership effectiveness. Co-workers were also asked to measure the degree of follow-up they had with the participant. In total, we collected more than 86,000 mini-survey responses for the 11,480 managers who participated in leadership development activities. This huge database gave us the opportunity to explore the points of commonality and distinction among these eight very different leadership development efforts.

Personal Touch
The overarching conclusion distilled from the surveys in all the programs was that personal contact mattered — and mattered greatly. Five of the corporations used the same measurement methodologies, while three used a slightly different approach. All eight companies measured the frequency of managers’ discussions and follow-up with co-workers and compared this measure with the perceived increase in leadership effectiveness, as judged by co-workers in the mini-surveys. The first five firms — the aerospace/defense contractor, GE Capital, the electronics manufacturer, the diversified services company, and the media company — used a seven-point scale, from –3 to +3, to measure perceived change in leadership effectiveness, and a ½ve-point scale to plot the amount of follow-up, ranging from a low of “no follow-up” to a high of “consistent or periodic follow-up.” They then compared the two sets of measurements by plotting the effectiveness scores and the follow-up tallies on charts.

The remaining three firms used slightly different measurement criteria. The telecommunications company used a “percentage improvement” scale to measure perceived increases in leadership effectiveness, as judged by co-workers. It then compared “percentage improvement” on leadership effectiveness with each level of follow-up. Johnson & Johnson and Agilent measured leadership improvement using the same seven-point scale employed by the first five companies, but they did not categorize the degree of follow-up beyond the simple “followed up” vs. “did not follow up.”
As noted earlier, follow-up here refers to efforts that leaders make to solicit continuing and updated ideas for improvement from their co-workers. In the two companies that compared “followed up” with “did not follow up,” participants who followed up were viewed by their colleagues as far more effective than the leaders who did not. In the companies that measured the degree of follow-up, leaders who had “frequent” or “periodic/consistent” interaction with co-workers were reliably seen as having improved their effectiveness far more than leaders who had “little” or “no” interaction with co-workers. Leadership, it’s clear from this research, is a relationship. And the most important participants in this relationship are not the coach and the “coachee.” They are the leader and the colleague. Most of the leaders in this study work in knowledge environments — in companies where the value of the product or service derives less and less from manufacturing scale and, to use Peter Drucker’s formulation, more and more from the processing and creation of information to define and solve problems. In discussing leadership with knowledge workers, Professor Drucker has said, “The leader of the past was a person who knew how to tell. The leader of the future will be a person who knows how to ask.” The study shows that leaders who regularly ask for input are seen as increasing in effectiveness. Leaders who don’t follow up are not necessarily bad leaders; they are just not seen as getting better.

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