True commitment

What does it mean to truly be committed to something?

In the workplace, we let the concept become very slippery. We ask people to commit to a deadline, and try to hold them “accountable” for that, but despite that many things don’t get done on time or done properly.

So let’s take a moment to step back and look at the concept of making a work commitment.

Ideally, commitment should mean:

• I have high confidence that I will do it
• I will work very hard to remove any obstacles to getting it done
• If I fail, I accept the consequences of the outcome
• Which means I’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen

Using this definition, then, commitments should be unusual and reserved for the most important things. We shouldn’t take them lightly, just treating them as “it’s my job” or “it’ll be my top priority.”

Which means that as leaders, we shouldn’t use the term lightly or too often.

It turns out, this opens up space for much clearer communication:

• This is my best estimate right now, including a little padding for surprises along the way
• It’ll be my top work priority, but there are other tasks I’m responsible for as well
• I can put in some extra effort, but not so much that it destroys my family life or burns me out
• I’ll let you know as soon as I see something which endangers meeting this goal

It used to drive me nuts in the software business that the norm was to have amazing schedule slips. Everybody expected slips, so there wasn’t really true “accountability” for missing deadlines. Managers would create hidden plans which even doubled the size of the bottom-up schedule.

And managers who tried to enforce schedules as “commitments” would burn their people out or have severe quality problems.

So let’s start being more honest and use our words to describe what’s really going on. We can estimate, we can work hard, but ultimately we can’t entirely control the future.