Commitment’s Many Faces

The word, commitment, has many faces (situational conditions) to which it applies and, as a consequence, a whole host of different meanings with those conditions.

In the remainder of this blog, i’m going to highlight various commitments we make and the various ways in which we violate these commitments. My goal is to make us aware of the commitments we make and how we can do a better job of honoring them.

We are all good, well-intentioned people. Yet, we make decisions without fully anticipating the impact these decisions have. Awareness of the ways in which we often, unintentionally, violate our commitments enables us to do a better job of honoring the commitments we make.

Commitment & Commitment Violations

Business owners commit to their customers’ welfare, then:

• Create policies that without considering the negative impact they have on their customers.
• Reduce the size of the product to hide the fact that they’re raising prices.
• Reduce staff in a way that diminishes the level of service once provided.
• Make it impossible for a customer to talk to a person when they have a problem.
• Lower the quality of an offering to save money…hoping the customer won’t notice.

Business owners claim to care about their employees, yet:

• Fail to offer employees opportunities to grow within their job.
• Move successful producers into management roles, whether or not they’re capable of being successful in that role, without providing effective leadership training or mentoring.
• Frequently point to an employee’s failings without ever recognizing what they do well.
• Criticizing employees’ performance when it’s the owner’s failure to set clear expectations and priorities.
• Altering compensation and benefit programs without involving employees in the discussion or providing any rationale for the changes.
• Micromanaging employees: in essence, telling them that you don’t trust them or that you consider them inept.

Business owners claim to want mutually-beneficial relationships with vendors, yet:

• Consistently demand lower prices from their vendors.
• Establish payment policies of 120 days or more…negatively impacting vendors’ cash flow.
• Wait to the last moment to order essential products/services and expect next day delivery.
• Expect vendors to accept returns on expired offerings.
• Expect vendors to accept returns on orders that “don’t meet specifications” when the vendor was given the wrong specifications.

We make commitments to ourselves, then quickly set them aside. Business owners time-block their calendars for personal times like exercise and skill development, then quickly set them aside when a customer or prospect calls. Business owners need to honor their commitments to themselves with the same verve as the commitments made to customers.

In a similar vein, we all make commitments to ourselves then quickly set them aside because we’re too busy, other things are more important and a myriad other excuses. Think New Year’s resolutions. The reality is that we’re making excuses because what we say we want isn’t what we really want. In other words, we make commitments to ourselves when we really don’t want what we’re committing to.

Husbands and wives commit to “’til death do us part,” yet fail to work through the tough times…and, as someone who has recently celebrated his 52nd wedding anniversary, I can tell you there isn’t a long-term marriage that hasn’t experienced multiple tough times. Long-term marriages don’t exist without a strong commitment to one another.

Parents commit to providing safe, loving, encouraging environments for their kids, then:

• Criticize them when they don’t meet our expectations.
• Are overly severe in punishing them.
• Are too protective of them…thus denying them the opportunities to make mistakes and recover from those mistakes, which, if allowed, assures that they’ll make better decisions in the future.
• Try to control their child’s destiny while ignoring their interests.
• Fail to teach them that everything in life is a tradeoff and the quality of their choices depends upon them understanding the tradeoff they’re making.
• Place our careers ahead of our kids…thus leaving them without the love and direction that assures future happiness.
• Fail to teach them how to handle money at an early age.

As volunteers, we make commitments, then fail to follow through leaving others to pick up the slack or mayhem to occur. Volunteer commitments should carry the same weight as any other commitment we make.

This may seem like one of the most negative blog posts I’ve ever written…and it may be. But, as I said earlier, my goal is to make your life easier and more enjoyable. Making you aware of the ways we all, myself included, drop the ball when it comes to honoring commitments…with the express intent of helping you do a better job of:

• Deciding when to commit and when to say no.
• Honoring the commitment once made…including commitments to ourselves.

In today’s fast-paced world (in reality, every age has been fast-paced for its time), it’s quick and convenient to make a commitment and move on…until it’s time to honor that commitment. Then the reality that we’ve overcommitted hits us and we either honor our commitment at a personal cost to us or fail to honor our commitment which costs those to whom we made the commitment.

In either situation, someone loses. We can avoid both negative results by pausing before we make a commitment to assess both our willingness and ability to honor the commitment. If either the willingness or the ability don’t exist, we need to say “no” to that commitment. It’s the right thing to do for all parties involved. When you say “no,” you give the other party a gift, the gift of being able to find someone who can honor their commitment.

As I said earlier, we are all good, well-intentioned human beings. Our goal is to help others whenever possible…to make their lives easier and more enjoyable. Yet, we regularly fall into the traps described above.

Takeaways

Failing to honor a commitment doesn’t make us bad people. Consistently failing to honor our commitments, to ourselves and others, makes us unreliable and detrimental to the parties involved.

My hope is that the examples above, help you assess where you are in your handling of the commitments you’ve made so that you can do a better job of honoring your commitments in the future.

The world becomes a better place for us all when we make conscious decisions before making a commitment because we are more likely to honor our commitments…a win for all involved.

If you’ve found this post helpful, please share it with your friends. It’s a great way to let them know how much you care.

If you’d like the leaders in your organization to learn how to use the numbers more effectively and dramatically improve the productivity of your workforce, contact me to learn more about these resources:

Resources

Making the EXCEPTIONAL Normal program helps you identify and nurture emerging leaders who elevate all around them to higher levels of performance and greater job enjoyment.

Financial Awareness & Strategy program where employees learn to identify opportunities to improve financial results and prioritize these opportunities on the basis of which produces the greatest impact with the least effort. Greater financial awareness = Better decisions.