Make Promises, and Keep Them

“Did you come up with a solution for the customer renewal problem?”

The question gripped my suddenly overwhelmed and embarrassed heart. Two weeks prior, I had agreed to create a proposal for solving this particular issue. I had dropped the ball.

“Keep your word” is a core value I teach my children. It’s also a requirement for high performance in most jobs. When applied consistently, doing what you say you are going to do can be a professional superpower.

When someone tells me they will do something I expect them to follow through about 9 times out of 10. Unfortunately, keeping your word 90% of the time is not good enough!

Think about an app that you depend on almost every day like Gmail. If Gmail were only 90% reliable, it would be out of service for over a month every year. No one would use the app if that were the case. 

People are not expected to be as consistent as email software but we can learn a valuable lesson from Gmail. The reliability that an application, car, appliance, or human being offers us shapes the kind of relationship we have with it. If we feel like we can depend on something or someone, it frees us from having to make contingency plans. A high degree of reliability lowers the mental and emotional overhead of engaging in a relationship. People remember when they feel wronged. Sometimes all it takes is one broken promise to taint our reputation.

For that reason, some people go to great lengths to avoid commitment. This is impractical and undesirable. Studies have shown that making and fulfilling promises is a strong way to build trust and connection. We should look for opportunities to make promises and commitments that we can follow through on.

Why don’t we keep our promises and what can we do about it? 

Mistake #1: We over-promise

My wife and I recently did a full interior remodel of our house. Near the beginning of the project, the general contractor told us the rough plumbing would be completed in 3-4 weeks. It ended up taking 8 weeks! Similar timelines were communicated and inevitably missed again and again throughout the project. Despite the contractor delivering high-quality work, this pattern of over-promising and under-delivering drove us insane. It negatively complicated what would have otherwise been a happy customer relationship.

Over-promising is communicating an unachievable timeline or overstating confidence in the expected result. It can also be presenting your intentions as guarantees before they’ve come face to face with the unmoving contours of reality.

In order to stop over-promising, you have to train yourself to recognize when you are tempted to make someone happy by committing to something you can’t guarantee. Once we start to recognize when we are overpromising, we can chunk our promises into pieces that we can guarantee delivery on.

For example, instead of promising my co-worker a finished proposal in two weeks, I could have promised to schedule a time to begin work on the proposal and agreed to give a status update in the next meeting.

Mistake #2: We fail to create action plans for our commitments

My parents recently visited from out of town. At the start of their visit, my 10-year-old son asked if we could take my parents to his favorite park that has a goldfish pond. I figured we would have plenty of opportunities to hop in the car for a quick outing the following week so I said “yes” without hesitation. By the end of the week, we hadn’t made it to the park and I had broken a promise to my child. I can still feel the sting of disappointment in his voice.

In this case, my problem wasn’t overpromising. There was time to go to the park. My mistake was not following through on carving out space for my promise in the family's list of priorities.

I see the error of sloppy follow-up run rampant in many professional lives. A “yes” with no specific action plan, priority, or deadline is begging to get bumped by someone else’s plan, priority, or deadline. This mistake can be a fast track to a mediocre reputation.

The solution to sloppy follow-through is building a habit of writing down and scheduling a specific plan every time you make a promise. A goal with no game plan is a countdown clock to failure. Build this habit by deciding where you will write down your action plans and setting a daily reminder to take inventory of any promises you haven’t captured.

Every day is an opportunity to be more reliable

I could have avoided the mental anguish of disappointing my co-workers had I recognized the temptation to over-promise and instead made an achievable promise with a scheduled plan of action. Once you internalize how valuable reliability is, you will gain the clarity required to create habits that will make you a rock of trustworthiness. Use each day to cast a vote for becoming someone who makes promises and keeps them. It’s a sure-fire way to set yourself apart in a world of flakey people.