Why is commitment important? Let’s say you have already applied the to-do’s from the authenticity chapter and as a consequence you have the initial good will of your team. That’s great, so you start with the right foot. Nevertheless, your team expects from you results and if they are being elusive for too long, your team mates patience will wear thin quickly.

So it’s time to start getting some tangible results. Just for a moment pick an individual or team achievement from the past that made you feel proud. Remember that unique state of elation after seeing that goal fulfilled. Given that you are proud of it, it’s sensible to assume that it involved overcoming a number of challenges. Of course you put hard work into it and used your advanced skills and creativity, but what made you keep going despite the difficulties(think about the most difficult situations)? The initial drive can come from various sources of motivation(curiosity, competition, need, etc.) and gives you the energy to get it started. What is needed to keep pushing until you get to the end result is a promise that you make, either to yourself or to your team. If we look back at our experiences we realize that in the end the difference between getting and not getting something done is commitment. Or luck. But as I am no expert in creating luck, I will continue writing about commitment.

Commitment is a personal issue, which implies that in order to have your team commitment you need to earn the commitment of each individual member. Notice my emphasis on “earn”, not impose(we’ll get into more details about that in the “Myths” section). In our complex environments, achieving something of importance typically requires the involvement of many parties. In this context commitment is like a chain, which is as weak as its weakest link. That is the place where it’s going to break, the link of no commitment. A trap is to fool yourself that a “best effort” promise means it’s more likely to happen than to not. Don’t make hard plans based on “best effort”, or at least include a significant contingency for that, otherwise you will get burnt.

Have you ever been in a situation when you really needed someone’s help and you weren’t able to get one to make that promise to you? How did it feel toward the situation and the individual that didn’t want to commit? I guess you don’t want to be regarded the same way by your team mates. Guess what, you should be the first to commit in front of your team toward the objectives your team needs to achieve. It’s all or nothing, middle way is just an illusion. How motivated your colleagues will be if they sense that even you don’t believe in the target? And great news, in your case as a leader, you need to commit in front of many parties besides your team mates(think about customers, higher management, etc.).

Another important aspect of commitment is that it is contextual and it needs to be specific. “I will help you with getting funding for your initiative” is not a commitment, “I will obtain 1 million Euro for your project in Q3” is. Ask for commitments, and conversely make promises toward objective goals. Any promise in regard to vague goals will lead to frustration on all sides.

At last but not least, beware that lack of commitment leads to cynicism and total demotivation. Moreover, lack of commitment is contagious. It’s enough to have one team member that doesn’t commit repeatedly and the whole team’s morale will suffer. “Why should John get away without any hard commitment and I have to work hard, some times doing overtime because I commit? That’s not fair” – I would be surprised if you have never encountered a situation that led to these thoughts crossing your mind.

Ultimately, commitment is just the first step, you also need to deliver. Making promises and not delivering is even worse than not making them in the first place. To add insult to injury, you can do even worse than that, telling your stakeholder(team mates or otherwise) at a moment’s notice that you won’t keep your former promise anymore because of various reasons.

Myths

1.- I don’t need anyone’s commitment, I just impose goals on my team and they will do it because I am their boss and I said so.

Monday morning. Team status meeting. Results don’t look good, there is a negative deviation compared to the target. Sarcastic questions are asked by Mary(the Team Leader). “This is unacceptable, we need to make this target until next week.” says Mary. “But boss, we did our best, we put a lot of overtime, maybe we’re missing something, but we can’t do it” tries Tom to put the situation in context and ask for help. “I am tired of excuses, you do it or else”.

While this approach might work for a limited time in an autocratic corporate culture, it is by far the most inefficient. It implies arrogance, lack of respect and intimidation. All these will lead to a high level of demotivation in the team, that consequently will push your colleagues to their default fight or flight response. Some of them will try to leave the team as soon as possible, while others will just become non-reactive. Not a good place to be for a team.

If people are not involved in the decision making, especially related to the work they are supposed to deliver, they don’t feel connected to the outcome. Moreover, this state of mind will block any creative thinking that could lead to solving the problems at hand. Team culture will evolve toward covering own ass, finding excuses and blaming others.

For best results, you need to get the commitment of your team. If this is not happening, you need to dig deeper and understand the root causes for which they don’t believe it’s doable. And no, the reason for their lack of commitment is neither complacency nor laziness. Most likely it is their desire of keeping promises and at the same time not having a solution they believe in. So together with them go to the root cause so that you all can find a solution.

2.- If I will ask my team for more than they can possibly do I will achieve the highest output from my team.

Setting ambitious goals is a very good practice that helps everybody in the team face challenges, and as a consequence grow. Also, the team as a whole benefits from this as nothing has a higher positive effect in bonding than overcoming together challenges. Setting unrealistic goals on the other hand has the opposite effect. The first goal is set, the deadline comes and with it the first failure. People become demotivated. Fast forward several times and people will learn that they can’t achieve the set goals. What’s the consequence, they will not believe or truly commit to any future goals. It becomes  “learned helplessness”. Wait, it can get even worse than that. And that is to ask for unrealistic goals that the team will eventually find out later that the goals had no practical purpose.

3.- Individual commitment is not necessary, if I just ask the whole team, someone will later pick up the task and complete it.

“And we need to also set up our electronic boards, can we do it by next week?” asked Mary during the weekly status meeting. “Sure, we’ll do it, of course, we need them.” responded joyfully the team. Next status meeting reveals that the boards were not set. What happened? Mary explained clearly the goal, it was toward everyone’s benefit and the team committed candidly. Still, the task was not done. The trick lies in the fact that there was no specific owner assigned and no personal commitment to it. More generally, it is related to what in Psychology is known as “diffusion of responsibility”. Briefly, in order to make sure that something gets done, we need to ask for individual ownership and commitment. The optimized version would have been “Who is going to make sure the boards are set until next week?” Mary would have said. “I will do it” says Tony.

4.- If I don’t commit I avoid the risk of being reprimanded for ulterior failures.

This is a common fallacy, more generally related to the illusion of having the potential rewards without the possibly associated risks. During the first lectures of a Corporate Finance class I was exposed to the principle that if you want a higher reward you need to commit to higher risks. Since then, my experience has been that this principle applies in many other aspects and not only in Finance. Lack of commitment is a big demotivator, especially coming from someone in a leadership position. It typically transmits lack of interest toward common objectives and lack of courage. Neither your team nor your higher ups will appreciate this attitude. Don’t forget that you were given a leadership position in order to take more risks and responsibilities. People will start to avoid dealing with you, so it is not a sustainable strategy.

Metrics

In order to have practical purpose, commitment should be judged in tandem with delivering. By that I mean that there are two sides of the coin: making a promise and keeping it. Thus, in order to be able to assess objectively you need to count the actions pertaining to both sides. Moreover, you should be careful to not mistake forced commitment for the real one. Forced commitment has the same truth value as the confessions “extracted” by the Inquisition.

Individual TODO

•  Identify your stake holders and tilt the balance alternatively toward a different stakeholder during various moments in time.
  As a leader you need to deliver to a certain number of stakeholders. Talking about the corporate environment, you have to deal with at least 3 parties: team, customer and higher management. Given that each has different interests, you are constantly pulled in 3 directions by these forces. A sustainable equilibrium state is when all those parties are happy in the long run. That means you have to commit and deliver to all of them. A big mistake is to constantly tilt the balance toward one of them(most frequently toward team or toward higher management). Be careful to tilt the balance toward various forces during various moments in time, but remember that in the next step you will need to favor another one of the 3 forces.
• Don’t force commitments from your team. Real commitment, the one you can count on is only voluntary. Yes, it takes effort, you need to have a clear “why” and you need to be able to express it. But it pays off.
• Don’t avoid making commitments.
• Keep your promises at all costs.

TODO with your team

• Explain the importance of commitment and alleviate the fear of making commitments. This can work only in conjunction with a no-blame team culture. As soon as failing to deliver an objective ends up in blame, people will be very skeptical to commit in the future. Or they will do so to goals that are way below the true potential of the team.
• Make sure the goals are very clear. Unclear goals lead to unrealistic expectations.
• Be the first to commit to the team initiatives. You should set an example.
• If people don’t commit, there might be a very serious reason for it, investigate together with the team until you get to the root cause. This way you can solve the real problems keeping your team away from your objectives.
• Don’t allow exceptions in your team regarding commitment. A single individual that avoids commitment will result in everybody doing that.
• Present ambitious but realistic goals to which everybody commits. Unrealistic goals lead to low level of commitment. Low level of commitment is the path to cynicism.
• Make sure each decision meeting wraps up with everybody’s commitment.
• Write down your promises.

Tips

• Create personal and team backlogs. I have a backlog which I open as the first thing at the start of each work day. It is a very simple and effective way of making sure I keep my commitments. Also, I adopted the habit of writing down immediately any task coming my way. A common cause of not keeping promises is forgetting them.
• It is useful to have a constant reminder of your objectives. Use an “information radiator” that displays the target and the current status toward achieving it.
• Split tasks and keep track of your status in sprint(typically 2 week) intervals.

 

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