Keeping promises is a simple behaviour that has the power to boost accountability, credibility and trust, all in one. Just imagine for a second that everybody in your organisation kept their promises! It’s so simple that it’s easily trivialised. But this simple and disruptive idea is also directly linked to employee retention…

There is a whole industry trying to provide data on why employees leave an organisation or on their level of happiness or frustration… Employers tend to like these surveys a lot: employee satisfaction, employee engagement, etc. A consistent feature in the list of ‘reasons for leaving the company’ is, “My manager didn’t keep his/her promises.” It is incredibly simple stuff. It is intuitive, (when we hear it, we immediately say, “oh, sure!”) but we usually do not grasp how important it is to people. The behavioural device of ‘keeping promises’ has the power to upset an entire organisation if this doesn’t happen, if people don’t keep their promises. On the positive side, it can also create a culture worth getting out of bed for on a Monday morning. We are not talking about grandiose promises of promotion or reward, but about more everyday, simple promises.

“Imagine that everybody kept their promises“. This is what I often ask clients to do to guide their imagination into finding out what kind of organisation they would (like to) have.

This is what the powerful and simple behaviour of ‘keeping promises’ does:

• It increases credibility and not just your own. It also increases the ‘collective credibility’ when more people do keep their promises or when it has virally become the norm.
• This is accountability in action. A ‘culture of accountability’ isn’t created by people simply preaching the merits of being accountable, but by having people behave in certain ways.
• It creates a habit of reliability and therefore a platform for excellent execution.
• It is transferable from the inside to the outside. If your internal habit is to keep promises, why would you behave differently towards your customers?
• It forces you to go deeper into what it takes to keep your promises. Many times the attitude is good (often one of servility!), but the offer may be unrealistic compared to what can be delivered. When ‘the promise’ fails, all credibility goes out the window, even if the failure was ‘for a good reason’.
• It will force you to understand other people’s priorities and it will put you in the shoes of people you depend on for delivering a promise somewhere else. Keeping a promise to a customer forces you to understand the constraints of the department responsible for the delivery.
• When promises are routinely kept, the organisation increases its collective trust capital.
• Keeping promises creates a ‘safe’ culture of interdependence that encourages interpersonal relationships, collaboration and cooperation.

‘Keeping promises’ as a behaviour needs to be reinforced by acknowledging it when it happens and by showing the benefits. The concept is so simple that you run the risk of it being trivialised and not taken seriously. It is worth remembering our original definition of ‘disruptive idea’: they are simple, cheap, can be implemented now and have enormous power if spread virally across the organisation. In my experience, this simple behaviour very quickly grabs people’s attention and ranks very high in their mind. Its language is easy and noticeable (”Here it is, I kept my promise.”) and the organisation feels the positive outcome very quickly. To introduce it you should follow the viral change principle of modelling it yourself and then letting others copy it once you have shown ‘how it works’.

If you want a culture of accountability, trust, credibility, confidence, empowerment, reliability and excellent execution you must install, practice and reinforce one single behaviour: ‘we keep promises here’.

If you want people to stay in the organisation, ditto.

Chances are your promise is dependent on somebody else’s promise to you. Make sure you will be able to keep yours!

Some people have never had a problem with not keeping promises because they have never committed to anything.

Copyright © - Leandro Herrero - 2008