Chapter 6: Promises Made, Promises Broken

Overview

Future leaders will be less concerned with saying what they will deliver and more concerned with delivering what they have said they would.

—Dave Ulrich, NAMED BY BUSINESSWEEK AS ONE OF THE WORLD’S TOP 10 EDUCATORS IN MANAGEMENT AND THE TOP EDUCATOR IN HUMAN RESOURCES*

* The Leader of the Future, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1996, pp. 212–213.

On the first day the country’s major airlines began operating flights again after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Kathleen Holmgren was scheduled to fly from California to the Midwest. As senior vice president of Santa Clara, California–based Sun Microsystem’s Network Storage Marketing Group, Holmgren was committed to leading a quarterly meeting in Colorado with approximately 100 Sun employees who were based there. But she, like so many Americans, was afraid to fly. “I was really scared about it, and my three children were saying, ‘Mommy, please don’t go,’” she said. After Holmgren and her husband discussed how best to handle the situation, she flew out as scheduled. She opened the meeting in Colorado by saying to the group of employees: “I felt like I made a promise to you so that’s why

I’m here. But I also need to keep a promise to my family. I can’t stay the four days that I said I would because my family is nervous about my being away from them.” As for the rest of the nation, it had been an unsettling time for Sun employees. One of the company’s directors was killed in one of the airplanes that crashed, and Sun also had had offices in one of the Twin Towers, although all those employees made it out safely, according to Holmgren. The Colorado executives were impressed with Holmgren’s commitment to keeping her promise, and many of them thanked her during the questionand-answer portion of the meeting.

Maintaining our commitments and keeping our promises are difficult tasks in both our personal and professional lives, and the complex situations in which we find ourselves do not always provide a clear choice between breaking a promise and keeping it. Sometimes, in fact, the best choice is breaking a promise as little as possible.

For example, say that you have committed to attend a very important annual planning meeting concerning product development. The meeting involves members from three departments—engineering, sales, and marketing—and as head of marketing, you are expected to present valuable information on your company’s competitors. Leaving the driveway on the morning of the meeting, two kids at the bus stop run toward your car and tell you a man in a truck twice drove slowly by the bus stop and looked “creepy.” As someone who is part of the neighborhood watch program, you feel obligated to wait with these children and then report their concerns to the school’s principal. You know that by doing so, you will be late for your important meeting—breaking your promise. However, your obligation to help, a promise you made when you became a part of the watch program, overrides the commitment you made to be at the meeting. To minimize the damage (to break the promise as little as possible), you call your assistant and ask her to pass the word that you will be late and that if you totally miss the meeting, you will provide your complete research in a written report by the end of the day.

You might think that the decision to fulfill your watch program duties is so clearly the right decision that there will be no negative consequences. After all, you are choosing children’s safety over business. Your coworkers will not only understand your choice, but they also likely will admire it, too, right? This answer is not so clear. For example, if you are a person who frequently breaks promises (even for the right reasons), your integrity may be in question. People may start to wonder about all your “excuses.”

It’s a hefty word, promise, and it conjures up the big ones in life—marriage, an oath of office, a legal vow to “tell the whole truth so help you God.” But credible leaders take everyday promises seriously, too. If we were to place the kinds of promises we make on a continuum, with absolute promises on one side (marriage vows, for example) and relative or “casual” promises on the other (such as saying to someone, “I’ll call you right back”), the promise you made to be at that meeting would fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum.

The consequences of breaking promises—including lost credibility—are likely to be far more serious on the absolute side of the continuum than on the relative side. How much your credibility is affected when you break a promise depends on both the level of the promise you made and how frequently you fail to fulfill your promises.

Whether you should or should not break an absolute promise is a complicated personal decision that does not belong in this book. Instead, we will examine the more relative promises, the ones people make—and break—in business everyday, the ones that affect people’s credibility most often. Commitments to call someone, to honor a deadline, and to attend a meeting are all relative promises. Avoiding them is nearly impossible, and breaking them, unfortunately, is the norm. We easily slip into the verbal blind spot of over-promising. “I’ll have the report to you by Tuesday” translates to “You won’t mind if it’s not to you until midmorning Wednesday, right?” “Let’s do lunch” means “See you soon.” “I’ll call you” really means “I’ll be thinking of you.” Just because you omit the words I promise does not mean that you are held to a lower standard of commitment. Children sometimes will say, “Well, but I didn’t promise” when they do not do what they said they would, but in grown-up reality, there is no such thing as “crossed fingers” to cancel out a commitment we chose to make.

Leaders who break commitments send loud messages through their organizations. According to a recent survey of 2700 CEOs conducted by management consulting firm Proudfoot, company chiefs arrive late for 6 in 10 meetings ( USA Today, November 26, 2002). Chronic tardiness is a promise breaking habit that sends a host of negative messages: “This meeting isn’t really important.” “A good work ethic—what’s the big deal?” “I’m the big guy. I can do what I want.”

Other promises are promises of confidentiality and value promises —commitments implied through the values we proclaim. These are often implied promises because the promise is never spoken but is instead understood without saying. An example of a value promise is a leader who begins a new campaign within his or her company for “innovation and creativity.” If, within 3 months after the campaign begins, this leader rejects all suggestions for a new way of doing performance reviews and proceeds with the way they have always been done, then the leader’s actions do not back up the values asserted with his or her words. In the eyes of the employees, this leader is breaking a promise.

When employees detect an inconsistency in a leader’s words and deeds, trust decreases and morale turns sour. Before long, productivity—and the company’s bottom line— is negatively affected. A study conducted by Tony Simons, associate professor of management and organization behavior at Cornell University, confirms promise-keeping’s value to a company’s bottom line. Simons’ study involved 6500 employees from 76 companies in the hospitality industry, specifically hotels, but his findings certainly could apply to other industries as well. He found that an increase in score of only 1/8 point on a 5-point scale in a hotel’s “behavioral integrity” (consistency between words and actions) on employee surveys would improve the hotel’s annual profits by 2.5 percent of revenues. For an average full-service hotel, this is $261,000 added to the bottom line.

“Hotels where employees strongly believed their managers followed through on promises and demonstrated the values they preached were substantially more profitable than those whose managers scored average or lower,” Simons wrote in the Harvard Business Review (September 2002). “No other single aspect of manager behavior that we measured had as large an impact on profits.”

Yet even with promise-keeping’s bottom-line benefits, research confirms that it is an unusual act in the workplace. In a study involving 700 people, a significant proportion of them chose not to keep their word even when told that breaking a particular promise had legal repercussions. The results showed that promise-keeping is a “very low priority in the workplace, a phantom work ethic rather than a core value” (“Promise-Keeping: A Low Priority in a Hierarchy of Workplace Values,” by Ellwood F. Oakley and Patricia Lynch, Journal of Business Ethics 27: 377– 392, 2000).

Our own research confirms that of 12,000 employees, 55 percent believed that a boss or coworker could improve in consistently keeping promises. And of more than 1100 leaders, 67 percent admit they have room for improvement in promise-keeping. Do you have room for improvement? Are you not keeping commitments and damaging your credibility?

Of 12,000 employees, 55 percent believed that a boss or coworker could improve in consistently keeping promises. And of more than 1100 leaders, 67 percent admit they have room for improvement in promise-keeping.