My wife trusted me to watch her handbag in the airline lounge this morning. Not a big deal? For me it was. It has been 10 years since she trusted me with this seemingly straight-forward task.
10 years ago in a coffee shop in London, England she casually asked me to watch her bag while she went to the washroom. No problem, I said as I surveyed a map of London, planning out our activities for the rest of the day. I was surprised by her question 5 minutes later – where is my bag? Gone forever, it turned out. Of course I rationalized how the guy who came by seemed to be on staff, how he rearranged chairs, chatted me up, and so on. Bottom line was I was conned by a skillful thief who pretended to be working, moved a chair to block my line of sight, and with a “Cheerio” was down the stairs with her bag.
What’s my point?
Transfer this to the organizational context. At a meeting you are promised by someone that they will prepare a report by a certain time. You plan to receive this report at that time so you can finish your part of the work, and move it along to someone who is trusting that you will deliver. The promised report doesn’t arrive. Your plans are up in smoke. You have to plead and cajole to finally get what you need – late. Now you are late on the promises you made to someone else – perhaps even to your boss. Where is your trust level with that individual now? Will you trust again that you will get what is promised when it is promised? Not likely. And even worse, your reputation to deliver has been damaged.
Trust is based in a fundamental expectation: people will do what they say they will do.
Just as 10 years ago I failed to watch my wife’s bag, you were failed by a co-worker. If it took me 10 years to re-establish that trust in a loving and full partnership, image the damage that is being done in organizations when people do not keep their commitments.
The most common excuse I hear in organizations is: “I didn’t have time to get it done.” But what does that really mean? If I give that as an excuse, what does the other person hear? They hear: “Your work wasn’t important enough; I had other things to do that were a higher priority”. And of course they are right. You were at work for however many weeks or days or hours since you made the promise. You chose to do other things instead of the promised work.
Of course we can rationalize. There are daily, urgent pressures on each of us. In to-day’s work environment we cannot hope to do everything we aspire to do each day. So we need to make choices. This means setting priorities so we can keep the commitments we have made.
The bottom line? If you say you are going to do something, getting that work done must be a high priority. A broken promise is a breach of trust. And, as I learned, that breach can take a very long time to repair.
