7 essentials for leaders on keeping promises and sustaining trust
Want to alienate your employees, chase away customers and flush your business right down the tubes? Just fail to honor your commitments. Instead, be true to your word with this guidance.
Leaders make a lot of promises.
They promise high-quality products and experiences to customers, careers that offer opportunity and purpose to employees, ambitious strategies to accelerate innovation to investors, and social and environmental responsibility to society at large.
In practice, though, many leaders struggle to keep their commitments.
Under the pressure of a quota or deadline, or amid the turmoil of constant change, some leaders experience “commitment drift,” in which crucial promises are forgotten or broken. Commitment drift erodes trust and undermines relationships.
It’s challenging for leaders to remember commitments over time, much less to communicate them clearly, hand them off between departments or adjust them as priorities change.
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