James King

One was a minor one. I told my daughter that we would have pancakes during the week and then we got to the end of the week and realised that we had not done so.

“So time got away from us,” I thought, “She would have reminded me if it was important and we can do it next week.”

Excuses pop through my head

Is it OK to miss a minor commitment that nobody seems to care about? I guess it is, but what if I has misunderstood the importance of pancakes to my daughter?

Reflecting on this minor event, I wondered how often I had made loose commitments that slipped away and “were OK”.

In many meetings at work, we take action items and then review them in the next meeting. Sometimes we are pleased that we have completed the action items, sometimes we talk about how we will get to them next time and, embarrassingly, we sometimes agree that we don’t know what they meant.

In fact I was in a meeting not long ago where we discussed an action, agreed that we were not sure what it was and then went to leave it open. I am not sure what the goal of an open “mystery” action is, but I am sure it is not a productive one.

Missing pancakes once is not too bad and being surprised by an action item I have not done in one meeting is not too bad either. But making a habit of not doing what I said I would do is a sneaky way to undermine my credibility and my sense of self.

We judge ourselves on our intentions and others on their behavior

Stephen Covey

This is something I learned a long time ago, then forgot and then relearned many times. Many times I make a commitment, I then discover unexpected obstacles and distractions. Sometimes I discover there is a new, higher priority and sometimes I just get overwhelmed with other things.

Whenever I “adapt to changing circumstances” or “get distracted,” I am quick to forgive myself because my intentions are generally pretty good. I forget though, that others will infer my intentions from my behaviour, so missing a minor commitment might actually suggest a poor intention or an attitude that commitments to a particular person are not to be taken seriously.

Meeting and missing commitments is therefore a good way of building, or undermining, relationships and credibility.

It is important to take the time to understand why things might not have gone as expected before making judgments about others. It is also important to realise that others might be making assumptions I have not recognised when I miss a commitment.

When I am at my best, I do this automatically, but when I am rushed and stressed, which is when it really matters, I can get stuck repeating my own assumptions to myself.

So some remembering to “be present” will improve life. But what else has driven me to miss commitments, besides just being distracted or busy?

I remember empty shelves in supermarkets when the Covid pandemic first hit. I was annoyed every time I went to the shop and found it empty, but I did understand that there was a good reason from the shelf being empty.

These days though, I still find the shelves in my supermarket are missing core things that I want and every time I feel annoyed. There is an implicit assumption that supermarkets will stock milk and minced meet and I feel like they are falling short of their commitment to me when I can’t get what I expect.

I can rage against the major supermarkets, but again I can reflect on whether this happens to me.

I missed commitments to both my wife and someone at the office recently because I did not realise I had made the commitment. This sounds a bit lame and saying it sounds like an excuse, but in fact I think this is something that is easy to do.

I like to think I am a good listener and a clear communicator, but I have been surprised how often I have been in conversations where multiple people agreed with something and then it turned out they were making very different assumptions about what they were talking about.

So to misquote Stephen Covey – We hold ourselves accountable for the assumptions we made in a conversation and we ALSO hold others accountable for what we assumed we were talking about.

I don’t know about you, but I have definitely been in conversations where I have found myself arguing retrospectively about what commitment was made, even though both my version and the other person’s version could be valid, given the assumptions that we were likely to have made.

I intend to get a little clearer on things when making a commitment, or accepting a commitment from someone else.

But I also think it is worth playing the long game, by taking time to understand different perspectives when there seems to be a missed commitment that could reasonably be a difference in assumptions about word meanings or priority or the scope and timing that apply to the commitment. I think over time this extra understanding will help me better predict what others will expect and when there is a potential gap in expectations coming.

There are two more reasons that I have missed commitments I should have met in the past, even though they did not apply to my recent experiences.

The first is being assertive and clear about what I expect from others:

Sometimes, I’ve agreed to something that a grumpy person wanted and relied on someone else to help me. Instead of standing up for myself with the grumpy person, or clearly expressing what I needed from the other person, I would just say yes to the grumpy person and make a weak request to the other person. As a result, I would often fail to fulfill my commitment because I didn’t get the support I needed. That sucked and all three of us were grumpy.

A good rule of thumb though is that when you make a commitment, the person you make the commitment to assumes you will manage dependencies and third parties appropriately in order to meet the commitment. Similarly, when you make something sound optional or flexible and then complain that what happened did not meet your expectation, you are treating someone unfairly, even if you tried to be nice in the first place.

As a result it is better to be open, transparent, up front, clear and assertive with everyone as you go. It is also better to make people grumpy earlier rather than later.

When someone asks me to do something, I often need them to do something too. For example, they might need to make time to speak to me or provide some information.

Sure, here’s a simplified version of my last answer:

I made the mistake of assuming that if someone doesn’t respond to my needs, they will be okay if I don’t do what they want. But experience has shown that this is rarely true.

So something I still work on is being clear on what I need from the person I am making a commitment to and then holding them to account in the same way I should hold myself to account for my actions.

To communicate effectively, it’s important to be clear about our expectations and the impact it has when they are not met. This doesn’t mean being overly demanding or harsh on ourselves or others. It simply means being open and honest about what we need and how it affects us when those needs aren’t fulfilled.

So I cannot say I will never miss a commitment again, but I can say I can tweak how I go about meeting commitments. I think I can track my time and competing expectations OK so the next tweak is to be clear about what the other person or people think the commitment actually is.

That means both being curious about the assumptions other make, even when my assumptions seem reasonable. It also means being clear with all concerned about what I need from them if I am to meet my commitments to them and others.