Do What You Say

What It Requires From You

Doing what you say first starts with the discipline of not saying something that you’re not going to do. If you have no intention on doing it, why are you saying you’re going to do it? Why do you what are you doing that for? And isolate that so that when you do say something that you’re going to do, that every intention, every fabric of your body is to do what you say that, like, to me, specifically, that’s a moral obligation as well as a professional obligation when you’re leading people.

I don’t care if it’s in the interview process or, when you stand in front of company and give sort of a a perspective of what we’re going to get done by the end of the year and what you’re going do and how you’re going to approach it. This idea that you’re willing to say something and have no intention on doing it is a recipe for disaster.

You can say you’re going to do something and in your wholehearted attempt to get there, fail. That’s life. You could say you’re going to do something and then have no intention of doing it. That’s not life. That’s a poor decision. And poor decisions lead to many different gaping stress fractures within an organization, especially when people are following this person, especially when this person is hiring people and making management decisions. People follow people they believe.

How to Check for It in Others

The first sign of losing somebody is when they could reference the fact that you said something that you didn’t do, and they could see that you had no intention on doing it. If that behavior is ever rewarded — so if you have a middle level manager and they have a habit of saying things that they never do, but yet they get promoted because it hadn’t gotten through the organization that that person had developed that reputation and they get promoted – you have chaos on your hands within the culture of that organization. Because people start to believe that misrepresenting the truth or being hyperbolic about what your intentions are is rewarded behavior.

If people are doing exactly what they say or not doing rather what they say, it will reveal itself ultimately in the numbers. There’s some number. There’s some metric: profitability, growth, app downloads. There’s something that is an indicator of success in the department or overall with the company. If you’re really a high-functioning organization, you can find it before you get to the number. You see it through feedback. You see it through annual reviews or semi-annual reviews. So there are many different ways to catch it. Again, ultimately, there’s numbers to catch this level of nonperformance and sort of inflation of of facts. And then there is if you have a strong culture, you’ll see it earlier because the people will tell you.