Why Keeping Commitments Is Vitally Important To Your Influence
Today, businesses and their CEOs are challenged like never before to earn trust with their stakeholders. For CEOs, organizations, and teams to achieve their objectives in this world of accelerating change require commitments that stick.
Keeping commitments has always been important to higher performing leaders and their businesses. The difference today is the hyper-connectedness and transparency of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It has empowered people to participate in the conversations of your marketplace. Your ability to influence opinions through traditional marketing campaigns or public relations programs is rapidly losing its effectiveness. Nothing speaks louder than making and keeping the right commitments to your stakeholders.
The ability to make & keep commitments has become more of a social activity and trust is foundational to these interactions. As just in time teams come together across this ecosystem to innovate and solve problems together, the best way to speed up the trust is for all participants to show or account for their earned Relationship Capital (RC).
A commitment goes beyond just words of intent, but the actions that lead to positive outcomes. Leaders who operate businesses are responsible and accountable for a commitment or suite of commitments. Now multiply these commitments across each member of the organizational team, partners, suppliers, and customers. This creates actions that overcome obstacles and achieves operational excellence.
Your organization is a commitment-oriented entity
Without making and consistently keeping commitments to your customers, you will not be generating the revenues to fund your growth and innovation. This should be news. Your growth comes from building a trusted reputation. Earning the relationship capital that allows others to refer customers, employees, partners, investors, etc. to you. These ambassadors lend their trust to you with each and every referral. Imagine all of your stakeholders as trust ambassadors. This is where it is going. If your kept-commitments are not consistent, the people that support you will not continue to do so.
You also will lose the opportunity to build new additional advocates. Important considerations from leadership expert Marc Michaelson:
All Commitments Are Important: When you agree to do something do it as agreed. When you agree to meet someone, be there on time. When you fail to keep a commitment you fail yourself first and the other person second.
Conclusion
Relationship Capital (RC) is an industry standard metric and reward for keeping a declared commitment. It has always been a key performance indicator of high performing leadership, individuals, and teams. The challenge has been that this intangible asset is based on the values, perceptions, and behaviors of the individual & group, of which behavior is the only observable element.
Whether you are an executive leader of a global corporation, an entrepreneur, or a business professional, you compete in a global marketplace. The rapid deployment of mobile devices, cloud infrastructure platforms, and big data analytics technologies creates an environment that will transform the competitive landscape across whole industries. By adding industry standards for capturing and measuring what has been an intangible asset, you can foresee a business world that competes not just on financial performance but on proactive trustworthiness or Relationship Capital (RC). Competing by out-behaving the competition.
The speed at which a product or service innovation can be created, sold, and implemented through these global digital channels is mind-numbing. The ability to earn and maintain trust by capturing Relationship Capital (RC) is as important as any other forms of capital (financial, intellectual, human, etc.)
Now, through the explosion of social media and other digital channels, we have entered the “Relationship Capital Economy” where establishing and building a credible reputation or “RC” with your entire ecosystem of customers, employees, and partners is the new gold standard for influence. In this increasingly transparent social business world, teams and their leaders that publicly declare their commitments will achieve more of their goals with their stakeholders. How you keep your commitment is as important as the outcome itself to attract new customers, retain top performers, and any other meaningful relationship.
www.StandardofTrust.com
Sources:
- https://www.amazon.com/Standard-Trust-Leadership-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0692206965/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467112934&sr=8-1&keywords=standard+of+trust+leadership
- http://www.trainingindustry.com/blog/blog-entries/the-power-of-a-declared-commitment.aspx
- Originally Published on January 29th, 2016 on Linkedin Pulse
