There's a very good article in the current Harvard Business Review about Promise Based Management. The article is written by Donald N. Sull and Charles Spinosa.
Until earlier this year, I worked with Charles at Vision consulting. Before I left I was working with him editing an article which he had written, intending to turn it into a comprehensive white paper about what Vision calls Commitment Based Management. There's a lot of overlap in the hbr article although the it is much, much, much better edited!
I write about Commitment/Promised based management within my own book and I use the principles constantly in my own consulting work. The principles - unfortunately - are very simple to understand, but hard to "live".
Here's a quick overview of the principles, as I use them:
- Trust is key. With trust work is easy, things happen quickly, waste disappears. When trust is missing things take longer, take more effort and cost more due to the incredibly wasteful activities needed to ensure that things work despite the lack of trust.
- A simple example might help. A few weeks ago I had a very early morning flight and I used my blackberry as an alarm clock for the first time. I went to bed a little earlier that night and I dozed off earlier too, so I should be fighting fit the next morning, but I wasn't; I only managed about 3 hours sleep. Why? Because I didn’t trust that the blackberry alarm would work properly (since I'd never used it) and nor did I trust myself to have set it correctly. I found myself waking up to check the time every 30 minutes or so, just to check that it wasn’t after 4:45 yet and that the alarm clock hadn’t failed me. I litterally had a sleepless night because of a lack of trust.
- Look at your relationships - at work, at home - and rate the level of trust in each relationship from high to low. Ask yourself which of the relationships are easy, which are wasteful, which are profitable, which are draining ... and then ask yourself what you'd prefer: high- or low-trust relationships.
- One of the key causes of high trust is making and keeping commitments where both parties win. Making commitments and not keeping them loses trust. Making commitments where both parties don't win create resentment are lowers trust.
- Ask yourself if you make commitments and keep them.
- Start using the words "commitment" and "trust" more often. You'll be surprised how quickly that will change your own thinking and the thinking of your colleagues and friends.
- Study Lean, Agile, Theory of Constraints, and Quality thinking. Apply them so that you can learn how to make commitments that you keep.
- Read "Getting to YES" - because principled negotiation - and win-win thinking is a vital aspect of making commitments that you can keep.
I recommend that you splash out the $6.00 and purchase the article. Then read it! Then think about it. And think about it some more.
