Relationships are built on trust and respect, and few relationships are as important as the ones among members of your team. One critical way to build and maintain strong team relationships is to ensure that you are keeping your agreements.
Agreements come in all shapes and sizes. Some agreements are big, such as promising to give an employee a raise or committing to finishing a project by a certain date. Others are smaller, such as starting a meeting at a particular time.
When you don’t do what you said you’d do, your employees, colleagues, vendors and customers begin to lose trust in you. You lose authority with them. They realize they can’t count on you, and the relationship deteriorates. The fallout can range from a vendor’s reluctance to compromise on a project fee to increased employee dissatisfaction to losing valuable clients.
Breaking agreements also creates messes that require time, attention and sometimes money to clean up. The mess might involve you apologizing and rebuilding trust with a key employee. It might be a situation that requires other members of your team to properly address, such as working overtime to get caught up on a project to avoid losing an unhappy client.
You Pay the Biggest Price
Members of your team aren’t the only ones affected when you fail to keep agreements. You stand to lose the most of all, because every agreement you make is one that you first make with yourself.
When you make a commitment to do something and then don’t follow through, you learn to distrust yourself. You lose faith in your ability to produce a result, which impacts your self-esteem, self-confidence and self-respect. You undermine your sense of personal power and integrity.
Even breaking small agreements can negatively impact you. When you hit the snooze button instead of getting up at 6:30 a.m. to exercise before work, you create confusion and self-doubt in your unconscious mind.
How Many Agreements Do You Break? [Read more…] about Keeping Agreements to Strengthen Your Team