--- title: "My team keeps breaking their promises. What can I do?" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-team-keeps-breaking-their-promises-what-can-i-do.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/my-team-keeps-breaking-their-promises-what-can-i-do.html" published: "2010-05-09T07:12:44+00:00" updated: "2011-04-04T22:42:35.787000+00:00" tags: ["Anti Patterns", "Learning Phase", "people patterns"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "How a team leader can teach a team the language of commitment, spotting words like I'll try, setting end dates and flagging slips before deadlines pass." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # My team keeps breaking their promises. What can I do? _Execution_ – actually having the team get things done– requires people to : 1. Say what they will do  2. Mean it (be committed) 3. Do it Everyone likes to do #1. Only some do #2. Great teams also do #3. This post is about #2. ### There is a vast difference between people being _committed_ to something, and people _saying_ something. For example, you can start looking for words that are not committing to execution: - “_I’ll try_ to get that to you by Monday” - “Someone _should_ get that thing fixed” - “I _hope_ to get to that later” - “I _think_ I can make it” spot these things and see if you can ask people to actually commit to the thing they need to do: - “I _will_ do this by Monday” - “I _commit_ to getting this done by Monday” - “It _will be done_ by Monday” If someone can’t commit to that – that’s good. Maybe they are not sure they can – maybe there is something stopping them. But you won’t know until you can either get them to commit, or get them to say why they cannot commit to it. Also notice how there is a specific end date. Committing to something with an end date make things more real, and also prevents whoever is depending on that thing from bothering the doer. “Is it done yet?” “How about now?” . No need to ask. They committed to do this by Monday. ### Don’t under estimate peer pressure. Doing all this talking in an open daily standup makes the commitment more important. it’s not just you and someone else. now it’s you telling the _whole team_ you will get something. If your team members don’t know how to verbally commit to something, you can teach them. You can actually ask them to say things differently: “Can you say you _will_ do it by date so and so? Is that something you can commit to? Why not? “ ### I can’t commit to something I don’t have control over Of course, the biggest hurdle is that sometimes people really can’t commit to something if they don’t have full control of it. Expecting people to commit to something that depends on other people is less realistic. If that happens, see what things that person _can have control over_. For example, if the task is about getting a bug fix to a client and making sure it’s closed by Monday – the dev might have control over actually sending the email to the client, but they have little control over when the client responds back. In such a case they can commit to _sending the fix to the client_ . ### Failing commitments There should be no such thing is a failed commitments. the moment one sees that they will not make the deadline, they should notify whoever they committed to, that they will no make it in time – this allows the team to see if something can be done to maybe still get that thing in time by reorganizing or changing priorities. A failed commitment means you won’t live up to what you promised and you didn’t notify anyone beforehand that you will not make it in time. that is something that is _fully under your control_ and should not happen. ## Read next - [The Five Dysfunctions of a Team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team.html): A summary of Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team, from absence of trust and fear of conflict to inattention to results, a must-read for team leaders. - [The Bus Factor - Why your ‘best’ developer is your biggest problem](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-bus-factor-why-your-best-developer-is-your-biggest-probl.html): How to spot a bus factor of one in your team and reduce it with standups, pairing, code reviews and knowledge sharing, including the team leader as one. - [How to deal with bad decisions made by the team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/how-to-deal-with-bad-decisions-made-by-the-team.html): How a team lead can steer a self-directing team away from bad technical decisions by asking hard questions, based on Mike Cohn's Succeeding with Agile. ## Topic - [Learning Mode](https://www.5whys.com/topics/learning-mode) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/