I realize upfront that a lot of people do not want to address the topic of the things they neglect to do. It is uncomfortable to think about all the tasks that we forget, or put off until another day. Even the mention of it will probably make a lot of people think I am looking right down my finger at them. Don’t worry, this is not a message of scorn, because you are not the only one who is guilty of that thing you know you should have done but hoped nobody would notice or remember your failure to follow through.
Have you ever been stood up? Maybe it was a date, a business meeting, a telephone call, or many other possible ways that somebody did not follow through with what they told you. Do you remember how that made you feel? I can tell you that it is one way to end up in my recycle bin, and I am not the only one who feels this way.
When people do not follow through on their words, it often becomes a personal matter. It is insulting. It can even strangely cause a sense of shame or guilt for the recipient, with thoughts like “Well, I guess I was not all that important to them.” More often, it will bring about a dismissal of the individual’s words, both past and present. It destroys trust, and in business, that is a tragic fate which often negates even the best marketing efforts.
This topic comes up in my business and personal life once in a while, and the person I discuss it with is my wife. We have operated businesses for decades, and we have each encountered liars, cheats, and thieves on multiple occasions. We have also encountered a lot of people who are not quite classified as horrible, but rather what we call “flakey”. You do not have to look very hard to find flakey people. They are the ones you look at with a cautious eye when they tell you something that will require them to take action beyond the moment at hand.
Losing Influence is Easy
There are a squillion examples of what I call “flakey”. I’ll give you a quick example, but it can be far more subtle. In this example, it is the customer who lost influence and trust. I make this point because it can go both ways, and we each determine our own individual influence which we carry everywhere we go.
My wife and I own a thriving cakes and confections business. Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections has become quite a hit in our town, and I have found that cakes are about the easiest thing to sell that I ever brought to market.
Somebody recently placed an order for custom cupcakes from Mad Eliza’s and expressed urgency to pick them up at a specific time on Halloween Day for a party he had scheduled. The time came and went, and that afternoon, my wife rang him on the telephone. He quickly blurted “I’ll call you back in just a minute.” Did he call? No. Did we have some nice Halloween-themed cupcakes to hand out to friends that day? Yes, we did, and people loved them.
Being “flakey” in this case involved a blatant lie, right? Well, probably, but we cannot be so sure. Maybe he was in a terrible accident with a hair dryer and a bathtub. We do not know the whole story, but what we do know is that the lack of follow through took this person down a few notches on our “listening scale”. This guy clearly lost influence. He may not ever need any influence, but what would it look like if I saw him in the waiting room of a friend’s business applying for a job? Stranger things have happened!
With the massive popularity of social media, there is an even more profound importance of doing what you say you will do. People talk about things they find distasteful. Although you may think that lacking the integrity to follow through on simple tasks may not be conversation-worthy, you can bet that if your name comes up, there will be significantly less excitement for somebody to say great things about you. If lack of follow-through becomes a common problem within your company, even with “insignificant” tasks, it can destroy your influence. In more extreme instances, you can end up looking horrible when somebody searches for your company name.
Increasing Influence is Easy, Too!
Trust is a tricky thing. I wrote about the topic of building trust a while back, and it included some good food for thought. The article was titled “Building Trust Comes First in Business, But How?“.
Influence has a lot to do with trust, but influence can also be relatively easy to build if you do what you say you will, even when it seems insignificant to you. Being consistent and always following through with even the “little things” can build up over time.
About a decade ago when my company, YourNew.com, was new, I asked my wife and business partner what made us different. I was trying to distill what would set us apart and make our company great. She had a nearly immediate and very definite answer. She told me “I can sum it up in a single word … Integrity!“ That has always stuck with me, and I think of it every time I tell somebody I will call them back, email something, meet for coffee, or anything else when there is an opportunity to let somebody down by not following through.
I am certainly not a saint, but I try really hard to make a priority of keeping my word, regardless how trivial a matter may seem to me. It may matter a lot to somebody else. I hope that you will try hard, too.
Do you have an example of follow through building your confidence in a person or a brand? Do you have examples of it destroying your confidence? Please share your thoughts.
Photo credit to DigiDi via Flickr
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