Keep your commitments, clear obstacles early, and leave no surprises.
Most of the work in an organization runs on commitments people make to each other. A peer promises a forecast input by Friday. A team agrees to finish its part of a launch in time for another team to start theirs. A leader tells the executive they report to that a program will be ready for the quarterly review. Every plan is a chain of promises like these, and each person in the chain is planning around the ones before it.
The leaders trusted with larger and more important work are usually the ones who deliver what they promise. Their peers build plans around their dates. Their leadership makes commitments to senior executives on the strength of their word. When something does go wrong, the people around them hear about it early enough to adjust. That reliability is one of the most valuable things a rising leader can build, and it comes from a handful of habits anyone can practice.
AI is raising its value. As more of the work speeds up, teams take on more at once, and the time between a slip and its consequences gets shorter. Dashboards and AI tools can now show where nearly every task stands. Deciding what a delay means, who needs to hear about it, and what happens next still falls to the leader who made the promise.
Make Every Commitment Specific
Many commitments fail at the moment they are made. “I’ll take a look,” “we should have something soon,” and “let’s use AI to speed this up” all sound like agreement, and none of them tells the other person what to plan around. Each leaves room for two people to walk away expecting different things.
A specific commitment names what you will deliver, by when, and what you need from others to deliver it. Saying it out loud also tests it. If you cannot name the date or the inputs, the commitment is not ready to make yet, and you can tell the other person when you will be able to confirm it. Leaders who work this way say yes a little less often, and every yes they give is one people can rely on.
Keep a running list of the commitments you have made to other people, separate from your own to-do list. Promises to peers, partners, and your leadership are the easiest to lose track of, because no one is likely to remind you of them until the date has passed.
“Bad news delivered early with a plan gives your leadership options.”
Close the Loop on Small Promises
The commitments that shape a reputation most are often the smallest. Sending the document you mentioned, getting back to someone with the answer you promised, showing up to the meeting you accepted: people rarely remark on these, and they notice each time one is kept or missed. Over months, those moments decide whether your word is taken at face value.
Showing up in person is one of the simplest commitments to keep and one of the easiest to let go when the week gets busy. In one role, I committed to being a visible leader in the office for our local team, which meant going in several times a week. Part of that commitment was meeting other local leaders whenever the chance came up, over breakfast, at dinner, at team events, and at other gatherings. Many of those meetings turned into professional opportunities, and together they built a reputation for being committed and reliable that followed me into later work. Each one I skipped would have been a connection I never made.
Map What Could Get in the Way Before You Start
Most missed commitments trace back to an obstacle that was visible early to anyone who looked for it. It might be a dependency on another team with different priorities, an approval that takes longer than expected, data that does not exist yet, or a key person already stretched across too much work. Before you commit to a date, walk the path from start to finish, and ask the people doing the work what is most likely to slow it down.
As AI speeds up drafting, analysis, and production, the slowest parts of most work are increasingly the handoffs between people: reviews, sign-offs, and decisions waiting on someone’s calendar. Look for those first, since they move only as fast as the people involved.
Keep looking once the work is underway. The early signs that a plan is drifting usually appear before anyone reports them, in work that has not started, budget that has not been spent, or a team that has gone quiet. I once led the marketing planning and budgeting process for a multibillion-dollar, matrixed global business. That gave me a clear view of how every team was spending, and I learned to read spending as an early signal of which parts of the plan were moving and which had stalled. It helped me partner with our CMO to put the plan into practice across the team, build on what was working sooner, and adjust the budget during the year to get more return from our investments.
Ask for Help While There Is Still Time
Some obstacles are beyond what you can clear on your own: a stakeholder who will not move, a decision that belongs to someone more senior, or two teams with conflicting priorities. Reliable leaders raise those obstacles while others still have time to act, and they say exactly what they need, whether that is a conversation, a decision, a resource, or a word with someone they cannot reach themselves.
Asking early shows the people above you that you saw the problem coming and took responsibility for it. It also gives them the best chance to help. A request made a week ahead usually costs them a phone call, while the same request made the day before can cost them an escalation of their own.
A mentor I once worked with taught me the value of air cover and of asking for help early. Before I spoke with critical or difficult stakeholders, I routinely brought her in to align on the conversation. She trusted me to lead those conversations, and she coached me on the points that mattered at the right moments, which eased concerns and friction before they could build. Working with her made me comfortable going to other leaders for help when I needed it, including some of the most difficult ones.
Make Sure Your Leadership Hears It From You First
Problems are a normal part of ambitious work. A surprise is a problem that reaches someone above you too late for them to help, or through someone other than you. Most problems cannot be prevented entirely. The surprise usually can.
Keep your leadership informed with short, regular updates that start with what has changed since the last one. When something slips, tell them as soon as you know, with what happened, what you are doing about it, what you need from them, and when they will hear from you next. Bad news delivered early with a plan gives your leadership options. The same news arriving later, or from a peer, leaves them explaining a situation they knew nothing about.
This holds even when a problem is not of your making. Owning the response keeps the issue moving toward a solution, and it spares the people above you from working out who is responsible before anything gets fixed. Marketing personalized for clients inherently carries some risks. Client issues take different shapes, and they are rare when the work is managed well, though they do happen. I encountered several while leading marketing for federal and public sector clients, where government agencies work under greater public scrutiny. In each case, I took ownership even when I was not directly responsible for the cause, kept the issue moving through the right chain of communication, and led from the front in bringing the affected parties together to resolve it with the least possible damage. Each one strengthened the confidence leaders had in my reliability.
Leaving no surprises works best when it runs through your whole team, so your leadership never learns about a problem in your area from someone other than you. Your team’s early warning is what makes yours possible. In my CMO roles, I made it a priority to be approachable and build rapport with my team, applying much of what I had learned from CMOs who mentored me. One leader brought me a media issue the day it appeared, and together we resolved it within 24 hours. Another raised a client issue that had started in marketing, which let me partner with the account head to resolve it before it escalated. A third brought me a significant budget overrun, and I moved dollars from other priorities to close it, with time left to adjust other parts of the budget and keep everything on track. A culture like that depends on a leader the team trusts, and on a leader who trusts the team to do the right thing.
Start With the Commitments You Made This Week
This week, write down every commitment you have made to someone else, including the small ones. Confirm each one that is on track, reset any that are not with the person counting on it, and tell your leadership about anything that has changed. Leaders who do this every week become the people others plan around.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Growth Leader | Business Builder | Leadership Multiplier
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
