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Closing for a Commitment or Settling for an Agreement?

Guest post by: Patrick T. Malone

Article Overview: There comes a time when all your hard work and preparation come together, and the time is right to go for closure! This is the moment you go for commitment. In business, whenever people interact, they make decisions ― a decision to talk, a decision to listen, a decision to act on a recommendation. Ideally, as a leader you want your followers to make decisions that are both well-informed and high in confidence. The reason for this is two-fold. First, the higher your followers are in confidence when they reach a final decision, the more effort and quality they will put into carrying through that decision.

Closing for a Commitment or Settling for an Agreement?

There comes a time when all your hard work and preparation come together, and the time is right to go for closure! This is the moment you go for commitment. In business, whenever people interact, they make decisions - a decision to talk, a decision to listen, a decision to act on a recommendation.

Ideally, as a leader you want your followers to make decisions that are both well-informed and high in confidence. The reason for this is two-fold. First, the higher your followers are in confidence when they reach a final decision, the more effort and quality they will put into carrying through that decision.

At commit, your follower, or the Decider, owns the result and outcome just as much as you. At the highest level, the Decider is committed to seeing the decision through, definitely more than someone who only thinks your idea may be good, more than the person who expresses interest in the idea, and more than the follower who may be excited by the idea.

Second, agreements can come from any level of engagement, but commitments only come at complete confidence. This means the extra time needed to gain a commitment, instead of an agreement, is definitely worth your effort. When your followers are negative towards your idea, but agree with the idea anyway, they are either surrendering or complying. Neither is acceptable if you seek willing followers.

In most cases, when surrender or compliance from followers occurred, the leader used positional or economic power to achieve that result. This type of command leadership, while occasionally acceptable, is never appropriate when you seek a co-owner of your idea.

Oftentimes, people may say they are committed to an idea, but then they fail to follow through. When this happens, the leader, more often than not, has misread his followers and confused a high level of agreement with commitment.

Agreement and commitment are not the same. You can gain agreement from people at neutral all the way up to enthusiasm. However, agreement at any of these levels is simply based on good intentions at that moment in time and, as such, is subject to change with the passage of time or an additional conversation.

Commitments are decisions that people willingly reach from confidence. In other words, when people are committed, they believe in their decisions and own them. Their decisions are promises, convictions, and definitely much more than agreements. The highest quality and quantity of results occur when someone really becomes a customer or co-owner of an idea and acts on that idea without reservation.

In any organization, agreements can come from neutral or any positive level. However, with commitment, the will to take action, and own that action, comes from confidence. Enthusiasm is close, but it is not closed. It represents good intentions that can be eroded with the first problem or issue. How often have you talked about how great a party or event would be, but you did not attend?

Or conversely, have you had people tell you your idea was fantastic, but they failed to act on it. Unfortunately, this happens all too often in business, and results are rarely what you wish for. If you are constantly following up with your people to make sure they are following through, you do not have their commitment.

Successful people know when to go for commitment, how to gain commitment and how to handle stalls and indecision.

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Article Tags: closure, confidence, decisions, final decision, followers



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