One of my favorite rules of thumb for reviewing books is this: can you boil it down to its most important insight? If so, you probably have read a good book—well, at least if the insight itself is good.
The same thing goes for my principles here. Now, I want to share with you one tip to always keep in mind, for the sake of the sanity of anyone you work with in the future. It is this:
If you have a deadline, then make sure you meet it. But if you can’t for any reason—which is usually fine, since you are human—make sure you let all other stakeholders know you are unlikely to make it as soon as you realize that.
Like many pieces of home-grown wisdom, this sounds obvious. Of course! But in practice, this is very rarely, far too rarely, done.
In practice, what usually happens is this:
- You focus so much, you miss the deadline because you’re hard at work and don’t even stop to breathe, go to the bathroom, or communicate that it was missed to anyone.
- You feel bad you won’t make the deadline so, in shame, you postpone telling everyone until it’s too late.
- You have a naïve hope you’ll make it even though in your stomach you know the worst will happen.
- You miss it but you think, “no actionable items are happening as an immediate consequence, so if I give it to them two days later; it won’t be a big deal”.
And so forth. In my career, I’ve heard every variation.
How come, too frequently, people fail to follow this rule? For the reasons mentioned in my examples—embarrassment, or not realizing the importance of it, or even deep focus sometimes—but all of them come down to a core subtext: your reliability, in other words, the integrity of your word.
To be an awesome professional, your word needs to be gold. That may not even be enough, your word needs to be platinum. Therefore, if you say you’re going to do something, then you need to do it.
Except when you can’t. Here’s the thing, you are human and everyone knows it. As a human, sometimes you miss deadlines and usually, almost always, that’s okay. Maybe a bug was more complex to solve than you ever imagined. Maybe other people didn’t deliver their parts to you on time. Maybe you got sick and were in bed. Life happens. And that’s fine, because to your client, life happens to him as well!
The problem only comes when the plan change isn’t communicated, no matter how small. That weakens your integrity and makes everyone less likely to believe you next time. It often throws off plans, even plans you may not know about. Remember, you will seldom have full visibility into the team’s plans, just knowing the bits they tell you. So, if you’re going to change the plans, that’s fine, so long as you communicate.
Framed differently, the key lesson here is the same as the lesson from Nixon’s resignation as president. It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. And just missing a deadline without telling anyone is a form of covering it up.
One final observation: the rule also includes the qualification to not only alert the stakeholders but also to alert them at the earliest point. Why is that detail needed? It’s a matter of respect and helping them plan, the earlier they know their plans will have to change, the easier it is for them to plan around it. Knowing the deadline won’t be hit one minute before it arrives is much better than the 90% of cases where you learn afterward; but 10x better than that is learning three days beforehand, because then your client will have three days to enact his contingency plan. And from your eyes, he’ll be thankful and grateful to you for the early alert.
