The definition of reliability for the purposes of this post: other people believing that you (or your team) will:

1. do what you say you’ll do, and
2. do what they expect you to do.

Reliability is other people believing that you will do what you say you will do and also what they expect you to do.

Why Reliability?

Reliability is vital to several areas of organizational success:

1. Successful delegation
2. Independent execution by teams
3. Independent execution by individuals

Delegation

When you hand off a task, it’s ideal if you no longer need to think about it – and the more you reliable the person you’re handing the task to, the more likely this is. With reliable people and teams, the default assumption is that any delegated task will be completed. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Delegation backed by a perception of reliability actually clears brains of stress and cognitive dissonance. Basically, people can stop worrying and focus on the work they need to do.

This magical theory applies to teams as well – if a team does the work they own, and they believe other teams will do the work they own, then all teams can focus on their own work. Ultimately this eliminates time spent on “following up” (pestering), and lowers everyone’s stress.

Execution

Individuals and teams who are allowed to execute without being required to explain every step and justify every decision can focus more on doing actual things. Even in the awesome Utopian Land of Reliability, some checking in is necessary, for a lot of reasons – one of the best is to give the leader the opportunity to teach and to reinforce good judgement. However, guidance shouldn’t be a nuisance – it shouldn’t turn into oversight to the point of preventing productivity.

If brains are calm and hearts aren’t worried, people can more easily focus on their work, objectives, and goals – and they execute their tasks more cleanly. When each person or team believes that they can focus on their responsibilities rather than worrying about other people’s execution, this leads to overall organizational success.

Reliability seems awesome! Uh…now what?

Cool, you want to be thought of as reliable so you can do stuff. A key question now becomes: how do you build a reputation for reliability? Or maybe the question should be, can this be deliberately built? Nope! Blog post ends here. Thanks for reading!

Kidding.

Building a reputation for reliability is surprisingly simple. In any relationship, you start at the ground floor, with basically zero reliability. To increase the number of reliability points, it’s like a ramp – a slow and steady upward movement.

The super secrety secret to building a reputation for reliability: make a commitment. Fulfill the commitment. Repeat.

Reliability for Newbs

Start a meeting by saying, “I’ll make a recap.” End the meeting, re-iterating that you’ll make the recap. Then make the recap. Tada! You’ve done a useful thing that you promised to do. Congratulations, you now seem more reliable! People now know that you kept that commitment.

You can do this by doing anything useful – say you’ll do it, and then follow through. For bonus trust points, promise to do it by a certain date and then deliver on or before your deadline.

Reliability Level Up

To continue to build your new reputation for being reliable, continue to keep your commitments. Small commitments can build reliability only to a certain level –  but after keeping enough smaller commitments, people will begin to give you opportunities to keep larger commitments.

These larger commitments, once kept, will give you more reliability points – but they’ll also be more complicated, and take longer to complete. However, in order to build to a high level of reliability, the pattern is exactly the same: steadily fulfill commitments over time.

Team Reliability

Teams can do the same thing, for themselves and for the teams and people they work with. At any time, an individual on the team can step up and start keeping commitments on behalf of the team. This results in a team’s reliability points increasing. The individual can then teach the other team members to keep commitments on behalf of the team. Every commitment kept adds to the team’s reliability point total – and also helps boost overall team morale.

There’s also the team’s perception of the team’s reliability – when this is working correctly, it’s usually when people say things like, “it’s a good team to work on.” Goals are a great way to help build this – committing to goals has the added bonus of building unity, and then following through on those commitments builds reliability. Even if a goal is not achieved, the tasks necessary to attempt to fulfill the goal are completed, and those commitments are kept.

Uh…Whoops. I Broke It.

A reputation for being reliable can be broken. To break it, don’t keep your commitments. Promise things that you can’t or won’t do. You could also just stop doing the things already expected of you – because reliability is both the things you say you’ll do and the things people expect you to do.

Let’s say you fail to fulfill a commitment and you lose reliability points. It happens. People aren’t perfect – but that’s okay, because perfection isn’t necessary here. There are two things that can help repair this break and then allow you to go back to building reliability:

1. Accept responsibility. Clearly. Be obvious that you accept responsibility for the failure. Hiding from a commitment, hoping no one notices it wasn’t fulfilled, does even more damage.
2. Renegotiate the commitment. Make a reasonable judgment about re-committing to the task. Does the task still make sense to do? If so, what is a reasonable deadline for the commitment? If the commitment should still be fulfilled, fulfill it.

Ultimate Value

Being perceived as reliable lets people and teams believe that they can do increasingly harder and more awesome things. If we don’t truly believe that we can succeed, we don’t try. When we do believe that we can succeed, we start to watch for opportunities to do increasingly more awesome things.

Reliability lets teams believe in themselves.

Reliability also lets us focus on execution instead of worrying. We can focus more on tailored challenges and working hard, and less on trying to split our focus to all details of all things.

Basically…when we believe that we can succeed (more awesome things), and we can focus on execution (get things done), more awesome things get done. Reliability helps fulfills both of those requirements.

Reliability makes more awesome things get done.