The commitment was written in Mateo’s journal and shared with his team: I will loosen my grip. For three months, it held. He moved his one-on-ones to every two weeks and stopped rewriting proposals that were already good enough. He blocked Friday afternoons for building the deck he’d been promising his wife since their second child was born — something physical, nothing to do with revenue.
His team stepped up. His director of client services started solving problems that Mateo used to solve himself. Her approach was different than his, and sometimes better. His wife told him he seemed re-energized.
Then the largest client threatened to pull their contract. Mateo’s phone rang at 6 a.m. By 6:15, he was back in the plant, personally inspecting product, rewriting procedures. Seventy-two hours of adrenaline saved the account.
But his old ways had returned. The Friday block was gone. The deck sat unfinished in the yard, and his wife stopped commenting on it.
In our next session, Mateo looked satisfied but exhausted. “Sometimes you have to jump back in,” he said. I let several seconds pass before asking, “Was the crisis the reason you went back to your old approach, or was it the permission?”
“Permission,” he finally said. “It felt natural to be solving problems again.”
Mateo recommitted the following week to the promise he made his team: I will loosen my grip. Recommitment is what happens after the first failure, the first crisis, the first pull back toward old habits. It is not a feeling, but a practice, and often arrives without recognition or fanfare because it looks identical to what you were already doing.
He called each director and acknowledged that he had stepped over them during the crisis. He asked what they would have done differently. He listened. They rebuilt their agreements together, this time with protocols for how the team would handle the next emergency without him at the center of it.
The second crisis came four months later. Mateo’s phone rang again. He called his operations director instead of driving to the plant. The team handled it. Not perfectly, but they handled it.
The initial commitment gets the recognition — the announcement, the early wins, the spouse who notices a change. But commitment is a single act. It lives in one moment, and then it’s over. The recommitment that follows, quietly and without applause, is where the leader is actually made.
Commitment is a declaration. Recommitment is a capability.
THE QUESTION
Where have you let a setback become permission to abandon a commitment that was actually working?
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” — Pema Chödrön