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Thought Leadership

Adam Bryant

How good is your do-to-say ratio?

November 15, 2021

The right balance is heavy on follow-through and reliability. Those who have it will go further in life.

Think for a moment about all the colleagues in your immediate circle, whether they are your peers or people you manage. Which of them can be trusted to follow through when they say they are going to do something? And which ones make you think to yourself, “Hmm, that’s probably not going to happen. I’ll have to follow up”?

Throughout the pandemic, there has been a lot of discussion about the qualities that matter most in employees. We hear about the importance of being an agile learner or embracing ambiguity, for example. Those are important attributes, of course, but we can’t lose sight of a foundational quality that sets the best team players apart: reliability.

Reliability is a theme that has come up often in my many interviews with CEOs over the years, but it was Brett Wilson, who at the time of our conversation was CEO of TubeMogul, an enterprise software company based in Emeryville, Calif., who shared with me the memorable concept of the do-to-say ratio.

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The ExCo Group’s Adam Bryant wrote this article for his column in Strategy + Business. It was originally published here.