The One Metric That Predicts Whether Your Team Will Win

Here's a question most leadership teams can't answer: what percentage of the commitments your team makes actually get done on time?

Not projects. Not OKRs. The small, specific things people say they'll do in meetings, on Slack, in one-on-ones. "I'll send the proposal by Thursday." "I'll follow up with that candidate." "I'll have the numbers ready for the board deck."

If you don't know that number, you're flying blind. And if you're honest with yourself, you probably suspect it's lower than you'd like.

That number is your team's reliability score. And it's the single best predictor of whether your organization will execute or just talk about executing.

Trust isn't a feeling. It's a track record.

There's a reason "trust" shows up in every book about high-performing teams. But most of those books treat trust like a vibe. Something you build through offsites and vulnerability exercises and falling backward into your coworker's arms.

The research tells a different story.

Paul Zak, a neuroscientist at Claremont Graduate University, spent over a decade measuring brain activity while people worked. He found that employees at high-trust companies reported 50% higher productivity, 76% more engagement, and 40% less burnout than those at low-trust companies. High-trust organizations had half the employee turnover. And when a company moved up just one quartile in organizational trust, the average employee produced an additional $10,185 in revenue per year.

Trust isn't soft. It's the hardest competitive advantage you can build.

But here's the part most people miss: trust doesn't come from team dinners. It comes from people doing what they said they'd do. Repeatedly. Over time. That's it.

When your VP of Sales says she'll have the territory plan done by Wednesday and it lands on Wednesday, trust goes up. When it doesn't land, and nobody says anything, trust goes down. When that happens three times in a row, trust is gone, and no amount of Slack emoji can bring it back.

Reliability is the behavior. Trust is the outcome.

Google figured this out the hard way

In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle to answer a deceptively simple question: what makes some teams wildly effective while others flounder?

They studied 180 teams. They looked at everything: team composition, personality types, educational backgrounds, social connections. None of it predicted performance.

What did predict performance was psychological safety, the shared belief that you won't be punished for speaking up, admitting mistakes, or flagging risks. It was the single most important factor. And it maps directly to reliability.

Because here's what psychological safety actually looks like in practice: it's the confidence that when someone commits to something, they mean it. And if they can't deliver, they'll say so early enough that the team can adjust. It's not about being comfortable. It's about being dependable.

Amy Edmondson, the Harvard researcher who coined the term, found that psychologically safe teams didn't make fewer mistakes. They surfaced them faster. They talked about what went wrong instead of hiding it. And that made them dramatically more effective.

The teams that win aren't the ones with the best talent. They're the ones where people can count on each other.

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it

Most organizations have no idea how reliable they actually are. Commitments get made in meetings, scattered across Slack threads, buried in email chains. Nobody tracks them in one place. Nobody knows the real completion rate.

So when things slip, it feels random. Unpredictable. Like you're playing whack-a-mole with missed deadlines.

It's not random. It's just invisible.

The fix is simple, even if it's not easy: create a single, centralized list of every commitment your leadership team makes. Who owns it. When it's due. What bigger goal it connects to.

Then measure your completion rate. Weekly. Relentlessly.

This is what we built Tether to do. When you connect your meetings, your Slack conversations, your one-on-ones, Tether captures every commitment across all of them, pulls them into a single view, and tracks what's getting done and what's not. No more digging through transcripts. No more "I thought you were handling that." Just a clear, honest picture of your team's reliability.

But visibility into completion rates is only half the picture. When you centralize commitments, you also start to see where your team's time is actually going. Are the dozens of micro-tasks coming out of your weekly syncs moving the strategy forward? Or is your team burning hours on operational odds and ends, one-off requests, and shadow processes that nobody sanctioned but everyone tolerates?

Most leaders are surprised by what they find. The VP who's supposed to be driving the product roadmap is spending 40% of their commitments on internal firefighting. The head of sales committed to six things last week and five of them were reactive. The strategic priorities you set in the quarterly offsite aren't generating any commitments at all, which means nobody is actually working on them.

You can't fix what you can't see. And you can't see it when commitments are scattered across twelve Slack channels and a handful of meeting transcripts nobody revisits.

That number becomes your baseline. And once you can see it, you can improve it.

A team running at 60% commitment completion is a team that doesn't trust itself, even if nobody says it out loud. A team running at 90%+ is a team that executes with confidence. The difference between those two numbers is the difference between an organization that talks about strategy and one that actually delivers it.

Pair it with the metrics that matter

Your reliability score doesn't live in a vacuum. It's one part of a bigger picture.

Velocity tells you how fast your team is moving. Are commitments getting done ahead of schedule, or are they consistently sliding? If your completion rate is high but everything lands three days late, you have a capacity problem, not a reliability problem.

Employee satisfaction tells you how your team feels about the work. High reliability paired with low satisfaction means people are grinding through commitments but burning out doing it. That's not sustainable. The goal is a team that delivers consistently and still has energy left.

Culture markers tell you whether accountability is healthy or toxic. Are people flagging risks early? Are they comfortable saying "I can't take that on"? Are commitments being made collaboratively, or are they being dictated from the top? A high reliability score built on fear is a ticking time bomb.

When you can see all of these together, you stop managing by gut feel and start managing with real data. You can spot the VP who's overcommitted before they burn out. You can identify the team that's quietly drowning. You can see whether your weekly rhythm is actually working or just generating busywork.

If your team resists accountability, that's the problem

Here's something nobody wants to say: if your people push back on explicit commitments and visible accountability, you have a culture problem.

High performers don't resist accountability. They crave it.

They want to know exactly what's expected of them. They want to see how their work connects to something bigger. They want to be on a team where everyone pulls their weight, because nothing is more demoralizing to an A-player than watching a colleague coast while they carry the load.

Zenger and Folkman's research confirms this: 72% of employees said their performance would improve if their manager provided more corrective feedback. 57% actually preferred corrective feedback over praise. The people on your team who are doing great work want to know where they stand, and they want everyone else held to the same standard.

When someone bristles at tracking commitments or making deadlines visible, the question to ask is: why? Sometimes it's a legitimate concern about micromanagement, and that's worth listening to. But often it's a signal that someone has gotten comfortable operating without accountability, and that comfort has come at the expense of the rest of the team.

The best people you'll ever hire will leave if they don't feel like they're on a high-performing team. And high-performing teams are built on one thing above all else: the confidence that commitments are commitments, not suggestions.

It starts at the top

None of this works if leadership isn't modeling it.

If the CEO makes commitments in Monday's leadership sync and quietly lets them slide by Friday, that sets the standard for the entire organization. It doesn't matter what's written on the wall about "accountability" or "ownership." People watch what leaders do, not what they say.

Unreliable leaders create unreliable teams. Unreliable teams produce unreliable results. And unreliable results kill companies, slowly, then all at once.

The flip side is equally true. When the CEO tracks their own commitments publicly, flags when they're behind, and closes the loop every week, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. It makes reliability feel normal instead of burdensome. It turns accountability from a threat into a shared operating system.

Zak's neuroscience research found that leaders who show vulnerability, who admit what they don't know and ask for help, actually trigger oxytocin production in their teams, the same brain chemical that drives trust and cooperation. Saying "I committed to having the hiring plan done by Friday and I'm behind. I need another two days." isn't weakness. It's the strongest move a leader can make. Because it proves that the system applies to everyone.

The compound effect of reliability

Here's what happens when a team gets this right:

Commitments become meaningful. People stop over-promising because they know it'll be visible when they don't deliver. Instead, they commit to what they can actually do, which means the commitments that get made are the ones that actually matter.

Trust compounds. Every kept commitment is a small deposit in the team's trust account. Over weeks and months, that account grows until the team operates with a kind of effortless confidence. People assume good intent. They give each other the benefit of the doubt. They move faster because they don't have to double-check everything.

Execution accelerates. When everyone knows what everyone else is doing, coordination costs drop. You spend less time chasing updates and more time doing the work. The Project Management Institute found that only 52% of projects finish on time. Teams that track commitments relentlessly blow past that number.

The best part? It's not complicated. You don't need a transformation initiative or a six-month culture change program. You need a list of commitments, a way to track them, and the discipline to review them every week.

Start there. Measure your reliability. Make it visible. And watch what happens when your team finally knows, with data instead of hope, that they can count on each other.