The Broken Promise
I learned this lesson the hard way during a product launch that went sideways.
We had promised our biggest client a feature delivery by month-end. The team had been working nights, the client had planned their own launch around our timeline, and everyone was counting on us to deliver. Three days before the deadline, we discovered a critical integration issue that would take at least two more weeks to resolve properly.
My first instinct was damage control. I called an emergency meeting, explained the technical complexities, offered a partial workaround, and promised we’d work around the clock to minimize the delay. I wanted to fix their disappointment immediately. Get everyone back to trusting our team’s capability. Show them we were still reliable despite this setback.
The client listened politely, accepted our revised timeline, and said they understood these things happen in software development. I felt relieved. We’d navigated the crisis professionally.
But over the next few months, something had shifted. They stopped including us in strategic planning conversations. Started asking for more detailed progress reports. Required approval for decisions they’d previously trusted us to make. The working relationship had changed, and no amount of excellent delivery seemed to restore their previous confidence in our judgment.
I had treated the trust break like a technical problem that could be solved with better communication and harder work. But trust doesn’t heal on our timeline. It heals through consistent demonstration of changed behavior over time, and only when people are ready to risk believing in us again.
That expensive lesson taught me: when trust breaks, slow down the repair. Don’t rush the healing. Respect the process that genuine trust requires.