Getting people to try CBC once is easy. Sustaining it is where most leaders fail. Anyone can draft an agreement, but keeping it alive as a working discipline requires consistency, not enthusiasm. CBC is not a campaign or initiative. It’s a standard. Once it slips, you’re back to vague promises, missed deadlines, and “we thought someone else owned that.”
Make CBC Non-Negotiable
- The rule is simple: no agreement, no work.
- If someone says “we’ll just start and figure it out later,” you’ve already lost. That’s how scope creep and blame games are born.
- CBC keeps everyone honest by locking in expectations before execution begins.
Example (1-1 with a direct report): Your engineer wants to jump into a refactor “while they’re in the code.” You stop them: “No agreement, no work. Write down the objective, scope, and success criteria, and we’ll sign off. Otherwise, it’s just noise.”
Keep Agreements Lightweight but Concrete
- CBC doesn’t mean writing contracts like a lawyer. It means agreements that are short but enforceable.
- Success Criteria = how we’ll know it’s done. Not “make progress,” not “explore options”, but “API deployed, tested, and handling 1,000 RPS with <200ms latency.”
- A one-pager that’s clear beats a ten-page doc nobody reads.
Contrast with OKRs: OKRs love aspirational fluff like “Delight the customer.” CBC forces you to say: “Ship feature X by date Y with adoption target Z.”
Normalize Review and Closure
- At the end of every agreement, close the loop.
- Did the work meet the success criteria? Yes = success. No = failure. There’s no “partial credit” for activity.
- Closing agreements creates a track record of execution, not just a backlog of half-finished promises.
Scenario (midsize company): Instead of a quarterly OKR review full of hand-waving (“We made good progress”), a CBC review is blunt: “This contract called for migrating 50% of services by Q2. Only 30% migrated. That’s a miss. Let’s document why before we sign the next agreement.”
Enforce Dual Accountability
- Leaders own clarity. If agreements are vague, that’s on you.
- Operators own results. If agreements are clear but missed, that’s on them.
- CBC kills the corporate sport of finger-pointing by drawing a bright line of accountability.
Scenario (enterprise): A VP complains about slow delivery. Under CBC, you can point to the signed agreement: “This is what we agreed to, these were the dependencies, and this is where execution failed.” No one escapes the paper trail.
Use CBC as a Coaching Tool
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Agreements expose whether someone struggles with clarity, ownership, or execution.
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If they fail, you know exactly where to coach:
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Don’t understand objectives? Teach clarity.
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Don’t meet deliverables? Coach execution.
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Keep missing dependencies? Teach risk management.
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The “Three Gates” framework, desire, ability, applying guidance, lines up cleanly with CBC reviews.
The Takeaway
Sustaining CBC isn’t about pep talks or posters on the wall. It’s about discipline: every piece of work tied to a signed agreement, every outcome reviewed against success criteria, every failure traceable to a clear cause. Unlike OKRs or KPIs, CBC doesn’t care about how “aligned” or “motivated” you feel, it cares about whether you did what you said you’d do. And that’s the whole point.
