Service commitment is a phrase that I was first introduced to when I worked in the hospital.
In the hospital, you were divided into two types of posts: the first were training posts, and the second were service commitments.
Service commitments were not a training post; they were a 'career grade', a position where you turned up, did your work in the hospital, treated patients, and went home; not too much training was involved for yourself or for others, mostly just getting through the work.
It became clear, though, that as a training position in the hospital, you also had a service commitment; you also did things which weren't really related to your training, mostly just related to getting the work done.
It's an interesting concept, service commitment because it's something that most people don't want because they feel it becomes boring; they want to do the interesting stuff, the exciting stuff, the development things, the more edgy things or the higher paid things and so they push service commitment to the side.
They want to do things faster and get to places before they would have done otherwise, and therefore, service commitment is boring because it gets in the way and takes up time, and this misses the point of service commitment entirely.
Service commitment is turning up each day and doing the things that you do; that's not to say that you shouldn't try to develop or move on or improve yourself, but the actual process of turning up and doing things repetitively, and learning from them is the most extraordinary scheme of development that you could possibly undertake.
It goes back to that phrase that we've used a lot recently in my house and roundabout that was introduced to me by Simon Sinek, often related to younger generations than me, but perhaps related to everybody in one way or another is this failure of people to be able to see the mountain.
In the context of the phrase, "Everyone sees the summit of the mountain, everyone wants to get to the summit of the mountain, it's just that they don't see the mountain", service commitment is climbing the mountain one step at a time
Blog Post Number - 4128