Be Consistent

Bite sized leadership advice

Consistency is one of the elements which accelerates trust. It takes resilience and prioritisation, simple yet important.

Trust comes from actions, not words. It is what you do, not what you say.

Build the resilience so that even when you are tired, stressed or distracted you can find a way to be consistent.

It can be tough, like those times when your young child does not want to go to bed at bedtime. You sigh as you heave yourself off the sofa, dragging every bone in your body, it has been a ‘hell-of-a-week’.

What you would give just to say ‘OK, stay up’, so that you could curl back up on the sofa with a glass of wine and relax. ‘Would one late night really matter’ you try and ask yourself. But you know if you do that you will lose the routines that you have worked so hard to establish.

Leadership has a lot of parallels. Consistency really matters. It helps your team know what is important to you, it creates a predictability which allows your team to feel.

If you think you are getting away with it, you probably aren’t.

Your team know that whatever you talk about, consistently, is what you really care for. If all you focus on is delivering performance, they will focus on performance too. Simple.

Consistenency is not at the expense of flexibility. If you always reward risk taking or accept failure with learning, then your team are more likely to take risks.

Inconsistency leads to paralysis as your team try to second guess what pleases you and fails.

The clearer and consistent you can be the better the results you will see from your team.

If you can’t be consistent, don’t do it. Scale back to something you can be consistent with. Even if these are smaller steps. Consistent application wins.

This is part of our Leadership Wizdom series, bite sized leadership advice for leaders who wish to improve their leadership, but don’t have much time. For more indepth articles check out The Change Wizard