Consistent Leadership is Key to Success
@Rumana Maner
Consistent leadership is one of the most important strengths of successful managers. As a business leader you are in charge of establishing a consistent culture and value system in your company.
Consistency in your business is far more important that you can imagine. Being consistent allows you to establish awareness, build trust and deliver your services efficiently and profitably. Without it, your business is more likely to fail. Here’s some advice to help you show up a little more consistently…
1. Ensure your Efforts are Aligned.
It is crucial to remember that every decision and action you take should contribute to accomplishing a greater purpose for your business. Every business operates like a machine, and whether it works efficiently or not depends on the stability and smooth function of every one of its parts.
2. Define your Brand – and stick to it!
As creative entrepreneurs, it’s understandable that we get bored using the same brand elements every day. But the truth is consistency is critical when it comes to your visual brand. Constantly changing your colours, images and fonts can make your brand appear unprofessional and even untrustworthy.
Forbes Magazine suggests that solid branding differentiates your company from the competition, but if you don’t consistently live up to the promises your brand delivers, customer loyalty is massively reduced.
When you study the actions of powerful brands all over the world, you can see that they are highly consistent in both strategy and implementation, and any changes are few and far between.
3. When you make a plan, see it through.
Let’s be honest. If you do not commit to following a specific plan of action, you can put yourself in danger of generating high amounts of debt, or even going out of business.
Every time that you choose to change your plans too early, you are likely to rack up the costs without receiving any benefits from your prior initiative.
A start-up or a small business cannot afford to make terrible financial decisions based on inconsistent actions, or the company may sink quickly.
4. Analyse the results of your efforts
It is crucial to remember that it often takes time to see the results of your efforts. If your business processes, sales, and marketing efforts are inconsistent, you receive wavering results.
For example, running an ad for a day or two won’t give you much insight into how successful the ad is, but using it for a set period can provide a great deal of insight into if a particular marketing strategy is working.
If you end a campaign before it has a chance to gain traction, you may be sabotaging your own efforts.
5. Consider how changes affect your clients
Consistency in the interactions that you have with your clients allows your business to build a loyal customer base and provide a memorable customer experience for all. Understanding what customers want and giving it to them every time is important.
Whether you are establishing your brand or determining the course of your sales and marketing strategy, you have to recognise the power of consistency. Give yourself an advantage over fickle competitors by becoming consistent in how you operate your business, and what you present and offer to your customers.
Why inconsistent leadership often fails.
The manager is annoyed: The business goals are not reached; decisions are not implemented and deadlines with customers are not met. It’s enough.
“We need to implement what we have agreed. We need to be more consistent in what we do. As a boss I must and will be more consistent! From now on I will consistently check results and take action if needed!”
Employees hear it and they understand the reaction of the manager. Inconsistency is a waste of time and money. A company can’t afford it long term.
Everyone agrees – but after a while everything is as it was before. The manager has failed to act and stay consistent. This is unfortunately a typical leadership mistake.
The question is why? Why is it so hard to be consistent as a boss? What can you do as a boss in order to be consistent in your daily activities?
Punctuality
The Managing Director called his 8 department heads for a meeting at 10 am. Now it is 10:15. Everyone is there – only he is missing. Suddenly the door of the meeting room opens. The Managing Director enters the room and apologises briefly:
“Sorry for the delay, but I had to talk to John about the production figures for tomorrow.”
What goes through your head when you read that? You might think:
“I understand that. As a boss, I have so much work to do. My employees sometimes also have to wait for a few minutes.”
This short wait can be quite expensive. In the above example, each of the 8 departments has 15 minutes to wait idly. At an assumed hourly rate of $ 150 for each head
$ 150 x 15/60 x 8 = $ 300!
are wasted in this 15 minute!
Perhaps you’re thinking now:
“$ 300 is not that much. That can happen even once. The meeting with John regarding production numbers was surely important!”
The point is: It is not about the $ 300 loss. It is crucial that the manager acts as a role model. If you demand punctuality of your employees – and you should – then you need to be on time as well – always. No excuses.
If you want consistent leadership in your company you have to act consistently. The first thing is to be consistent with yourself. Walk the talk! The fish always stinks from the head!
Act consistently!
As an executive you have to act consistently. What does it mean? You must define the goals properly, agree measures and actions with your staff and check the outcome, control the results.
If you don’t control results regularly, you aren’t consistent – and you and your employees aren’t neither effective nor efficient. You give a wrong impression. It looks like you do not care about the results. It looks like that the work of your employees doesn’t really matter to you. That’s fatal!
But don’t act as a micromanager. Control results, but not the steps towards the result. Avoid micromanagement by all means.
How can you avoid being inconsistent in your day-to-day work?
7 Tips to achieve consistent leadership!
1. Your commitments are a word of honour!
Your deeds must follow your words. Little things count.
Keep your commitments – always – no matter whom you gave it, and no matter how seemingly unimportant it may seem to you. You gave the commitment voluntarily. No one put the gun to your head, right?
If you tell one of your employees, you send him the email on Wednesday, your employee should not receive the email on Thursday! Otherwise, you destroy employee motivation. You don’t want that, do you?
Take any of your commitments seriously – as serious as a word of honour. That’s what true leaders do!
2. Focus! Ask only what is truly important!
If the boss wants to become consistent, he wants this change immediately. He changes his behaviour and wants his employees to change immediately as well.
But change is mostly not working that quickly. It takes time to get all on board. The new rules must not only be heard but also understood and accepted. Your employees need time to realise that your behaviour change is serious and will stay long term.
So do not change everything at once, but go to the things that are really important. Name the important things by name and be there consistently. But do not get bogged down with consistency in unimportant trifles.
3. Keep a written record of agreements!
If you make arrangements or give a commitment, write it down. No need for a comprehensive protocol. A short e-mail just mentioning the results is fine.
4. Define objectives and actions verifiable and transparent!
Qualitative goals can become a great danger. Pseudo Goals such as:
“We will improve our communication!”
“We will increase our supply rate!”
do nothing if they are not quantified or if at least measures and actions with deadlines and responsible are derived.
General calls for greater customer focus and for increase of competitiveness will not do any good. These calls are getting lost in the daily operating business. The manager has to make sure goals and actions are clearly defined: Who is doing what until when? Only then he can control the results later on.
5. Plan the dates for reviews well in advance!
As a manager you should regularly check milestones. Have the objectives been achieved? It is helpful to develop your own appropriate control structures to remove your own inconsistency and inefficiency.
One problem is often that managers understand that the regular control is important, but they do not classify them as a matter of urgency.
A customer call or a problem in the production is urgent. It appears suddenly. Are these things strongly important? Mostly not. In contrast, regularly checking results is crucially important, but has mostly no urgency. Therefore it often falls by the wayside.
You can change this. Just make important things urgent! How? Assign dates for important things – do it months in advance!
For example: Fix a date once a month for a review meeting. In that meeting your employees report on the progress of their projects and you review the departmental goals regularly.
With the start of the year, fix all these monthly meetings for the next 12 months in advance. Instruct your secretary that these dates are important and should not be cancelled or postponed.
In this way these review meetings will become a habit for you. Believe me you will make a big step towards consistent leadership if you do this.
6. Put sanctions for seemingly mundane missed deadlines!
A Meeting must start on time. You need to make that a habit. To force all participants – including yourself – to be on time you can do the following:
Have a piggy bank in the meeting room. Anyone who is late must interject $ 1 per minute he is late. You as the executive have to throw in $ 5 per minute!
If the piggy bank is full, donate all the money to a charitable organisation.
You will be surprised how quickly you and your employees get used to being on time.
7. Celebrating Success!
If your team and you have achieved important goals, celebrate. This doesn’t need to be expensive. It can be a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant or just a chocolate cake that you bring to the meeting.
The celebration of success will not only strengthen the team spirit. Rather, it also means that you and your employees connect positive experiences with the consistent checking of results – and that helps to be more consistent.
By
@Rumana Maner [MBA]
HR Manager
AirCrews Aviation Pvt Ltd
www.AirCrewsAviation.com
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