Consistent Leaders Get Superior Results

Episode #401 Consistent Leaders Get Superior Results

CONSISTENCY IS UNDERRATED

We all think we’re pretty consistent… and anytime we aren’t, we are expert at rationalising any inconsistencies. The fundamental problem with this is that we judge ourselves by our intentions, but other people judge us by our actions.

Consistency is one of the lesser-known levers of high performance. People hate uncertainty way more than they hate bad news, because they can adapt to virtually anything, as long as they know what to expect.

If you’re unpredictable, the impact on your team is massive. They don’t just become frustrated; their work output slows to glacial speed. They spend all their time and energy focused on how to manage your expectations, rather than doing their jobs.

In this newsletter, I take a deep dive into the six drivers that separate consistently great leaders from the rest, and I’ll show you how to build a team that performs with confidence, not one that’s forced to constantly second-guess itself. 

WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY?

One of the observations that I took away from my corporate executive career is that people hate uncertainty way more than they hate bad news. So, imagine my delight when I received an email from The Economist (Bartleby, of course), talking about the value of consistency and leadership.

The article came from a pretty novel angle, as did some of the research it quoted. For instance, it makes the point that people who know the details of a colonoscopy are less likely to be worried about it than people who don’t.

I don’t know about this one… my attitude is, once you’re under general anesthetic, it’s completely out of your control. As long as you have confidence in your surgeon, there’s no point in worrying about it. Wake me when you’re done!

It’s also true, though, that leaders are more likely to put off making significant investment decisions during times of uncertainty, which goes some way to explaining why economic growth slows as uncertainty increases.

One source of uncertainty that the article explored is inconsistent behaviour by a leader. One study published in the American Psychological Society Journal concluded that working for a boss who swings unpredictably between being toxic and being charming is more stressful than working for a boss who is consistently abusive.

Go figure! I guess at least when you’re working for a total d!ckhead, you know what to expect.

In another piece of research, the authors build a model to simulate the impact that the Big Five personality traits have on teamwork (the big five traits being neuroticism, extroversion, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness).

The authors of this paper are huge fans of agreeableness. Their model was built from 10 years’ worth of data on the performance of MBA students at the London Business School. The model found that the more uncertainty is involved in a task, the more important it is for the team to exhibit agreeableness.

Bartleby’s conclusion is that there should be a greater demand for warm-hearted people who know how to cooperate.

But hey, you know me and research, right!?

I immediately questioned the sample group. Students in an MBA program, even one as prestigious as the London Business School, are forced to collaborate on group assignments. They have a compelling common interest: getting the best grade.

I can totally understand how agreeableness might become more important with increasing uncertainty in that scenario.

But this is radically different from a commercial business. In a company, leaders set the tone, the pace, and the standard for their team. People look to their leader for guidance and direction. They take cues from what their leader emphasises and expects.

When uncertainty is high, people tend to simply down tools. When they’re not sure what to do, they avoid making decisions, and output slows to glacial speed.

I suspect that, in the corporate world, the Big Five trait of conscientiousness is a much stronger predictor of performance than agreeableness.

A SORDID TALE OF INCONSISTENCY

I worked with many inconsistent leaders during my years in corporate.

One was so bad that I had to find another job… urgently. She was as nice as pie one day and irrationally volatile the next. Her directions and expectations were completely unpredictable.

On one occasion, she asked me to attend an interstate meeting with an important stakeholder group on behalf of the team. I had a meeting with her the day before I flew down to make sure we were aligned on the strategy, and I had clear objectives for the outcome of the meeting.

I felt fully briefed, and I understood my boss’s expectations pretty well.

On the day of the meeting, everything went brilliantly. And I flew back to Sydney that evening with a sense of great accomplishment. However, when I briefed my boss the next day, she exploded. She insisted that I hadn’t followed her direction.

She was visibly shaking, with genuine rage, as she told me what I’d done wrong, although it wasn’t entirely clear to me what that was.

Look, I’m no idiot. I can follow simple directions, and this definitely was not rocket science; and the approach we’d agreed was unequivocal. But apparently, in the cold light of day, she wasn’t happy with that outcome.

I was old enough and ugly enough to handle the dressing down I got: it wasn’t the first or the last time that happened to me during my career. But this was different. It was the fact that she was trying to convince me that the sky was brown and the grass was red.

Before I made the decision to move on to greener pastures, I spent a couple of weeks trying to find a pathway through the situation, at least in my own head. But as much as I looked for a way to salvage it, I always kept coming back to one key fact: as long as I didn’t know what to expect from her, I couldn’t function properly.

I’d be forever second guessing myself and trying to work out what she actually wanted as opposed to what she told me she wanted. And that would have been fatal to both my team’s performance and my own sanity. I could not get away from that role fast enough.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t bright: she was definitely smart.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t a good person, because I really think she was, deep down.

It was the inconsistency.

Not knowing what to expect was a showstopper for me.

THE SIX DRIVERS OF LEADERSHIP CONSISTENCY

That’s the horror story; but I’ve also reported to many leaders who demonstrated ironclad consistency, and it was an absolute pleasure to work for them.

What actually makes a consistent leader? What capabilities would you need to develop, and what behaviours would you need to demonstrate? How would you know where to focus your attention?

Your people will function way better if they know what to expect; not so that you become entirely predictable, of course, but you do want to be consistent. Instead of trying to second guess how you’re going to react and trying to work out how to best manage you, they can just get on with it and do their jobs.

And as much as you might think your people should be more capable in ambiguous situations, it still comes down to you as the leader. You have to bring the stability. You have to give your people the confidence that they can get through anything.

Consistency is driven by a number of factors, and I’m going to take a deep dive into my top six.

1. Unshakable values.

Virtually every leader talks about how important their values are to them.

For example, I once worked for a leader who swore blind that the thing he valued more than anything else in the world was his integrity. But there were many times when he demonstrated a breathtaking lack of integrity.

I saw him bend the rules on several occasions so that he could maximise his own self-interest. And whenever someone from above directed him to adopt a flexible approach to financial reporting, his integrity was the last thing on his mind.

He just wanted to please his boss. He never pushed back because he was fundamentally a weak human.

But I’m sure he was always able to rationalise his behaviour. I reckon he had no idea that his team felt this lack of consistency so acutely. Instead of being able to rely on him being driven by predictable values, we spent our time trying to guess what might best serve his rampant self-interest.

Your people need to know that your values aren’t malleable, and that you will hold the line on what’s important to you, even though it might not ultimately be the best thing for you, personally.

2. Goal clarity.

One of my least favorite terms in business is “pivot”.

A lot of leaders use the word pivot because it sounds way sexier than: “I changed my mind”; or “I’m actually indecisive, so I flip-flopped between the options”; or “I got this call so wrong that I had to reverse it completely”.

When you constantly move the goalposts, inconsistency can very quickly breed insecurity in your team.

No one wants to put much effort into anything, because they know the priorities are most likely going to shift. A lot of value is squandered and a lot of energy is wasted.

Goal clarity is the name of the game: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How does it contribute to the company’s strategy? How does it deliver value?

If you can communicate the broader organisational objectives and how the work each person is doing contributes to those, you’re going to be in a great place. In fact, connecting the goals from the top of the company to the bottom, and providing your people with extreme clarity is the holy grail of leadership:

• This is why we’re here.
• This is who we serve.
• This is our go-to-market strategy.
• This is what we have to deliver, and
• This is how our team results contribute to the company’s broader objectives.

Get that right, and consistency will flow.

3. Predictable decision making.

The process of decision making has to be predictable and repeatable. This starts with having clear, single-point accountabilities. Accountable people make decisions in their specialist domain: they decide who to consult and what role each individual plays in the process; they decide how and where to derive their inputs from.

A really good decision-making framework includes a consistent process for assessing risk, and pressure testing assumptions. It has clear rules and guidelines that people can rely upon.

For example, what are the acceptable financial hurdle rates: Internal rates of return? Net present value?

We’ve just completed Module Six with our current global Leadership Beyond the Theory cohort, so my eight point decision making criteria is front of mind for me.

Predictability comes from being able to show a clear methodology for decision making.

4. Clear, unambiguous standards.

When you evaluate someone’s performance, it has to be abundantly clear what criteria you’re using to evaluate them. This requires a higher level of transparency.

Having a clear, well-documented performance standard for every leadership role in your company is vital. It’s the backbone that supports the one-on-one conversations you have. If people don’t know precisely what the standard is, then how will they know whether they’re meeting it?

Feedback has to be very specific, rather than general. And if someone isn’t meeting the standard, they need to know why not. Where people are performing well, you’ve got to be able to point to the performance standard criterion that they’re meeting or exceeding.

Likewise, when their performance is below par, you need to explain precisely why, and to help them improve so that they can meet the standard.

Despite all the nuances of human interaction, people are pretty simple for the most part. They want to know three things when they walk into work each day:

1. What are your expectations of me?
2. How am I performing against those expectations?
3. What does my future hold?

Having unambiguous standards is a prerequisite for this, and it’s one of the key drivers of consistency.

5. Emotional self-regulation.

You have to be able to control yourself before you can hope to achieve any level of consistency for your people. This begins with not allowing yourself to be emotionally triggered.

You have to be in touch with your physical, emotional, and psychological state. If you don’t feel you’ve got this nailed already, you may have to employ coping strategies so that you’re confident you can remain stable through different phases.

Consistent, stable leaders are not triggered by other people and events. The best leaders are thoughtful; they listen well; they don’t fire up easily.

Frustration, fear, and anger are the enemies of consistency.

6. Composure under fire.

It’s much easier to be consistent when everything’s going well. In fact, in my experience, one of the key differentiators between leaders who are seen as consistent and those who aren’t is how they handle high-pressure situations.

The times when this will challenge you most are when complexity and ambiguity are high, and pressure is at its greatest.

We produced a number of podcast episodes over the years dealing with different elements of resilience:

• Most recently, Ep. 387: 5 Leadership Essentials for Resilient Teams, and
• An old favorite of mine, Ep. 43: People Follow Resilient Leaders.

Your objective as a leader is to bring clarity to ambiguity; to have confidence; to not freeze.

In times of extreme pressure, you have to go back to your basics: “What are the no-regrets moves that I can make?”… “How can I sharpen the focus on value delivery?”

Think about this from a CEO’s perspective. Almost nothing is black and white. It’s just 1,000 annoying shades of gray.

But at the frontline, people need to have extreme clarity: “What do I need to do right now?”… “What does good look like?”… “How do I do a good job today, on this shift?”

Somewhere between the CEO and the front line, ambiguity has to be translated into certainty, and every leader in between has a role to play in that.

Do you have the composure under fire that you need to demonstrate the level of consistency and focus that your people expect? Because the best, most-consistent leaders have grace under pressure.

BE CONSISTENT, OR LEAK VALUE

Consistency is a very underrated capability of great leaders. If you think about the consistency of your previous bosses, both good and bad, it should increase your desire to become more consistent.

The six drivers I’ve just run through absolutely work. Anything you can do to improve even one of these elements is going to pay you back in spades. So just pick one and commit to working on it.

What would you have to do to improve it?

Every single one of these drivers is completely within your control. They’re not easy to change, though, because they are big value levers. But if you’re not a consistent leader, you’ll have to just resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to leave a huge amount of value on the table.