When employees face challenges and difficulty, many are creative and resourceful, perhaps even adaptive in seeking solutions. In most situations at work, their struggle is not faced alone - they have a supervisor to provide them with direction, support, and an encouraging word. Sometimes this support is readily available, other times it’s missing or is poorly provided. What some employees experience, maybe even struggle with is not a supervisor who is blunt, directive, or overly strict. Moreso, it is a supervisor who is inconsistent.
When leaders change expectations from day to day, when they react logically or rationally one day, but emotionally or unpredictably the next, this creates confusion, dissonance, anxiety, as well as a significant erosion of trust. Consistency is not necessarily doing the right thing ALL the time (after all, we each are human and prone to imperfection, right?). For the leader, consistency is about behaving in a way that is predictable, and most of the time reasonable and fair. When an employee spends more time and energy trying to anticipate the mood of their supervisor, the time and mindshare they spend doing this could have been more productively applied to other, more positive and productive work activities.
Consistency, Stability, and Culture
Consistency in our interactions with others influences the quality and outcomes of all relationships. Consistency, including both the positive attributes of leadership behavior and even those considered less positive, set expectations for future interactions. And the expectations we have for our leaders based on consistent past behavior, allow us to plan how we will work together. This type of “planning” supports the development and maintenance of Trust in a leader-employee relationship such that the past behavior becomes indicative of how future interactions will (most likely) go. This predictability builds confidence, accountability, and psychological safety within a team.
Consistency strengthens credibility, which is also a primary benchmark of Trust. For a leader, doing what you say you will do…modeling the behaviors they espouse and expect from others reinforces the supervisor - employee - bond. The simplest commitments to punctuality, professionalism, respect, and accountability — create cultures in which these behaviors become the norm. People are far more influenced by what leaders repeatedly do than by what they say.
Change is “all around us”. It would be nearly impossible to identify one aspect of our world, country, organization, even our families that do not experience change. Given this prevalence of change, consistency becomes even more essential. Employees need leaders who remain steady under stress and communicate with clarity during uncertainty. Leaders become great not through occasional or infrequent motivational moments. Their ability to lead others well is built through repeated (and consistent) daily actions that demonstrate fairness, reliability, and integrity, along with other values they hold “near and dear. Consistency builds trust — and Trust is the foundation of every high-performing team.
Challenges provide the opportunity for learning and growth. Being an effective leader is more about “doing” than it is about “knowing”. This blog introduced the concepts of consistency, credibility, and follow-through and their influence on the supervisor-employee relationship. To learn more about these concepts, and others essential for becoming an outstanding leader, contact Ray Bennett, Director of Learning & Development at
[email protected] or 616-698-1167 to explore the many options available for your growth.