How consistent are you in your approaches to dealing with people and problems?
Is this You?
Is there an early warning system in place in your office that tracks your every move from the car through the parking lot and into the office?
“DefCon 9, she spilled her coffee reaching for her employee badge and she just made the security guard cry as a result. Approach with extreme caution.”
Or,
“All clear…he’s smiling and humming on the way in, and he’s carrying a box of donuts. It might be a good morning to ask for more resources.”
Do people approach you with fear about concerns, not knowing whether you will erupt like Mount Vesuvius or offer a conciliatory tone and encourage you to pull up a chair and talk things through?
Are you actively encourage innovation and risk taking on one day, and summarily executing the failed experimenters and their messages the next day?
Do you preach about transparency and your open door policy and then glower at people when they interrupt you after a week’s worth of closed door meetings?
While my slightly tongue in cheek examples are modified for public consumption, the inconsistent managers behind them are very real. It gets worse. A valued colleague is losing good employees at a fairly rapid clip as his direct boss wreaks havoc with her daily Jekyll/Hyde swings in dealing with people and issues. They’ve been reduced to nominating one person every morning to make a potential kamikaze run into her office. If the sacrificial lamb returns, everyone sighs and work proceeds. If not, people hunker down and head the opposite direction every time the boss is in sight.
The Subtle Power of Consistency as a Leader:
- How you respond to people and to situations (victories, losses, mistakes etc.) goes a long way to forming the working environment on your team.
- Set clear standards for performance and respond to successes and failures in a consistent manner, and you reinforce a culture of accountability.
- Encourage your team members to experiment in pursuit of innovation, and then support them when some experiments inevitably fail, and you will strengthen the innovation culture on your team.
- How you engage with people on daily basis helps create a rhythm in the workplace. If life’s annoyances drive you to adopt the Jekyll/Hyde behavior of the manager above, your team will struggle to do much more than survive.
Six Ideas for Improving Your Consistency:
1. Prepare your attitude every day before you walk in the door. One client uses an approach of sitting in his car for a few minutes mentally running through how he will deal with people from the moment he steps out of the car until he climbs back in at night.
2. Stop and think before reacting. Ask yourself, “will my do match my tell?”
3. Ask your team members to volunteer when your approach or your decision is dissonant. While you reserve the right to change your mind, this system will allow you to think through the situation and minimize the more random weather shifts.
4. Keep a Decision-Journal and revisit earlier decisions and the rationale behind them before you reverse course.
5. Strive to eliminate any double standards in your management approach. Giving one person a break and then preaching the need for results to everyone else is confusing (and annoying) to the people around you. Accountability and fairness are only achievable through a single standard.
6. If you feel your blood boiling on a topic, for a lot of good reasons, disengage, get control and think through the proper response to the situation.
Thoughts for People Dealing with an Inconsistent Manager:
One of the fatal flaws of these types of posts is the offending or offensive manager typically won’t have the emotional intelligence to read this, much less recognize himself or herself. If you’ve exhausted all noble and direct attempts at dealing with this manager (truly exhausted those attempts), try printing this out and placing it on his/her chair with a note: “You can help us all by paying attention to this post,” or, “This is you and you are driving us crazy.” Sometimes the indirect and metaphorical clubbing over the head wakes people up. Sometimes…but not most of the time.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While working for an inconsistent boss is wholly unpleasant, at the end of the day, the only one you can control is yourself. If you are reading this, it’s either been placed on your chair or, you are one of those good people interested in improving your performance and growing as a leader.
Pay attention to your consistency, ask for feedback and encourage your team members to help you help them on this issue. Your consistency is an indicator of your professional and personal maturity and a powerful force in building a high performance environment. Work is difficult enough without people having to spend time which one of your personalities is going to show up every day.
Thanks for tackling a tough topic. I appreciate your ending reminder about ‘what do we control?’ I am reminded about a leader getting some feedback during a session around the Birkman Method and they realized how their stressed out behavior differed from their normal behavior. They saw their inconsistent behavior in that moment – and it is a glorious moment when the light goes on.
Like you pointed out, too often it is difficult to get through to that discussion. Nice post.
Scott, here’s to more lights going on! Thanks much for reading, tweeting and commenting. Best, -Art
Great advice. I am still trying to find a workable solution to the employee whose behavior has caused me to alter my habits and adopt some worse ones. As a manager who strives to improve, 360 evals, etc I am struggling to figure out a way not to renig on my open door policy as a result of one employee with a nonstop stream-of-consciousness conversation, while standing in my open door! The slightest opening results in 30 minutes of blather. Gentle reminders to ‘get to the point’, get on my calendar so you have my full attention, etc have achieved nothing!
Karen, we all have “Watchmakers” in our culture. (Ask them the time, they will tell you how to build a watch.) My own approach to this is two-fold: 1. politely and respectfully ask for the question or issue as a means of getting the discussion on-track. If there is no issue…just small talk, respectfully indicate it was nice catching up and indicate your need to get to your next item. (2): The second phase of this…if the individual is a chronic over-communicator (watchmaker), this is a great opportunity for some developmental feedback. I address this in a number of my posts and have taught many Watchmakers how to use a Message Map to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their communications. Over-talking can be a career-limiting factor…it’s a great developmental opportunity!
One thought…perhaps there is a hunger for more face time with you from your team members. Increase your informal communication and you may reduce the type of interchanges you describe.
Last and not least, a point I make in my book, Practical Lessons in Leadership is that every manager has the need to communicate what they mean by “open door” policy. Inherent in the “open door” is the occasional need for you to also close the door. Let people know you will share with them when the door must close for a bit. I also encourage Managers to develop a 911 protocol…for those situations where you encourage people to barge through any and all closed doors in the interest of customers and the business.
Hope this helps a bit! Thanks for reading and writing. -Art
Art, this is great – thank you. Your last paragraph is particularly powerful – the idea that “consistency is an indicator of personal and professional maturity” needs to be shouted loudly and clearly from every high point of leadership in every team and organization. Tragically too many leaders remain locked in a long adolescence, for which their team and organization colleagues pay a heavy price.