There are few things more frustrating for organizational leaders than inconsistent results. One month is a near record profit, only to follow the next month up with a below average result. The same group of people proved they are capable of extraordinary results, only to fall back to being just average only thirty days later. Why is this? What changed?
While there can be many factors, I’d like to encourage you to think about just one today—consistent integrity. With credit to Henry Cloud, author of Boundaries for Leaders, our results are the product of what we create and what we allow. Let me explain.
Oftentimes, organizations spend a lot of time creating. They dream up vision and mission statements, define values, create strategic plans, and hold meetings to review all of these. This would be great if the vision process was the only part that mattered. There is another piece of the puzzle, however, which as Cloud explains, is what we allow. Do we allow team members to fail to deliver consistent results? Do we allow top performers to regularly defy our stated values? Do we allow excuses to explain away our strategic plans? Do we allow our non-A-players to sink to the lowest acceptable standard without getting fired? You see, if we aren’t remaining committed to what we are creating, there will be a lack of integrity and consistency in our leadership teams. In order to foster an environment in which we enjoy more consistent and healthy results, leaders can take the following three steps:
- Paint done. This is a concept well articulated in Brene Brown’s book, Dare to Lead. She explains the responsibility upon leaders to clearly articulate what a good job would look like for an employee, leaving nothing up to the imagination. This isn’t merely about doing tasks well. It is about communicating and modeling culture in word and deed. It’s about applauding the embodiment of core values.
- Measure the Same. One of the great things about sports is that there are scoreboards and record books. We can see where we stand. Many leaders are good at seeing the score. There is a step before seeing the score that they fail to spend time on though. That’s making sure that we are keeping score of the things that actually make a difference, such as cultural fit along with the key performance indicators of a position. How does this person fit with our company? Then, secondly, are they creating value to move the company forward towards the fulfillment of its mission?
- Coach the Difference. What is the delta between what you have “painted done” to look like, and where the employee currently is? What will it take for those pictures to be the same? This is where the leader’s work continues. They must provide consistent feedback, which sadly, is often mistaken as micromanaging. Micromanaging is coming in and telling someone how to do their work, not ensuring that what was done was completed to the organization’s standard. The leader should be asking questions of employees to help them unlock and implement their own realizations and solutions to potential problems. And lastly, leaders must inspire employees to see a better way and model it for them.
I know this sounds really simple. It is. It’s simple, yet difficult because we allow the distractions of our days to put our focus onto things that don’t matter. As leaders operate in that space, they end up lacking consistent integrity in their own work and that bleeds over to their employees. To prevent this, it’s incumbent upon leaders to clearly “paint done,” to measure to that picture, and to coach when the two aren’t aligned.
Check out my Organizational Alignment Leaders Analysis to help you navigate this.