Greetings!
Following on from last week's article about Positive Duty obligations, I touched on the important role leaders play in modelling the right behaviours and setting the standards through their actions, especially about ensuring they do the right things.
The next part of that conversation is one we don't talk about enough: the importance of leadership consistency. For clarity, I’m not talking (at least in this article) about one leader behaving consistently; I’m talking about all of your leaders being on the same page and leading with consistency across departments and teams.
The Complaints We Hear Every Week
Too often, our team are assisting clients with issues such as:
- How come the factory team all have to provide medical certificates in line with the personal leave policy, but the office staff don’t?
- How come Billy can come in later when he needs to, and his manager never makes him stay back and make up the time?
- Why is Jill from finance allowed to take extra breaks to go and smoke, but Karen, who is also a smoker, has been told she’s not allowed?
- I love it when I get to work in Sally’s team. She’s so much nicer than Peter and doesn’t make me fill in all the paperwork.
The amount of damage that inconsistent leadership across the business does really is underestimated and can erode company culture. People perceive these types of actions as leaders playing favourites, or one team being more important than another, or one leader being an ideal one to work for while another one is to be avoided at all costs.
Why It Happens
Many times, the leaders in your business may not even be aware that they’re managing differently to others. They’re usually just plodding along doing what they think is the right thing. Also reasonably common is that there are differences in leadership skill and confidence: one leader feels confident in managing a conversation about taking additional breaks to smoke, while another is worried about upsetting the employee, or just simply doesn’t know how to address the issue, so they stick their head in the sand and do nothing.
Regardless of what causes it, inconsistent leadership triggers issues.
The Good News: It’s a Relatively Easy Fix
We don’t want leaders to be carbon copies of the business owner, or of each other. Great leadership comes from authenticity, individual personality and the ability to adapt your style to meet the needs of each person on the team. However, we DO want leaders to lead by the same set of rules. We want the leaders to be on the same page with regards to setting standards and holding people accountable. We don’t want the team to feel that some leaders play favourites, or that it’s easy to get away with stuff in another leader’s team. Everyone should understand the rules, play by them, and be accountable for when they don’t.
(and we definitely don’t want people to play one leader off against another... ‘Samantha didn’t make me do that’, or Kevin said no, so I’ll ask Julie’).
7 Ways to Build Leadership Consistency
So, how do you make sure that all leaders are reading from the same playbook and managing consistently as a team?
- Make sure your leaders know that their loyalty and commitment need to be to their leadership team – not to the people that report to them. We don’t want leaders coming to the table as lobbyists for their own team. We want your leaders to consider what is in the best interest of the whole business, regardless of whether it’s not the best outcome for their own specific team.
- As the business owner (or most senior person) it’s your job to ensure your leaders know what your company policies are and enforce them. If your Personal Leave Policy states that a medical certificate must be provided for absences of two or more days, then make sure your leaders enforce this. If your business requires all employees to submit a timesheet at the end of each week, make sure your managers follow this up and address it appropriately when the standard is not met. If the company permits every employee to take their birthday as a paid day off, make sure none of your leaders stop an employee from doing this, or allow them to make an employee ‘feel guilty’ for accessing the special benefit.
- Avoid grey areas in your company policies or rules. When you remove personal opinions from the rules and stop saying to leaders “Manage it how you see fit”, leaders stop making up their own standards and apply the company ones.
- Define expectations. Tell your leaders what you expect them to do when rules are broken. You can even create the standards, expectations and actions together – it’s a great leadership workshop to get your leaders on the same page!
- Develop your leaders! So many times we see people promoted into leadership roles with no training or coaching. Often the best ‘technical person’ is promoted, but their technical skills are very different from people leadership skills. A great cabinetmaker does not necessarily make a great Factory Manager! Enhance your business by developing your leaders – give them the tools and coaching to be great. You win, the leaders win, the team wins and the business wins. What’s not to love???
- Treat leaders the same. They not only have to set the consistent standards, but they have to model them as well – and you can’t let them get away with stuff you don’t want them to let others get away with.
- Remove bias. It’s crazy how often our HR team hears leadership bias (actually, even team member bias). It happens more often than you think. Business owners allow high-performing leaders (or team members) to ignore the rules because they do good work. Stop it. Doing good work actually means doing the whole job properly. That means following the rules themselves and holding others accountable as well.
What Consistency Actually Gets You
I mentioned before that inconsistent leadership breeds discontent and causes issues. However, the opposite is true… when there is consistent leadership, people feel like they work in an equitable and fair workplace, where everyone gets treated the same with regards to rules and standards; and this has a positive impact on employee engagement and company culture. It’s really not hard to make improvements in this area, especially if you have the right people in the leadership roles. You just need to draw a line in the sand and commit to consistency – and then do some of the actions outlined above.
We’re always here to help, so if you’d like some assistance with getting leadership consistency into your business, or coaching of your leadership team, reach out! We’d love to help!
FAQs
It means all leaders in a business apply the same standards, policies, and expectations, rather than each managing their team by their own rules. It matters because inconsistency is one of the fastest ways to damage trust and culture.
Remove grey areas from your policies, make expectations explicit, and make sure leaders understand their loyalty is to the leadership team and the whole business, not just their own direct reports.
No, leaders should keep their own style and personality, but apply the same rules, standards, and accountability across the board.
Get your leaders together, define clear expectations for what happens when rules are broken, and commit to enforcing policies the same way across every team.
Usually it's not deliberate. Differences in leadership skill, confidence, and awareness mean some leaders enforce standards firmly while others avoid difficult conversations altogether.
