Consistency – Art of ‘I care, and hence I Succeed’

“No one reads your weekly reports!” said the fictitious team leader to the shaking team member.

How often do we grow weary of sticking to a periodic task hoping or even believing that no one will notice anyways?

Come to think of it, most of us get away with inconsistency at one time or the other, but the question remains –

Is it worth the effort to be consistent, or is it worth the risk to be not?

Each year I take the time to divide my efforts throughout the year into three buckets – Strategic priorities, Tactical initiatives, and ‘Give to achieve’ themes. Each year I look back at the list from the previous year, and I find more and more common items – 'Am I running on the hamster wheel and this repeating… Maybe’ or ‘Maybe I truly derive value from some themes and hence keep repeating them. Jokes aside, I side with the latter and can recall instances from each year where I have been oblivious that a report/summary/briefing that is my regular has been of strategic value to a key stakeholder.

The fun part is that I got to know about it only after I had messed up and not sent it when it mattered the most ??

Being consistent is the most underrated and yet most valuable asset of a leader. At your very best, you may not get any applause for it but ask any network security professional, and they would tell you that at their very best, they are invisible!

Being consistent resonates with many deeper themes of team building –

Trust – No team can rely on a talented yet rogue meteor to save the day everytime. We all know who would undoubtedly reply to an email, dial in a minute early to every conference call, and update the meeting invite with the meeting room or dial-in information. Always submit their timesheets on time and never, I mean never, delay a client weekly status report. This is where the tenants of ‘Trust’ emanate from, and being consistent is the only way to build it up.

Confidence - The only thing that is more nerve-racking than prepping for a high stake client orals is knowing that the information package may be missing something. Having an iron-clad information package or proposal response is invaluable, and the confidence that you are always in the green comes from being consistent.

Resilience – We don’t know what we don’t know but Are we prepared to fall forward? Is there enough preparation in place that we can blaze through standard deliverables and tackle the complex themes that made the team stumble?

?Are you consistent enough to know that when the chips are down, you can still rely on steady stilts and build upwards?