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When you start something new, whether it's a business, a project, or a podcast, there's always that moment of doubt. Is this the right move? Is it actually going to work? Look, I've been there. And while the uncertainty never fully goes away, having the right systems in place makes a big difference. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and it powers 10% of all E commerce in the US from established brands to people just getting started, it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com leadership go to shopify.com leadership that's shopify.com leadership. Your people probably aren't struggling because the work is hard. They're struggling because they can't predict you. Inconsistent leadership doesn't just frustrate teams, it completely debilitates them. In this episode, I break down the six drivers of consistent leadership and I show you how to build a team that performs with confidence, not one that's forced to constantly second guess itself.

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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.

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Hey there and welcome to episode 401 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode Consistent Leaders Get Superior Results we all think we're pretty consistent, and anytime we aren't, we are expert at rationalizing any inconsistencies. The fundamental problem with this is that we judge ourselves by our intentions, but other people judge us by our actions. Consistency is critical. People hate uncertainty way more than they hate bad news because they can adapt to virtually anything as long as they know what to expect. When a leader is unpredictable, the impact on the team is massive. They don't just become frustrated. Their work output slows to glacial speed. They spend all their time and energy focused on how to manage your expectations rather than doing their jobs. In this episode, I take a deep dive into the six drivers that separate consistently great leaders from the unshakeable values, goal clarity, immutable standards, emotional self regulation, predictable decision making, and composure under fire. Consistency is one of the lesser known levers of high performance. I'll start by taking a look at some of the research around consistency. I'll give you an example from my career of the impact on me of working for an inconsistent leader. And I'll finish with my six drivers of great consistent leadership. So let's get into it. One of my observations that I took away from my corporate executive career is that people hate uncertainty way more than they hate bad news. So imagine my delight when I received an email from the economist Bartleby, of course, talking about the value of consistency in leadership. The article came from a pretty novel angle, as did some of the research it quoted. For instance, it makes the point that people who know the details of a colonoscopy are less likely to be worried about it than people who don't. I don't know about this one. My attitude is once you're under general anaesthetic, it's completely out of your control. So as long as you have confidence in your surgeon, there's no point in worrying about it. Wake me when we're done. It's also true though that leaders are more likely to put off making significant investment decisions, truly during times of uncertainty, which goes some way to explaining why economic growth slows as uncertainty increases. One source of uncertainty that the article explored is inconsistent behaviour by a leader. One study published in the American Psychological Society Journal concluded that working for a boss who swings unpredictably between being toxic and being charming is more stressful than working for a boss who is consistently abusive. Go figure. I guess at least when you're working for a total dickhead, you know what to expect. In another piece of research, the authors built a model to simulate the impact that the big five personality traits have on teamwork. The big five traits neuroticism, extraversion, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness. The authors of this particular paper are huge fans of agreeableness. Their model was built from 10 years worth of data on the performance of MBA students at the London Business School. The model found that the more uncertainties involved in a task, the more important agreeableness becomes as a team trait. Now, Bartleby's conclusion is that there should be a greater demand for warm hearted people who know how to cooperate. But hey, you know me in research, right? I immediately questioned the sample group. Students in an MBA program, even one as prestigious as the London Business School, are forced to collaborate on group assignments. They have a compelling common interest getting the best grade. I can totally understand how agreeableness might become more important with increasing uncertainty in that scenario, but this is radically different from a commercial business. In a company, leaders set the tone, the pace and the standard for their team. People look to their leader for guidance and direction. They take cues from what their leader emphasises and expects. When uncertainty is high, people tend to simply down tools when they're not sure what to do, they avoid making decisions and output slows to glacial speed. I suspect that in the corporate world, the Big five trait of conscientiousness is a much stronger predictor of performance than agreeableness. I worked with many inconsistent leaders during my years in corporate. One was so bad that I had to find another job urgently. She was nice as pie one day and irrationally volatile the next. Her directions and expectations were completely unpredictable. On one occasion she asked me to attend an interstate meeting with an important stakeholder group on behalf of the team. I had a meeting with her the day before. I flew down to make sure we were aligned on the strategy and I had clear objectives for the outcome of the meeting. I felt fully briefed and I understood my boss's expectations pretty well. On the day of the meeting, everyone Everything went brilliantly and I flew back to Sydney that evening with a sense of great accomplishment. However, when I briefed my boss the next day, she exploded. She insisted that I hadn't followed her direction. She was visibly shaking with genuine rage as she told me what I'd done wrong, although it wasn't entirely clear to me what that was. Look, I'm no idiot. I can follow simple directions and this definitely was not rocket science and the approach we'd agreed was unequivocal. But apparently in the cold light of day, she wasn't happy with that outcome. I was old enough and ugly enough to handle the dressing down I got. It wasn't the first or the last time that happened to me during my career, but this was different. It was the fact that she was trying to convince me that the sky was brown and the grass was red before I made the decision to move on to greener pastures. I spent a couple of weeks trying to find a pathway through the situation, at least in my own head. But as much as I look for a way to salvage it, I always kept coming back to one key fact. As long as I didn't know what to expect from her, I couldn't function properly. I'd be forever second guessing myself and trying to work out what she actually wanted as opposed to what she told me she wanted. And that would have been fatal to both my team's performance and my own sanity. I could not get away from that role fast enough. And it wasn't that she wasn't bright, she was definitely smart, and it wasn't that she wasn't a good person, because I really think she was. Deep down, it was the inconsistency. Not knowing what to expect was a showstopper for me. So that's the horror story. But I've also reported to many leaders who demonstrated ironclad consistency and it was an absolute pleasure to work for them. What actually makes a consistent leader? What capabilities would you need to develop and what behaviours would you need to demonstrate? How would you know where to focus your attention? Your people will function way better if they know what to expect. Not so that you become entirely predictable, of course, but you do want to be consistent. Instead of trying to second guess how you're going to react and trying to work out how to best manage you, they can just get on with it and do their jobs. And as much as you might think your people should be more capable in ambiguous situations, it still comes down to you as the leader. You have to bring the stability. You have to give your people the confidence that they can get through anything. Consistency is driven by a number of factors and I'm going to take a deep dive into my top six. The first is unshakeable values. Virtually every leader talks about how important their values are to them. For example, I once worked for a leader who swore blind that the thing he valued more than anything else in the world was his integrity. But there were many times when he demonstrated a breathtaking lack of integrity. I saw him bend the rules on several occasions so that he could maximise his own self interest. And whenever someone from above directed him to adopt a flexible approach to financial reporting, his integrity was the last thing on his mind. He just wanted to please his boss. He never pushed back because he was fundamentally a weak human. But I'm sure he was always able to rationalise his behaviour. I reckon he had no idea that his team felt this lack of consistency so acutely. Instead of being able to rely on him being driven by predictable values, we spent our time trying to guess what might best serve his rampant self interest. Your people need to know that your values aren't malleable, that you will hold the line on what's important to you, even though it might not ultimately be the best thing for you personally. The second big driver of consistency is goal clarity. One of my least favorite terms in business is pivot. A lot of leaders use the word pivot because it sounds way sexier than I changed my mind or I'm actually indecisive so I flip flop between the options or I got this call so wrong That I had to reverse it completely. When you constantly move the goal posts, inconsistency can very quickly breed insecurity in your team. No one wants to put much effort into anything because they know the priorities are most likely going to shift. A lot of value is squandered and a lot of energy is wasted. So goal clarity is the name of the game. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How does it contribute to the company's strategy? How does it deliver value? If you can communicate the broader organizational objectives and how the work each person is doing contributes to those, you're going to be in a great place. In fact, connecting the goals from the top of the company to the bottom and providing your people with extreme clarity is the holy grail of leadership. This is why we're here, this is who we serve, this is our go to market strategy, this is what we have to deliver and this is how our team results contribute to the company's broader objectives. You get that right and consistency will flow. The third driver of consistency is predictable decision making. The process of decision making has to be predictable and repeatable. And this starts with having clear single point accountabilities. Accountable people make decisions in their specialist domain. They decide who to consult and what role each individual plays in the process. They decide how and where to derive their inputs from. A really good decision making framework includes a consistent process for assessing risk and for pressure testing assumptions. It has clear rules and guidelines that people can rely upon. For example, what are the acceptable financial hurdle rates, internal rate of returns, net present values? We've just completed module six with our current global leadership beyond the theory cohort. So my eight point decision making criteria is front of mind. For me, predictability comes from being able to show a clear methodology for decision making. The fourth driver of consistency is clear unambiguous standards. When you evaluate someone's performance, it has to be abundantly clear what criteria you're using to evaluate them. This requires a high level of transparency. Having a clear, well documented performance standard for every single job in your company is vital. It's the backbone that supports every single one on one conversation you have. If people don't know precisely what the standard is, then how will they know whether or not they're meeting it? Feedback has to be very specific rather than general. And if someone isn't meeting the standard, they need to know why not where people are performing well, you've got to be able to point to the performance standard criterion that they're meeting or exceeding. And likewise, when their performance is Below Paris, you need to explain precisely why and help them improve so that they can meet the standard. Despite all the nuances of human interaction, people are pretty simple for the most part. They want to know three things when they walk into work each. What are your expectations of me? How am I performing against those expectations? And what does my future hold? Having unambiguous standards is a prerequisite for this, and it's one of the key drivers of consistency. Driver number five is emotional self regulation. You've got to be able to control yourself before you can hope to achieve any level of consistency for your people. This begins with not allowing yourself to be emotionally triggered. You have to be in touch with your physical, emotional and psychological state. If you don't feel you've got this nailed already, you may have to employ coping strategies so that you're confident you can remain stable through different phases. Consistent, stable leaders are not triggered by other people and events. The best leaders are thoughtful, they listen well and they don't fire up easily. Frustration, fear and anger are the enemies of consistency. The final driver, number six is composure under fire. It's much easier to be consistent when everything's going well. In fact, in my experience, one of the key differentiators between leaders who are seen as consistent and those who aren't is how they handle high pressure situations. The times when this will challenge you most are times when complexity and ambiguity are high and pressure is at its greatest. We've produced a number of podcast episodes over the years dealing with different elements of resilience. Most recently episode 387, five leadership essentials for Resilient Teams and an old favourite of Mine, episode 43. People follow resilient Leaders. We'll leave links to the show notes for those episodes. Your objective as a leader is to bring clarity to ambiguity, to have confidence, to not freeze. So in times of extreme pressure, you have to go back to your basics. What are the no regrets moves that you can make? How do you sharpen the focus on value delivery? Think about this from a CEO's perspective. Almost nothing is black and white. It's just a thousand annoying shades of grey. But at the front line, people need to have extreme clarity. What do I need to do right now? What does good look like and how do I do a good job today? Or on this shift? Somewhere between the CEO and the front line, the ambiguity has to be translated into certainty. And every leader in between has a role to play in that. Do you have the composure under fire that you need to demonstrate the level of consistency and focus that your people expect because the best, most consistent leaders have grace under pressure. Consistency is a very underrated capability of great leaders. If you think about the consistency of your previous bosses, both good and bad, it should increase your desire to become more consistent. These six drivers I've just run through absolutely work. Anything you can do to improve even one of these elements is is going to pay you back in spades. So just pick one and commit to working on it. What would you have to do to improve it? Every single one of these drivers is completely within your control. They're not easy to change though, because they are big value levers. But if you're not a consistent leader, you'll have to just resign yourself to the fact that you're going to leave a huge amount of value on the table. All right, so that brings us to the end of episode 401. I really hope you enjoyed it, but as I'm sure you know, listening is easy, leading is hard. If you've found this episode useful, please follow or subscribe to no Bullshit Leadership on your favourite podcast player. I'm looking forward to next week's episode, the Charisma Myth. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no Bullshit leader. Sam.