Not the mood you are in, but people’s performance should determine your response. Our mood affects our attitude and affects our actions and response to others. Leaders often squelch good performance and lose good performers by allowing our mood to control our response. This is outright poor leadership. Our response to any situation should not be determined by our mood, but rather by the performance of others.
Leadership specialist, Ken Blanchard says, “Consistency is behaving the same way in similar circumstances.” It is important to take notice of the word similar in his definition. Consistency is not behaving the same way in every circumstance. It is behaving the same in similar circumstances.
If you are running a production line and a new employee makes a mistake that costs the company three hours of a shutdown and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, you would not treat this situation the same as another employee who saved the company $10,000. It would be ludicrous to think so.
Consistency as Blanchard describes it is responding in similar fashion in each comparable situation. When something praiseworthy is accomplished, you praise in a similar fashion. You do not give one employee/volunteer an all-expense paid getaway and the next person a free pencil. Likewise, you treat those who mess up, who make mistakes in similar fashion.
With this consistency, you are giving your employees/volunteers a special gift of predictability. I have served in ministry and the corporate world alongside others who always feared their higher-ups, not knowing what to expect. This is not a morale builder. It is, in fact, a morale-buster. People leave corporations, even the good performers are more willing to entertain other offers and leaving your organization.
Certainly, with this type of consistency, your high performers will strive for even higher achievements and your underachievers will be more open to redirection and more apt to “get it right.” When an error is made, learn to redirect. Redirection is a powerful way to positively impact a person’s performance.
Your mood and attitude should never determine how you respond to others. This is a difficult leadership trait to master. Yet it is one all leaders should continuously strive toward. The great coaches and leaders have discovered this consistency is appreciated by both high achievers and low achievers. What will you do this week to become a leader of this type of consistency?
George Yates is the Church Health Strategist for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, assisting churches and individuals in pursuing God’s purpose for life. Learn more at ALSBOM.org/revitalization.
