Maintaining Consistency in Your Leadership Skills

Managing your staff, daily operations, and other facets of your business is a task that defines your leadership.

CEOs, heads of HR, upper management and department-specific supervisors all have to juggle many processes, ensure their teams are up to task, that their core beliefs and company culture are being put into motion and constant from Q1 to Q4. 

But, sometimes there are snags.

A roadblock or two can send ripple effects up and down the office hallways. It could be something as minor as department heads disagreeing with the direction of a project. Or it might be something even more impactful, such as dips in employee productivity or deteriorating motivation.

It’s here, where leadership skills are tested.

How management solves these problems and puts out strategies to help keep potential leaks from cropping up again, comes through finding a consistent mantra that everyone in the office can lean against.

While every manager strives to find that balance, there are a few areas where being consistent can yield results for the here and now.

Understand Your Company Culture

Stagnation is a big pitfall.

Being unclear about where your company culture is can be an even greater issue. Employees on all levels must feel a degree of certainty with where they work. They’re needs to be an ironclad resolve, a culture where it’s comfortable to work, but still demanding. Open-ended discussions about projects, the freedom to execute and fail only to know they’re pushing the envelope with how to rectify an issue right then and there. 

Part of developing a company culture incorporates many of these idioms:

• Creativity
• Open Communication
• Teamwork
• Demand of Excellence
• Consistency

Yes, once you’ve uncovered a perfect match with how you perceive the company culture, whether it’s utilizing the above idioms and more, you must keep that atmosphere as steady and healthy as possible. And should you feel the need to make changes, ensure they have positive gains and won’t create too many fissures among the ranks.

Train Employees To Excel

New hires within any business are greeted with a set of training regimens.

It could be packets, standard videos or face-to-face sessions with a department manager or HR. All employees that you hire have their own special skills. Some are great with technical. Others excel at communication and sales. Others have creative marketing angles. And then there are many employees that share a few of each.

But skills must be cultivated beyond “specialization”; they should build towards “mastery”.

Technology keeps moving at a lightning pace, and businesses must keep up. And with every new platform, software, sales tactic or other innovation that comes about, your employees should have the necessary training system to align with it.

Finding a consistent training method goes beyond having some representative stop in every now and then to give a live demo of some software.

It requires a system that’s adaptable to your operations that can educate as you grow. And whether you’re utilizing custom e-learning programs that suit your business style, instituting weekly department meetings where managers are giving short training demonstrations, or offering up Q&A’s among the staff and so forth, the end game is that you’re sticking with it, and ultimately, setting up your staff for success and growth in their respective roles.

Feedback is a must with this.

If something’s amiss or disjointed, it needs to be addressed. While this may seem obvious, a pillar of performance improvement is communicating among your peers that you understand every ounce of the process.

Don’t Flip Flop Your Managing Styles

Leadership is many things.

The two characteristics that help solidify one’s leadership are perception and confidence. More importantly, the tone in which they’re delivered is just as important. Neither the tone nor the characteristics should ever waver to the point your message starts to crack and create other issues down the road.

Don’t get me wrong, managers and supervisors need to instill a sense of urgency and demand to their employees, but if the tone changes from “open-minded and understanding” to “ruling with an iron fist” overnight, it could encroach on employee motivation. For example, if you’ve stopped being transparent with your staff, they’ll notice the difference quickly. 

Management doesn’t have to be BFF with employees, but they must lead with a sense of purpose, be confident and maintain their style.

Leadership is at the forefront of your business, every step of the way. It’s wading through the positives and the negatives with great passion and professionalism. Most of all, it’s building a foundation that fosters employee productivity, uniformity, and effective communication between all departments. Once you’ve hit that stride, do everything in your power to maintain it.

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About the Author, Kyle O'Brien
Kyle writes about motivation, training, leadership and other facets of business and is community manager for ej4 (@ej4video) which specializes in crafting training videos to change behaviors and increase knowledge in the workplace. Other posts by Kyle »