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Being Consistently Inconsistent

What if you could be a fly on the wall in the break room after your next staff meeting in which you passionately rolled out 3 new initiatives?

Is it possible that you would hear the following phrase – “Don’t worry about it, he’ll forget all about these ideas by the middle of next month”?

Now let me ask a really painful question – Have you been the business owner who has forgotten all about those great ideas just a few weeks later?

We all have.

As a business owner, we are constantly coming up with great ideas to improve our company! The problem is that we are always coming up with great ideas to improve our company!

As a result, your staff never knows which idea you will really latch on to and enforce on a regular basis. So, they tend take all of your initiatives a little less seriously (aka – ignore) than they should. Unfortunately, you can’t get too mad at them because you can barely remember all of the edicts you have issues in the last 60 days!

The cure for us business owners who tend to overwhelm our teams with new ideas is to be consistent. This probably means that you will need to slow down just a bit or at the very least you need to group your ideas/initiatives into two categories.

  1. Rules (thoughts or initiatives) that must never be broken. For example, you may roll out a plan that states that you will always return a customer’s call within 2 hours.
  2. Improvements that should be adhered to whenever possible. For example, it would be great if we spent the first hour of each day reading blogs so that we can get up to speed with industry changes.

Now that you have your categories, it is imperative that everyone on your staff (and especially you!) understand the difference between a must and a should. It will help you be more consistent in an inconsistent world!

  • Do you provide your staff with the same direction every single day?
  • Does this lack of consistency create confusion?
  • How much more productive would your company be if you were better at delivering a consistent direction?