Your Stability Defines Your Potential

What does it mean to be stable? In leadership, it means you are competent in your role, consistent in your character, and you are connected to those who follow you. When each of these attributes are operating at their peak in your leadership behaviors, the potential for productivity in your team goes through the roof! Let me illustrate.

Suppose you were working for a leader who has a pattern of erratically jumping from one potential solution to a problem to another. Not fully disclosing all of the facts, you learn bits and pieces about what you're really up against as the work progresses. Without understanding the situation or clearly defining the facts, this leader has a history of making 3 bad decisions for every 1 good decision. How likely are you to believe this leader is stable? How confident are you in achieving results that make a difference?

Knowing his or her instability makes its way into your mindset and the next thing you know, you begin to doubt your own next steps in a goal, project or task. Now, if your doubting next steps then that means you are taking away time from actually doing work and spending that time looking to validate what work is the right work for you to do. Not only are you spending less time on doing things that result in acquiring new customers, supporting internal customers, or serving your existing customers but you are also tying up the time of others in your organization, preventing them from doing the same! Lost productivity for you equals lost productivity for the organization. 

Contrast that with a leader who consistently defines the problem and supports it with facts. This leader invites you into the conversation to co-create solutions and defines clear next steps once you've had a chance to lend your expertise, You're then empowered to accomplish your part of the work with an understanding of when to check in for clarity or to receive direction for next steps. Naturally, the likelihood of this leader making a good decision is increased because of his or her process for reaching decisions. How confident are you in this leaders ability to make good decisions? How likely are you to spend more time working and less time worrying about whether or not you'll be making an impact on the bottom line? How productive would you and your organization be compared to your level of productivity in the previous scenario?

Take time today and reflect on the two scenarios and answer these questions.

1. Which leadership behaviors most define your teams experience with you? How do you know that is true?
2. What one thing can you change today that will increase the stability of your leadership for your team?
3. How will you act on this change today so that you begin to create a more solid foundation for your team to produce?