In business as with everything else, battling the never ending demands of life can be draining. We all know there are things we should do but finding the motivation and energy to really make it happen is a whole other story.
Personally, consistency is something I battle regularly. Keeping focused on one task really is hard when you have more than one thing to manage. At our firm, we work together to accomplish 1 or 2 big goals a year. Our individual goals are a little more vague and as we start our journey of defining our plan, we decided to come up with these tips to help us tackle these goals.
The word for this is consistency. You can have goals, but being consistent in the steps to accomplishing them is the most important key to your success.
When we started our brainstorming session we had to identify the benefits we wanted.
So, I wrote “what does consistency produce?”
It produces:
- Efficiency
- Accuracy/Less Errors
- Expectations and/or a Standard
- Ability to Cross Training
These were the goals we wanted to work towards and noted the consistent performance would produce these results. After that, we thought about what we needed to do to be consistent and some key tips to creating a consistent environment:
- Figure out what you want to measure–measure what matters.
- Create a Plan – decided what needs to be done
- Streamlined Process – make it simple for the firm to follow
- Standardized Process – make it standard across the firm
- Communication – you have to talk about it
- Stick with the Plan – be consistent with the plan
- Ability to Re-assess as needed – think agile and lean
The big take away for me was that building consistency takes work. It takes forethought and the willingness to put aside the urgent over the important. Spending time to create a consistent environment only increases your ability to settle upon a good plan. A good plan should produce great efficiency, more accuracy and create an expectation or standard of excellence within our firm. With systemized processes, our ability to cross-train and enlarge our team without huge delays and training time is a win-win.
People thrive in consistent environments, and customers like knowing ahead of time what to expect. We have worked very hard on being proactive so that everything is less ambiguous to everyone, and THAT is what takes hard work behind the scenes! When working with your team consistency is important too. Your team wants to know what’s expected and frankly, so do you. Everyone has expectations. The goal is to communicate so that you can have consistent performance, day after day, week after week, month after month and so on.
Consistency is the ultimate trust builder!
It has been a great lesson for us and I hope that this will help build a new understanding of the benefits of being consistent.
I know, I know, I should be talking about taxes and accounting but seriously none of that gets done if we can’t consistently show up to do it. It’s just part of being in business!
If you are on the journey and learning the same stuff I hope I have helped. Being a leader is tough but very fulfilling. Remember you are not alone. Let me know if you need accounting, taxes, consulting or advising. We have come up with some pretty cool ideas to help us achieve our goals!
