For Consistency’s Sake

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Leadership   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

Unpredictable leaders create unpredictable teams. When expectations and behaviors constantly change, it can damage team morale, confidence and performance. In fact, teams might prefer an encouraging manager to a taskmaster, but they’ll take the taskmaster over someone who switches between those two extremes at random.

I recently did some work for an organization that was struggling with executing projects in one particular area. Most of the company was very successful in project execution, but one particular department always seemed to struggle and nothing was making the situation any better. After taking a look at what was going on it was clear that the director-level leader of the group, through a series of inconsistent behaviors, was creating confusion for the project teams, lowering confidence and damaging morale.

This director was unable to focus on one particular issue. The team would be asked to focus on one particular issue on Monday, but by Tuesday that issue was no longer anywhere on the radar and several other items were top priority. Add to this the fact that the director wanted to drill down on all of the issues and you can see how the environment could be difficult for project team members to accomodate.

It is very important for project teams to have a work environment that is predictable. We know that issues will turn up during the course of the …

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