Leadership Means Consistency
Recently, one of my LinkedIn followers, Jen Musbach, told me that one of the most significant things she appreciates about the Zach on Leadership blog is my consistency. Every Friday, my readers can count on a new blog article and podcast episode.
While I am indeed intentional about consistency, I hadn’t thoroughly considered how rare and how important this is. Furthermore, for those of us who call ourselves leaders, there is an inherent lesson here for all of us, whether we publish or not. Before I get into that, I’d like to wind back the clock a bit and share the origin of this consistency.
The ZoL origin story
Zach on Leadership is nearly five years old. About six months leading up to the launch, I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted it to be and how to make it successful. I consulted a good friend of mine, Adam Wallschlaeger, who gave me some very specific advice: He told me that if I wanted to build a following that I needed to stick to a consistent cadence and not waver from it. New blogs launch and fizzle all the time. Blog followings are built upon trust. People won’t trust you if you aren’t consistent.
I considered this advice very carefully. I also knew that it would be very easy to get distracted or discouraged along the way. Blogs have a very tight feedback loop, and I knew I would be tempted to throw in the towel or delay future publications if I received some negative feedback.
In anticipation of all of this, I made my declaration upfront and put it out there for the world to see. You can see my first post from May 19, 2016, here. In it, I committed to publishing weekly for a year. Before I published my first article, I declared that I would write 52 articles before I evaluated whether or not this was a good idea. Mind you, I didn’t have 52 ideas for articles at that point. I probably had three or four ideas and had only written one. The upfront decision and public commitment were the origins of my consistency.
After about three months of writing and publishing weekly, things were going quite well. I had a family vacation planned and was going to spend a few weeks out of the country. I shared with Adam, that I planned to take a few weeks off from the blog and pick it up when I got home. He told me emphatically that this was a terrible idea. He told me that I was building momentum, and this was the worst time to take my foot off the gas. I took his advice and continued to write and publish from the road.
I made it to the one-year mark and had published 52 articles without missing a single week. I looked back and decided it was good. I looked forward and decided that I would continue and that I would afford myself a few weeks off every so often as needed. I figured I earned that with the hard work to get established. In the years since I’ve averaged about 47 articles per year. I decided for myself that consistency doesn’t mean perfection.
Consistency for the rest of us
Yes, my blog is about leadership, but it is also an analogy for leadership itself. Consistency builds trust. How can you lead without trust? You can’t. We need to be consistent in the little things and the big things. We need to show up for meetings on time. We need to hold and not cancel our team meetings and one-on-ones with our team members. We need to publicly state our commitments, which makes us way more likely to follow through. We need to surround ourselves with friends who will hold us accountable.
Yes, this is a story about a simple blog. Yet, I hope you see that there is a larger narrative that speaks to the core of what it means to be a leader. Rise to the challenge. You don’t need to be perfect, but you must be consistent.
Read this article on my blog site or listen to it on my podcast🎙️
