Fair and Consistent

Leaders each and very day have tough decisions to make about people and their performance. These usually review how are they doing today and how they are doing compared to their potential. However what happens when you have an employee who has an excellent attitude, great work ethic and passion to obtain results but this same employee has made a mistake that has cost the company thousands of dollars? Tough decision as you do not want to demotivate the employee or worse cause attrition?

Lets think about another employee; this person does not have passion, they do everything they have to do to obtain the minimum standards but do not exceed them. This employee is not negative but does not quickly buy in to new ideas and causes a challenge for managements "do what I say" approach. They have also recently made a mistake which has caused the company to lose thousands. Is this decision much easier?

Well I am sure most would agree we want the 1st employee on our team and build our business around winners. However, this does not mean the the approach to leadership should be different. The best leaders in the world are Fair and Consistent! This creates trust in the organization as employees feel there is no favoritism. This does not mean that you have to be friends with each person in the organization it means you have to be consistent in your approach to making decisions. Corporate politics are hard enough to deal with for employees but if they feel their leader will make fair and consistent decisions the tough decisions become much easier to understand. Looking at the example above I would love to have employee #1 but at then end of the day the mistake is the same and exceptions should not be made. Sure no one wants to work with employee 2 but that does not mean they should be treated any differently if the results of the mistake are the same. If you are consistent and fair you will not only gain trust from your employees it will make the tough decision become much easier.