Why Consistency Is One of the Most Underrated Leadership Skills
LeadingSmart recently hit a milestone: three years since I left my full-time job and decided to go all-in on this work.
When I started, I had a 15-year plan, spreadsheets, financial projections, and a pretty conservative idea of how long it would take to build something sustainable. A lot of those projections turned out to be wrong. LeadingSmart grew much faster than I expected.
But looking back, I don’t think it really grew in three years. It grew over decades.
For years, I wrote when only a handful of people were reading. I coached executive pastors before coaching was a meaningful part of my work. I built relationships, served churches, learned from mistakes, and kept showing up.
None of that felt particularly dramatic at the time, but that’s the thing about consistency: you rarely notice its impact while you’re in the middle of it.
Consistency Compounds
We tend to pay attention to the visible moments: the church that suddenly grows, the leader who gets a new opportunity, the team that seems to be thriving, or the organization that appears to take off overnight.
What we don’t always see are the hundreds of ordinary decisions that came first. The conversations nobody applauded. The systems someone kept improving. The relationships that were built over years. The hard leadership decisions made when nobody was watching.
Those things compound.
Over time, what looked small starts producing something much bigger.
The Same Is True in Your Church
Healthy churches usually aren’t built through one breakthrough moment. Healthy cultures aren’t created by one staff retreat, strong teams aren’t formed because you introduced a new set of values, and trust isn’t built because you gave a great talk about trust.
Those things are built through what happens next.
Do leaders follow through? Do difficult conversations actually happen? Do people know what they’re responsible for? Does the team keep practicing the values when things get stressful? Does leadership behave the same way in March that it promised to behave in January?
That’s where culture is built: one decision, one conversation, one hire, one hard meeting, and one ordinary week at a time.
It’s not flashy, but it works.
Leaders Often Quit Too Early
One of the challenges of leadership is that we want to know whether something is working, preferably immediately.
We launch a new process and want to know if everyone likes it. We make a change and expect the culture to shift. We introduce a new rhythm and start wondering three weeks later whether we should scrap it.
Sometimes changing course is absolutely the right thing to do. But sometimes the better leadership move is simply to keep going.
Give people time to understand what you’re trying to build. Keep reinforcing what matters. Keep doing the right work even when the results aren’t obvious yet.
After 41 years of leadership, I’m increasingly convinced that consistency may be one of the most underrated leadership advantages we have.
That doesn’t mean doing the same thing forever. It means recognizing that the right things, done well and repeated over time, build something you simply can’t manufacture overnight.
Listen to the Full Conversation
In this episode of The LeadingSmart Podcast, Holly and I took a little trip down memory lane to celebrate three years of LeadingSmart. We talked about what surprised me about starting a business, why our team grew much earlier than I expected, what I’ve learned about generosity and taking risks, and why I somehow discovered an entrepreneurial streak in my late 50s.
How We Help
LeadingSmart exists because we want to help Kingdom leaders lead better. We work with churches navigating growth, transition, team challenges, leadership structure, succession, and the kinds of issues that are often hard to see clearly when you’re living in them every day.
Whatever your church is facing in this season, our team is here to help. Book a call with our team.