Start with Consistency

The importance of soft skills or a person's EQ (Emotional Intelligence Quotient) in consulting is well established. In fact, I started to draft a series of posts outlining the virtues of some of these key skills like listening, follow through, situational awareness, and bias for action but instead decided that there's what I'd call a complimentary qualifier - consistency - which is where it all begins.

Consistency by itself is really nothing, and being consistently bad is definitely not good. In fact, I originally called consistency a qualifier, but maybe it's better to call it a multiplier.  Let's examine why?

Consistency leads to trust and trust is what we all should be seeking in our professional relationships because trust is critical to success, however you define it (with customers, with colleagues)

Quick exercise, check this out, put "consistency" in front of any soft skill and what do you get?

• Consistency in effort/work ethic
• Consistent creativity, critical thinking, strategic thinking
• Consistency in communications
• Consistent team player
• Consistently strong decision making

By establishing consistency in your work you've pulled a powerful lever. This is all probably pretty logical stuff but it's a lot harder to achieve than you think, because it demands daily attention, discipline really.

One last thing, consistency doesn't mean inflexible or unwavering. As learning occurs you can change your position, consistency isn't required. You would never sacrifice growth, experience, or better outcomes for the sake of staying consistent.

So, any number of hard and soft skills, depending on the engagement, need to be called upon to serve customers. I'm making the case that regardless of the situation there's always a strong place to start.

Start with consistency.