Two necessary components of growth
Your relationship to these two forces will dictate how you grow, and the growth you hinder or help in others.
“Growth is when change meets consistency”
My professor, Dr. Willem Dogetrom uttered these words in a class session 10 years ago and they have subtly shaped me, and my approach to life and leadership.
Perhaps you've never used this language but if you think about it, these two components are always present in some capacity when we talk about growth. Our relationship to these two forces determines how we set ourselves up for growth, as well as how we create an environment for others to grow (or not) in the spaces that we lead.
Depending upon our tendencies, patterns, and the ways we've been nurtured, we can bias towards one of these over the other, or resist the power of these two forces working in tension to propel us forward.
The challenge for us as leaders is to know ourselves enough to renegotiate our relationship to both change and consistency, appropriately calibrating both to facilitate movement towards growth.
Change without consistency
When we lack consistency and experience change after change, our life becomes chaotic and tumultuous. Over time change without consistency wares us down, burns us out, and burns bridges with others.
Change on its own acts as a counterfeit growth because it appears as if we have grown simply because things are different than they were. But different isn't always better.
This is probably the greater temptation for our cultural moment. With technological, aesthetic, political, societal and cultural shifts changing hour by hour, it can be really easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that because we look and sound different than we did last year, there has been growth.
As noted above, most of the changes in our lives happen around us and aren't necessarily by our choices. Even so, change in and of itself is an invitation to growth. That is if we will discern what then needs to stay consistent to navigate the change well.
And then there are those times when we must be the agents of disruption and counter cultural movement and introduce the change within us, and around us. Leading affective change takes much intentionality, patience, and strategy to appropriately affect movement in a way that matters, bringing people along at every twist and turn (but that’s an article for another day).
Consistency without change
A more subtle pitfall is consistency without change. Sometimes in resistance to the volatility of our context or our cultural moment, we can double down on arbitrary consistency to the neglect of the positive change that is needed. Surprisingly this is actually how we become victims of change instead of leading it effectively.
There are many examples of institutions that are on a slow and steady decline towards irrelevance because they have opted for a consistency around things that don't matter and have neglected the opportunity to change in a way that reinvents who they are and how they serve the world. We can do this on a microcosmic scale as leaders in our own contexts.
Consistency on its own without the power of positive change, ultimately results in either complicity or complacency but usually both.
Most of the time we fall into this trap when we neglect to include the voices of others into our decision making or imagining. This can also happen when we are so committed to our grind and our own goals that we get subsumed with our own soap opera narratives and miss the broader moment — ultimately growing stale and distant. Suddenly, over time, we settle for smaller scoreboards and shrink into a smaller story.
Consistency + Change = Growth
The challenge for us as leaders is to discern what must change and what must be kept with consistency.
To create meaningful work, there needs to be a consistency and discipline to the core of your identity while being open to innovative, disruptive, positive change when it comes to your strategy.
For true growth to take place in you and in your community, you have to intentionally design your self-leadership and the flow of your days to practice change and practice consistency around the things that matter most.
This will require a healthy submission to the wisdom of your community and elders within your space and traditions to call out where there is an invitation to discipline and consistency. As well as a commitment to making sense of the moment, excavating and listening to the voices of the audiences and the cultures you hope to serve, mining for invitations to positive adaptation and transformation. These streams of input will paint a picture of what must change and what must be kept well.
Reflection questions for growth:
- Looking back over the last three months, where have I seen change? Where have I seen consistency? Celebrate both.
- Looking at my work, life and leadership — what are the voices of elders, peers, my audience, and culture that speak into how do I decide what needs to change and what needs to be consistent?
- Looking forward at the next three months, what needs to change? What needs to change within me, around me, and what change do I need to lead in my context?
- For the next three months, what needs to be kept with consistency? What do I need to do consistently for myself, what do I need to call my team to do consistently, and what can I offer to my context to help them stay consistent with what matters?
To your true growth,
Jonathon
