The Consistency Check: Is Your Position the Same in Every Room?

Here is a question that most leaders answer too quickly: is your position the same in every room? Everyone says yes. Almost nobody has checked. And the gap between the yes and the check is where credibility quietly leaks out, one meeting at a time, without anyone ever catching you in a lie.

The reason it leaks is that shading a position for the audience never feels like changing it. A little more caution with finance. A little more ambition with sales. A little more sympathy with your own team. Each version is defensible on its own. Then the three people compare notes, which they always do, and what they find is a leader who agreed with each of them and therefore with none of them.

So the tool. The Consistency Check takes one issue, three people, and about twenty minutes. Pick something that matters that you have discussed with several people this month, a decision, a priority, a call you made. Then pick three of those people who sit in different places: one above you, one beside you, one on your team. Ask each of them the same question, separately, in writing if you can: what did I say my position on this was? Then lay the three answers side by side.

Three matching answers means the check passed and you can stop reading. Two that match and one that does not is the normal result, and it tells you exactly which room pulls your position off center, which is usually the room where it costs you something to hold it. Three different answers means you have not been holding a position at all. You have been holding a mirror.

Then the move, and it happens before the next meeting, not in it. Write the position down. One sentence, plain words, before the day starts. Then say that sentence, in those words, in every room, including the one that made you shade it last time. The sentence is the tool. The rooms are the test.

Run it once a quarter on one issue. It takes twenty minutes, and it is the only instrument I know that measures credibility directly, because it asks the people who hold it.

https://youtu.be/BtHQz-hTpPQ

The Right Altitude Field Guides. One dimension at a time. therightaltitudebook.com/the-field-guides