Boring Consistency Beats Dramatic Gestures For Teams That Succeed
I would like to tell you about my printer. A saga of sorrows, really.
For longer than I’d like to admit, I shared my home office with a device I never fully trusted.
It wasn’t broken, exactly.
It worked…but only sometimes.
There were definitely some mornings when I would hit print, and the document would appear, perfectly formatted, in the tray. [”What a wonderful world…”]
Other mornings, I’d send the same command and find myself staring at an error message saying the printer had gone offline and disconnected from the Wi-Fi.
Promoted it from the basement to the Director’s Office
It first lived in the basement, so I moved it to my office to fix the connectivity issue. Even next to me, the Wi-Fi was still often ‘not found.’
I then decided to hardwire it with a USB cable, hoping to bypass this wireless drama I was experiencing, but that didn’t make any difference at all. [sigh]
The printer would smile back at me from its perch, cheerfully informing me that no connection could be found. [”Not today, buddy!”]
My frustration mounted – not just from any single failure, but from the accumulated weight of never knowing what the printer was going to do that day.
Enough is Enough
After waiting far too long, I finally replaced it with a newer model.
I then discovered that the older, maddening version had actually been more reliable than its successor. [say, what???]
The manufacturer had also changed the ink cartridge format, so my entire supply of spare ink — money already spent – was now useless.
If I had read the very small print, I would have found this out before I purchased the newer model – but I was so bound and determined to get a printer that worked, it was something I overlooked in my haste to experience a ‘better tomorrow.’
I had been loyal to this brand and have several of their other products in my home office.
But I, Phil Eastwood, had finally reached the end of my tether, so I did what any frustrated but determined person does. I researched. Thoroughly. [This time].
I even purchased an independent consumer guide specifically focused on product reliability. [No stone left unturned!]
What I found pointed clearly to one brand for my needs: Brother.
When I visited their website, I was greeted by a banner that stopped me in my tracks:
Two words
That was all it took to sell me completely.
Not innovative.
Not cutting-edge.
Not award-winning.
Boringly Reliable. [like the old Volkswagen bug!]
Because at that moment, after all of that frustration, boring reliability was the most desirable thing in the world for me.
And then, just like when I went to the tulip festival recently, I wanted to share the story with you.
The hiddren cost of the printer that “might” work today
Think about what that printer experience actually cost me.
Yes, there was the wasted ink.
Yes, there were the replacement printers.
But the much deeper cost was something harder to quantify: the mental energy I spent every single morning bracing for disappointment. The low-grade anxiety of not knowing if it was going to work and the loss of trust that compounded quietly, day by day.
Imagine substituting the printer for a person on your team.
We all know them.
This is the employee who delivers brilliantly on Monday and mysteriously misses the mark on Thursday.
The supervisor who is fully engaged and encouraging one week and withdrawn and absent the next.
The team member whose output is terrific when they’re motivated but whose motivation you can never quite predict.
They’re not bad performers, exactly. They just can’t be counted on consistently.
One of my favorite sources of research is the Harvard Business Review. They make the cost of this inconsistency strikingly clear.
Inconsistent leadership leads to trouble.
Studies show that inconsistent leadership — whether it is holding people accountable, responding to performance issues, or simply showing up for the team — leads directly to decreased employee motivation and higher turnover rates.
You will likely be familiar with the research on trust, which is even more striking.
Employees in high-trust, high-consistency environments report 50% higher productivity, 76% more engagement, and 74% less stress than those working in unpredictable conditions.
That’s how important it is that we trust people.
The cost of inconsistency isn’t just having those bad days.
It’s the energy the team quietly spends each day, uncertain which colleague—or manager—will ‘connect,’ just as I never knew whether my printer would respond. That kind of unpredictability quietly drains everyone.
The people we forget to celebrate
There’s an uncomfortable flip side. If you’ve read this far, you know what I’m going to say.
While we’re quietly drained by the inconsistent performers, we often ignore the boringly reliable ones.
You know these people too.
These are the ones who arrive prepared.
They do what they say they will do.
They don’t generate drama, they don’t need managing, and they don’t require three follow-up emails.
They’re the quiet backbone of your team—never causing problems, so they rarely get noticed.
Who receives Employee of the Month on your team?
The employee-of-the-month award usually goes to the crisis-solver, not to the one who prevents crises.
Research, and likely your own lived experience, shows that when reliable, dependable employees feel invisible and unnoticed, they will disengage and eventually leave.
When real recognition follows steady performance, reliable employees become knowledge-sharing role models who strengthen team culture.
And this feedback loop runs the other way too: the more recognized a consistently reliable employee feels, the more they invest in maintaining and raising their own standard.
Put plainly: your boringly reliable people are an asset that is easy to undervalue and difficult to replace.
What HR Leaders and Managers Can Actually Do
If you’re in HR, or you lead a team of supervisors and managers, here are three things you can do:
When we develop supervisors and managers, we tend to focus on skills — communication, delegation, feedback.
1. Coach for consistency, not just capability
Those skills matter, but consistency is just as important and rarely discussed.
Help your leaders understand that their team is always reading them and that being predictably supportive, fair, and clear is a form of leadership excellence, not a baseline expectation. In two recent SONAR Leadership workshops I delivered, participants highlighted consistency as a major factor in building trust in relationships with leaders. As well as the opposite, of course.
Managers who communicate expectations, give guidance, and reinforce standards create stability and psychological safety—the basis of high performance.
2. Make reliability visible.
Review how your recognition practices are structured. Please do this.
If your formal and informal recognition systems only reward visible wins and high-profile rescues, you are systematically ignoring the people who prevent the rescues from being necessary.
Consider whether your performance conversations acknowledge consistent excellence — not just those moments that stand out every now and again.
A simple, personalized acknowledgment in a team meeting, a note from a senior leader, or a mention in a performance review that explicitly names reliability as a valued trait can shift the culture in meaningful ways.
3. Diagnose inconsistency before it compounds.
When a team member is showing up differently from one week to the next, it’s tempting to either manage around it or wait to see if it self-corrects.
Neither works well. Inconsistent performance often starts with unclear expectations, a lack of feedback, competing priorities, or early burnout.
HBR notes that when performance criteria are ambiguous, people default to subjective, inconsistent standards.
The sooner a manager can have a direct, courageous conversation about what consistency looks like, the more likely they’ll fix it before team morale suffers.
An update on my boring printer
My printer has been running without incident since the day I set it up. [big morning smiles]
There have been no error messages.There have been no offline surprises.
There has been no breath-holding in the morning.
It just works — every time, quietly, without drama.
I didn’t realize how much energy I’d spent on the alternative. That’s the true cost of inconsistency.
It’s not only the bad days themselves that add up—it’s the ongoing mental strain and uncertainty. This is why recognizing and valuing reliability is so important, both for teams and leaders.
The most valuable people on your team are often the ones you never have to worry about.
Celebrate the boring!
The challenge for HR leaders and managers is ensuring those people know they are seen — and that the systems around them are designed to develop and sustain that kind of quiet, powerful reliability.
In a world obsessed with flashy, disruptive, and innovative — boring is wildly underrated.
A question to sit with this week:
When you look at your team right now, who are the boringly reliable people — and when did you last make sure they knew you noticed?
