In Part 1 I unpacked why "work harder" is better understood by conceptualising it as a series of distinct processes and looked at outthinking, pure effort, and opportunistic work. Yet even when leaders take this approach performance often remains unstable. The organisation surges, ships, celebrates, then slips back into a BAU malaise. That pattern is usually not a strategy failure; it is a behavioural consequence of a problematic approach to work.
The remaining two modes—Consistency and Focus—are where advantage becomes durable. They are also where performance management is most frequently sabotaged, because both require leaders to say "no": no to novelty addiction, no to meeting inflation, no to permanent partial attention, no to the comforting lie that capability multiplied by effort is enough.
Consistency: the Compounding Advantage Most Leaders Undervalue
Consistency is not glamorous. It is the hard work of repeating good decisions and sensible routines until they become the default. It is also the superpower that can enable otherwise average people with average talents to achieve the most extraordinary things. It is also almost impossible to imitate. By that I mean focus or pure effort can be faked for short periods. For example, interviewing someone online who is throwing your questions into their AI tool of choice and parroting back the responses. However, Put them in a room or give them responsibilities in a project and the delta between what they appear to be able to do and can actually do becomes readily apparent.
Psychology and organisational research converge on the same point: behaviour stabilises through context and repetition, not through motivation alone. Wendy Wood and David T. Neal's work on the habit–goal interface is particularly useful for leaders because it treats habits as context-linked responses: when the context cues the behaviour reliably, execution stops requiring constant willpower.
The leader's job, then, is not to demand motivation; it is to design contexts—rituals, cues, constraints—that make the right behaviours the easy ones.
Habit formation research adds a sobering caveat: automaticity takes time, varies by behaviour, and is not a weekend transformation.
This matters because organisations routinely launch "new ways of working" with the implied promise that humans are software: install the update and restart. They are not. Achieving consistency in an individual, let alone team, is a slow process which does not fit well into quarterly targets.
For leaders, consistency involves at least four moves.
