Perfection or Excellence?
By VICKY BROWN
It’s the beginning of a new year, and this is the perfect time for people to set goals for the year, and make plans around how they’re going to achieve those goals – but while you’re doing all that, take a step back. Are you aiming for perfection.
The perfect schedule, the perfect week, the perfect quarter. How to perfect your process of delivering to your clients; how do you perfect the experience for your team, how do you even find the perfect team members – and on and on.
Listen, perfection isn’t the thing – we all know nothing’s perfect. And if you’re anything like me, driving yourself and your team hard toward perfection is a recipe for exhaustion, overwhelm and burnout. Think about a mental pivot – target excellence instead of perfection.
What’s the difference – well for one thing, as I mentioned before- perfection is not attainable. And actually, perfection just focuses on the outcome. When you’re aiming for perfection, then anything less than that is a failure, by definition.
Ah, but the pursuit of excellence is focused on a behavior. It’s the process of achievement – so ongoing improvement, being better than you were yesterday or last week, or last year. Fixing problems at their root, so they don’t pop up again and again, you just keep getting better. That’s the pursuit of excellence. Having high standards – that’s excellence. Embracing mistakes and using them to become better – again, that’s excellence.
So, as you look at what you want for your team in this new year – here are 6 tips to help you guide them to excellence.
First up – you have to set realistic expectations. Perfection is about – well, being perfect. No flaws, no obstacles to overcome, no learning opportunities. It’s binary, you’re either perfect or you aren’t – you failed. That’s not healthy, and it’s not excellence.
Excellence is about having standards – high, but achievable, standards – and working to uphold those standards. Getting zero customer complaints is perfection; successfully resolving 75% of customer complaints is a standard of excellence.
Next, you should encourage healthy risk taking. When you give your team space to experiment with a new approach to a problem, or step out of their comfort zone and try something different – well, that can lead to excellence. Because you are letting the people closest to the problem, actually THINK about how to best solve the problem.
And sure, you want it to be a calculated risk – not just running with scissors. But when you’re blindly driving toward perfection, there isn’t any room for – what I call, Mental Research and Development. You have to hit the goal and that’s it. How you get there is pre-ordained, with little flexibility. So the journey becomes unimportant – but that’s where the magic can be. Otherwise, you can get stuck doing the same thing, the same way for years on end. And that’s not growth, nor excellence.
“… Encourage your team to think like entrepreneurs. Give them autonomy to pursue projects and initiatives that can help with the company’s goals.“
Third – and you know this is one of my favorites – continuous learning. What can I say, a huge part of the pursuit of excellence is the pursuit of knowledge. Learning more, growing more, understanding more. Getting better skills, professional development – it all goes in the soup of excellence.
You see, to be excellent at something means you are also flexible – you have to be able to adapt to different situations, and changing circumstances – and still uphold high standards. It may look different, and feel a bit different, and you may have to bring different abilities to bear, but that’s all part of excellence.
Next – you’ve got to celebrate progress. Enjoy the journey. Again, that’s one of the defining differences between excellence and perfection. Perfection is an outcome, excellence is a behavior – a state of being. So you have to enjoy, and take pride in the small wins and the process. It encourages the team, and boosts their motivation.
Autonomy and Accountability – you’ve got to balance both to empower your team. You want them to excel without you having to step in all the time, and micromanage – well, hold them accountable. Let them know what needs to be done, what you’re trying to accomplish, and then give them room to do it.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur jumping into a leadership role, a seasoned business pro with new HR responsibilities, or just starting your HR career – we’ve got the right path to guide you through your HR hurdles.
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When you’re constantly looking over someone’s shoulder, you’re not managing – all you’re doing is hovering, stifling their drive and creativity, and making sure they know you don’t have trust that they can get the thing done. And while that’s a great way to produce a cog in a wheel, it’s a wholly unsuccessful way to develop a strong team member. So, make sure they have the skills and tools they need – and then…back off.
And finally, try a little Intrapreneurship. Encourage your team to think like entrepreneurs. Give them autonomy to pursue projects and initiatives that can help with the company’s goals. Basically, give them their little piece of paradise and see how they run with it.
Now I know you’re thinking – we’re so small, how can I possibly do that? Well, here’s an example – Maria is an HR professional in a small company and realizes that clients don’t always have consistent, or sometimes any, process for new employee orientations. She thinks that’s a service her company might be able to provide.
So, you tell her to run with it – she does a needs analysis, puts together a program design, develops a proposal and presents it to the team. Then she collaborates with other team members, creates a pilot program, gets feedback, and once that’s successfully running then she creates a rollout expansion plan to make it available to all clients.
Now that’s Intrapreneurship. Oh, and by the way – that’s also excellence. Congratulations, Maria.