Meditations On Leadership
These are my thoughts on leadership related topics and ideas. It is meant to be a sort of journal for me and if you find it useful than I am happy to have helped.
“The best is the enemy of the good.” -Voltaire “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.” -Confucius “Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.” -Shakespeare I have seen it a million times. Maybe even two million times. Someone gets so hyper focused on making something perfect that they don't finish the project or they have to rush at the end to make a deadline and the half of the project that is rushed at the end suffers. Which is almost worse because the client can see the difference between the first half and the second half. The push at the end also means long days and late nights. Which leads me to a frustrating occurrence. I'll use a personal experience to illustrate what I mean. I'm changing the names and being vague on purpose but the story is true. Jim is a very talented guy but he suffers from a bad habit of perfectionism. He gets a project and will work on it spending hours finessing the smallest details. His projects start looking great, incredible in fact, but it never fails that he runs out of time. In the week or two leading up to his project's deadline the manager always has to pull other team members in to this job to scramble with long days and late nights to get the project shipped on time. The team rallies and the job gets done just in time. Everyone is relived and the boss comes in and congratulates them for getting it done and thanks everyone for their hard work. The boss just rewarded bad behavior and reinforced it. So next time the same thing happens and over and over until no one questions it because that is the way it is and the habit is set. Everyone pulls long days and late nights thinking that they are heroes because every time they do this they get rewarded and the boss thinks that they are super dedicated because of all the long days and late nights. Before anyone knows it it is engrained in the culture and if you don't work long days and late nights you are shunned. Which compounds the problem. Yet these long days and late night slowly start taking their toll. People are more tired and make more mistakes which leads to more long days and late nights reinforcing the cycle. People's health starts to decline and they miss work. Minds aren't as clear so innovation slows to a crawl. Less projects get done because so much time is being spent on every project so there are lost opportunities. And on and on. Slowly, little by little the company begins to atrophy and die and the whole time everyone thinks that they are doing great and they can't figure out why their company is struggling so much. Perfection is such a dangerous thing. For so many reasons beyond the above stated. Stay away from perfect. Excel, exceed expectations, do great work, but do not obsess over perfection. Leadership LessonBe careful what you reward. Be especially careful of rewarding someone's "hard work". We say "Work smart not hard" but if we reward hard work rather than smart work we get hard work not smart work. Hard work is loud and in your face. It is obvious and easy to spot so it is easy to reward. If you have two managers and one is constantly staying late to fix problems and the other has a team that always seems to go home on time and there is no real news there why would you reward the first manager? Is he just procrastinating fixing these problems until the last minute? Does he have a time management issue? Yet he is often the manager that does get rewarded. He creates the problems through the culture that he has nurtured (often unintentionally) and then solves those problems using energy and resources in both the creation of the issues and the solving of those issues. That is totally backwards and not only will it kill your productivity it will create a culture that good employees will run away from. Be so careful of what you reward.
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AuthorJ. LaVarr Roberts Archives
April 2021
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