Good Enough…Isn’t

How often do we hear the comment, “It’s good enough” or some variation of it – that’s fine, that’ll do, that gets the job done?  I like to kid my Oklahoma friends about the motto, “Oklahoma, OK.”  OK?  We’re average?  Right in the middle?  Nothing special?

 The big problem with this isn’t the specific instance – often, what’s been done is enough and spending any more time or resources on it isn’t productive or valuable.  The big problem is the mindset it creates in actual human beings.  It sets the bar too low, and we’ll end up getting “good enough” even on work where it isn’t.  With people, we tend to get what we expect (or less).  If we expect average or okay, we’re going to get average or okay (and even that only if we’re lucky).

At Luman International, we created the concept of Pure-Performance.  We came to hate not only “it’s good enough” but “let’s work for high performance.”  “High” is too often subjective.  Higher than what?  Last year, last quarter?  Everyone facing bankruptcy?  Higher than whom?  Our peers?  The biggest people in our market?  Google?  Apple?  We can always find someone or something that we can be “higher” than.  It doesn’t mean the comparison is worthless, or even wrong.  It just means that we’re setting the bar too low, or maybe too fuzzy.  The output is not likely to be labelled “great.”

Pure-Performance says, “Good enough isn’t.”  It lines up with football legend Vince Lombardi’s guidance, “Aim for perfection, and you might end up with excellence.”  It urges us to throw out everything that isn’t producing results, adding value, or leading to improved performance.  If it isn’t leading to something useful and great, why on earth are we doing it?  We might not be able to weed out all of the useless activity, but we’re sure going to be a better organization if we try.

The vast majority of training and leadership development misses this mark almost entirely.  Even worse, it often forces everyone toward the “norm:”  “This is how leaders act/should act.  Go and do likewise.”  But in our 29 years of working with hundreds of organizations, we can say with absolute certainty that most leaders are leading something that is 20 or 30% performance and 70 or 80% nonsense.  They don’t even try to build the pillars of performance into their cultures, or to drive out the barriers to performance (even if they knew what they were).  Organizations that have managed to survive for decades – in part because their competitors are even more clueless – are wasting resources and exposing themselves at some point to organizational disaster.

Examples?  Recent ones are:

• Kodak – facing bankrupty from the digital onslaught, even though they invented it – more available in digital than just a short time ago, but not “high” enough to save them
• Barnes & Noble – coming to dominate the bookstore market just in time to watch it become burdensome, costly, and a distraction from the digital world and the introduction of their Nook (but at least they were operating “higher” than Borders!)
• Circuit City – trumpeted by Jim Collins as one of the 11 “Good to Great” companies right before they shuffled off this mortal coil
• Fannie Mae – dominating the mortage market right before they helped destroy the mortgage market and themselves (also a “Good to Great” company)

These were all once great companies, operating at a “higher” level than their competitors.  Higher didn’t save them.  They all had way too much waste, misdirection, and focus on the wrong things.  They not only didn’t get to Pure-Performance  – they didn’t even know what it was.

Pure-Performance.  There are keys to getting it, and things to avoid like the plague if we want it.  We encourage you to stop worrying about high performance.  Enter the world of pure-performance instead – different in kind, not just in degree.  There is leadership and market dominance in people who go through that door.

Italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International.  All rights reserved.

First Things Only

You know, there’s a lot of truth and value in the old expression, “First Things First.”  It reminds us that there are first things, things that are more important than the mountains of activities and detail that continually demand our attention.  It reminds us that we should put those first things at the head of the line.  And it reminds us that we have to make a point of it or this just won’t happen.  It also tells us something else that’s very important – that it takes mindfulness and effort to keep those first things at the top of the list of where we spend our time and energy.

In the actual world we live in, however, first things are often not put first.  Sometimes, they’re not in the middle of the list, or even on the list.  At times, first things are the last things that get people’s attention.  Why is this?  Well, partly because first things are often hard things.  They’re big and tough and difficult to get your arms around.  They take attention that we don’t seem to have, collaboration that we can’t seem to develop, passion that we just can’t muster.  Partly first things need a lot of focus and concentration to make something out of them, and the 21st century doesn’t leave much room for those.  Partly, we haven’t even defined first things as first things.  And partly, we often don’t even know where to begin.

But first things are where the game is won or lost.  That’s where the 80/20 rule really works – 80% of the results from drilling down on 20% of the decisions and actions.  It can even be the 90/10 or 95/5 rule, where very, very few things really make all the difference, where almost all of the results come from just one or two things done exceedingly well.

This is why, at Luman International, we say First Things Only.  If it isn’t a first thing, why are we working on it?  Or to say it differently, why are we working on anything else when there’s a first thing floating around that hasn’t been fully addressed?

But what really happens in organizations?  I was talking with the Senior VP of HR in a Fortune 500 company, who told me that his “first thing” was to create a sense of passion and commitment, and in the process to elininate their pervasive sense of entitlement and “doing only what I have to do.”  I gave him a lot of ideas about how to go about Building a Passionate Organization, something we’ve been helping leaders do for almost 29 years, something that should be on every leader’s list of First Things.  When I met with this executive some weeks later, I asked him what he had been working on.  His answer?  “I’ve spent every waking minute since then trying to get our new physical education/fitness center completed.”

Now, health is important, and organizations that try to help their employees be healthy have a commendable concept.  But could this really be a First Thing?  Aren’t employees ultimately responsible for their own health?  How will this contribute to building passion and commitment (it won’t, because they come from 10 Keys that have nothing to do with benefits)?  In fact, isn’t this likely in an entitlement culture to build an even greater sense of entitlement? 

In a way, this is more than just a performance question.  First Things Only is a question of everyday ethics.  Someone is paying for the time spent on second and third things, someone is paying for the first things that are going unattended.  Working on second and third (and often ninth and tenth) things when first things are crying out for attention is a waste of lives and resources.  It’s guaranteed to produce sub-optimal results, along with a lot of damage to a lot of human beings.

First Things Only.  Anything else is…well, not that important.

Terms in italics are trademarked property of Luman Interntational.  All rights reserved.

Phony and Genuine Accountability

There’s a lot of talk about accountability in organizations, but precious little of actual accountability.

What we normally see is a statement like, “You’re accountable,” and then actions by leaders that diminish that comment. These actions include micromanaging, randomly inserting ourselves into the middle of decision-making processes, creating overlapping or parallel accountabilities for the same things, and requiring multiple reviews along with approvals from above. The result is a sense of disempowerment, which leads to making excuses and pointing the finger at others.

To be meaningful, accountability has to be tightly defined. We need to provide the authority and resources to pull it off. Then, as much as possible, we need to get out of the way and stay out of the way until we reach a key milestone, deadline, or commitment date. People have to know, “This is my baby and there’s no place to hide if things go wrong. I’d better focus, work hard, be tenacious, ask for what I need to accomplish the work, get help with problems as necessary, and deliver the goods.”

Accountability is a great concept, but it’s just words unless we make it real in the conversations, actions, and decisions of those who are…really accountable.