“Good enough.” How often do you hear these words around your workplace? I’ve been involved in several industries over my career, and I’m amazed at the ubiquity of this phrase. “Good enough, the client will never notice,” or “That’s fine, he never reads these closely anyway.”
The problem is, it’s absolutely true! A homeowner would almost never notice if the studs in their framing weren’t crowned properly. Most car owners would never know if the air filter was really replaced, or just knocked clean and reinserted. And, in most cases, what they don’t know really won’t hurt them in any significant way. (It’s sad to say, but absolutely true)
So why bother writing about this non-issue? Because, while that way of thinking might suffice for little things in the short-term, the “good enough” mentality never ends there. It seeps its way, slowly but surely, into our self-image and work culture. Slipping into the office at 8:07 becomes “almost on time.” Falling just short of production standards becomes “close enough.” To anyone who says that perfection is too costly, I posit that your business can’t afford “good enough.”
The best example I can give of the endless pursuit of perfection is my grandfather. He’s the kind of guy who, when he washes his car, looks under the hood to clean any residue off the engine block and neatly bundles his sparkplug wires. The words “good enough” aren’t in this man’s vocabulary. He once helped me with a cabinet I was making. After the “show” faces were sanded and varnished to a glossy sheen, and having a little extra time before the project was to be installed, my grandfather guided me to sand and paint the backside. Mind you, this was a cabinet, and a cabinet’s backside spends its days against a wall. No one else would ever notice the extra attention, but putting in that extra effort and knowing myself that it was there fundamentally changed the way I viewed effort and the way I approached projects.
“But self-satisfaction won’t pay the bills,” you say?
Discretionary effort—the extra work that one does because one chooses to, not because one must—is often the difference between a satisfactory product and an excellent one. In marketing, the difference between a “satisfactory” and an “excellent” product or brand experience is the difference between simply dodging complaints and actively creating customer evangelists—the kind who sing your praises every time your name (or industry) comes up in conversation. No business owner or salesperson needs to be told how valuable warm referrals can be.
Here are three takeaways to stomp out “good enough” in your workplace:
1) Work with people who give a damn. There is no hard and fast way to determine who does and who does not, but a good rule of thumb is this—determine how they define themselves. My grandfather is a car/yard/home kind of guy and pursues each of these to perfection. He is not a graphic design guy, and, as such, it doesn’t bother him that his business card could use some work. I, on the other hand, am a branding/construction/creativity guy (not into cars—you can tell by what I drive), so I would sooner get behind the wheel of a rust-bucket than desktop-print my business cards, or let just anyone speak/write on my behalf. When doling out projects, match people by what they care about first, their skill sets secondly (the skills will come, the extra-effort attitude won’t).
2) Give people time, tools & opportunity for discretionary effort. It doesn’t matter how much someone wants to try harder if they don’t have the time, authority or ability to go above-and-beyond. There are other ways for them to satisfy that “perfection” bug—but those other outlets won’t likely benefit your company.
3) Recognize the effort. I’m not just talking about bonuses…in fact, more money is probably one of the least-effective means to promote from-the-heart or self-defined effort. For example, the American Red Cross once dabbled with donor payment to get more needles in arms. The result? The experience was “cheapened” for donors who gave (literally & figuratively) out of the goodness of their hearts, and fewer people showed up. Find out why people tried harder or gave more, then reinforce that feeling or reasoning.
