3 Cheers for 4 Stars

I get it now.

A few years ago a charity leader I was coaching asked me to post a review of their organization on Google so they could build their reputation. I was happy to oblige.

After a little thought I wrote a simple and sincere comment about the quality of work they do for the people they serve and the optimism I felt about their improving strategy.

Pretty good right?

And I (generously in my mind) scored them 4 out of 5 stars.

Oops…

I didn’t understand that in internet culture these days anything less than 5/5 is seen as a fail. I’ve since had customer service reps at a couple companies tell me that they get some grief for any customer rating less than perfect. And woe is me if my Uber driver gives me anything other than 5 stars!

I don’t get it. 4/5 is still an A grade in school last time I checked. (Though my teacher friends tell me an 80% today is more like a 70 when I was in school).

Pauses to yell at clouds and tell everyone to get off my lawn…

But what does it mean to us as a society when everything is either 5 stars or zero?

What does it mean as leaders?

For ourselves, we need to be intentional about developing the skill of nuance. We need to learn the value of a B-; and understand that long term improvement means we can both be satisfied with good enough, and take norte of how to be continually getting better.

For those we lead, especially the younger people entering our organizations who are formed in these strange all or nothing dynamics in so many ways, we need to be more deliberate in how we frame feedback and how we receive it.

Helping people understand gradients and ranges of success, encouraging them to see both what is working and what isn’t, and training our teams to hold things in tension are essential skills that are under-developed in many places.

I’m not expecting the elaborate algorithms that govern so much of our lives to adapt; but here in human relationships we lead well when we resist the pressure to polarize every opinion. Most things are really somewhere between amazing and awful and it serves no one very well when we lose all that space between.

That said, feel free to leave me a 5 star review…

Contact me if I can be helpful to you and/or your organization.

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