Excellence is Overrated

You can’t excel at everything. (No matter how hard you work).

Neither can your organization. (No matter how well you hire.)

And that’s a good thing.

Excellence is overrated.

The pursuit of excellence is often admirable, but it’s also a trap. Too many leaders and organizations are stuck in a constant state of feeling inadequate, always needing to be better. We have set excellence as a goal, or even worse claimed it as a value, without defining what it really means to us; leaving only the sense that whatever we are currently doing isn’t good enough.

Excellence is too easily perceived as perfection, resulting in organizational paralysis (“We need more time/money/staffing…”) and individual insecurity (“I can’t let anyone know I’m struggling/uncertain/need help…”).

Want to know what’s underrated?

Competence.

The most effective leaders understand what’s good enough. They are crystal clear about the few specific things that require rare excellence, and they are just as clear on what the minimum standard is for everything else.

Turning weaknesses into strengths is almost always a fool’s errand. It chews through resources, motivation, and capacity with little return. We get a lot better mileage spending that effort enhancing our strengths.

So instead, let’s figure out what it means to satisfy our weaknesses, to reach a level where they don’t hold us back from using our strengths, to find good enough.

The impossible quest for excellence in all things is a distraction from doing what we are capable of doing for the people, issues, and needs we can help.

So, sit down with your team this September and do some honest analysis. Ask what really needs to be excellent, and (more importantly) what excellent actually means. Then you can figure out what the minimum standards are for everything else to not get in the way of what’s most important.

Real excellence is a byproduct of clarity, not a vague virtue.