It’s a thin line between love and hate. This is a great quote to underscore the inherent challenge of delivering excellence or managing to very high quality standards. Recall this great song by Annie Lennox in case you need a soundtrack in your head while reading this. It’s easy to point out what’s wrong with something, but a much bigger challenge to make it better.
Walking the Tightrope, source: unknown
It’s like walking a tight rope… if you believe high quality is essential to achieving your goal. On the one hand, you can take the demanding boss or snooty patron approach and simply demand better/more. This might get you an immediate response, but often elicits such a negative reaction from the people around you that you lose their authentic trust, loyalty, and commitment.
One the other hand, if you tip towards forgiveness and understanding, you actually get less in the moment and hope that next time things will be better. This might engender fonder feelings from those around you, but fails to set a higher bar, push the envelope, surprise and delight. It is simply fine (given the circumstances). Unfortunately, over time, “simply fine” leads to mediocrity. Eeew.
It’s a difficult competing commitment: be a kind generous human being (like Jesus Christ) or be an innovative bearer of high standards (like Steve Jobs). Can’t you be both? Sure, and to do so, vision, vigilance, and veracity come to mind. Introducing the V-3 method of leading for quality! It helps you walk the line of pushing for mo’ betta, while accepting the inevitable influence of variables, unexpected interruptions, and, well reality taking things back to the lowest common denominator.
- Vision: paint a compelling picture of what could be, so others are inspired to act. In fact, paint is insufficient, you must craft it in Technicolor, no THX. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Powerful imagery has proven impact on individual motivation by “priming” people with impressions about what is possible and how it will make a difference. More importantly, a great vision helps clarify a choice and “allows” others to achieve versus forcing them to respond to a command. A clear and compelling vision attracts people who desire the same things as you, making achievement at very high levels of quality more sustainable.
- Vigilance: don’t let there be exceptions and don’t let there be distractions from the highest priority aspects of your quality mission. Allowing exceptions and distractions lets people off the hook before they achieve mastery, and may negatively effect their desire to try next time. See more on this concept in Why Chinese Mothers are Superior by Amy Chua.
- Veracity: use facts and present them in ways that inspire continued efforts to try harder. Providing feedback on progress is essential in support of persistance and high achievement. But the facts must be relevant and presented in appropriate scales. One study on goal achievement compared weight loss on a wide scale of 25 pounds versus a narrow scale of 5 pounds and found that participants needing to lose 4 pounds were more likely to slack off in the wide scale (because 4 is small compared to 25 while it’s huge compared to 5).
It’s a thin line between engagement and overwhelm. One last tip: if you tell someone something is “not good enough” the next action on your part is to pitch in and help make the situation better. This is a doubly-good thing because mimicry is a powerful social motivator and it’s energizing to have fresh legs in the face of a difficult challenge!
