We live in a society that seeks perfection. Anything that deviates from perfect becomes a speed bump in our day. Perhaps the line at Starbucks was too long. Maybe you got a flat tire on the way to work or a meeting ran longer than originally scheduled and now the rest of your day is off program.
We expect perfect. Perfect line at Starbucks. A perfect commute. A perfect meeting. And we expect perfect out of ourselves.
But perfect comes at a high cost and often times, relies on activities outside of our control. The long line at Starbucks is something we can’t control but are dependent on to have a ‘perfect’ morning and make it to the office on time.
This quest for perfect also derails us from learning. None of us remember, but each and every one of us fell when we were learning to walk. Multiple times. And yet today – if we are doing something new, we expect to not fall. We expect to be perfect.
Learning is messy and we will never be perfect out of the gate. So, how do we mesh those two realities? The reality that something new will be messy, but we have a desire to be perfect?
We choose to do nothing. We choose to not try the new thing. We’d rather do nothing than fail.
And so, Wholestack Solutions not only accepts failure as an option…but we encourage it. If we fail…we know that we were trying something new. And we likely learned something from the failure.
How do you encourage progress over perfection? If you’re in technology, one of the greatest investments we made was a lab environment. Here our team can do whatever they want…break things…reset them and start over again. Providing a safe environment for the team to experiment and fail reinforces the message – progress over perfection.
For those in content or marketing – getting started is the first step in learning. Create some internal content, start writing your own personal blogs or play around in tools like Canva. But accept that whatever you do today…at the start…won’t be perfect. In fact, a year from now if you don’t look back at your starting point with a little hint of embarrassment? You waited too long to start or you haven’t progressed much.
From a cultural perspective – we must encourage our team to try new things. To accept failure. To accept less-than-perfect. And a great way to encourage that? Lead by example. We as leaders often hide our failures from our team. Whether it’s our ego that gets in the way or some self-imposed idea of what ‘leadership’ is supposed to be. We need to share our own progress over perfection steps to show-not-tell that progress over perfection is the path forward. Only by creating a space that accepts failure as an option will we empower our people to try new things, grow, learn and unleash their potential.
