Posted by It’s a daunting thing to write. Can I really be the one to say doing less than perfect is not only ok but better? And yet, this is a lesson the past few years have carved deep into my leadership.
If Harvard says so…
Earlier today I was reading an article about how to find the time when you are overloaded and delegation is not an option. One of their recommendations spoke close to home:
Make sure your team really understands what “good enough” looks like. It is easy to think that every piece of work should be an A+. But if everything you or your team does is excellent, you are overdoing quality, stressing your team, wasting energy and slowing down progress. – Harvard Business Review
The article goes on to give examples of how workloads can be reduced, deliverables can be simplified, processes can be streamlined, and AI can be leveraged. It brought up some tough memories.
The olden days
Having grown up as an M&A banker, everything had to be perfect. And everything had to be done. The combination meant hours worked in the first 5 years that equated to more than 10 years of work, sleepless nights and far-from-rest weekends. When people asked me with a puzzled face why I did it, the answer was invariably “Because I must, I want to”.
In all honesty, it was my belief that I had to do every bit of what I was doing. That the extra review would yield marginal benefits, that the extra analysis might add value to the work, and that the different colours on the chart made a difference to our reputation. Don’t ask me how I got into that culture so fast and furious when I never even considered investment banking as a career option until my first interview came up. I was a true believer in attention to detail and going the extra mile. Isn’t that what you are supposed to do when you start your career?
Grooming the perfection
As I grew into other areas of the bank, my resolve did not fade. Whilst I was not the preacher that bankers were the ones that got it right, there was a lot of the culture that came with me into the COO Office and ensuing management roles that I had. The culture that I would say yes to anything that came my way and actually debate whether there was even more I could do with it. No joke.
For years, I took pride in having teams that were willing to question and push the extra mile but 2 collisions hit me on this path. First, I was passionate about maintaining sane teams and a work-life balance for my juniors. Second, I was given more and more work to do. It became unsustainable. Again, self-inflicted.
Delegation met the wall
As my responsibilities grew and I perfected the art of delegation, I also learnt that delegation is not the only tool available in the arsenal of running a team. And it has its limits. After all, that would severely collide with my priority of having a long-term view of my team members, working on their development and prioritizing their wellbeing.
As we started getting too tight for time, we evolved to analyse every piece of work for usefulness and compare it with the amount of work involved. Reporting, strategic analysis, metrics – it all was open for discussion. From then on, it was part of our DNA to keep asking questions about ways to reduce low-value work and choosing where we spent more of our time. It was never an easy reflection, given most of the time I hired to my own image of perfectionism. But, as a team, I like to think we evolved to allow ourselves the space to do this.
The next level
It was not, however, until last year that I truly tested myself in the context of prioritization. In my prior life, that had implied doing something later or doing certain work with fewer bells and whistles. Last year, as I took over the daily management of the charity, alongside finance, marketing, fundraising and operations, with a reduction of 75% in the size of the team, there was no delegation or postponement available. There were the things we were going to do, and things we were not going to do.
It is interesting to reflect on it as, over the years, I had always struggled to cope with all “I was not doing” for the charity. It was my night job and I kept running after what people asked me for. As strategic as I would try to be, it would always feel like putting down fires and lots of guilt. But when faced with an extreme case when, at some point, there was just no one to do the job, we had to decide what was the most important thing.
The choice
For me, it was crucial to write it down and say it out loud. In a way, writing down the 5 things we would do gave me permission to do those 5 things only. More importantly, it gave us permission to let go of emails and deliverables that were not on the list. It gave us permission to leave behind the “nice to haves” with the certainty that the important ones would come back when things were back to normal. It also gave us permission to do one less revision, to change one less sentence. And naturally, to experiment with AI more, out of need, rather than out of curiosity.
For the team, or what was left of it at the time, this was an essential step. For the new-joiners who were jumping into an environment where there was so much to do, it was key to have this clarity. For us, these priorities revolved around what we do and the integrity of the organization in the long term. For others facing similar pressure, this kind of ruthless clarity can serve as a starting point. Here’s what our top 5 priorities looked like—your list will likely differ, but the act of defining them is transformative
- Apply our funds – maintaining tight connections with the ground and ensuring the existing projects didn’t get off track – that meant feeding the children and sending them to school
- Keep our sponsors happy and engaged – to ensure we had no losses that would be harder to make up for
- Get money to pay for the projects – fundraising being our highest priority to survive the year, especially with large corporate donours
- Ensure our impact was clear and transparent – ensuring we were having a real impact and reporting on it in a consistent manner was a key progress area that was valid far beyond the existing year
- Keep up with our regulatory and legal obligations – to ensure we didn’t put the organization into any unnecessary risk.
Looking back, it almost does not matter if these priorities were well chosen or not. But having them ensured we knew what to focus on each week, especially when other themes asked for our attention. It was so much easier to say no.
Good enough is a better strategy
What is important to recognise is that good enough is not a short-term strategy.
Good enough is actually about smart prioritization, realistic execution and more impact-focused work.
At the end of the day, we achieved more in a year than we probably would have with more team members but less clear priorities. And less acceptance of prioritization. The fact that we empowered team members to understand the priorities and have a choice was essential for the organization. It also led to us being in a better place than ever as this year we are now able to deploy some of the “surplus” energy into new initiatives for marketing engagement, data management improvement and new fundraising ventures. The culture of understanding what is truly important and ensuring that it continues to drive the day-to-day as we strive for excellence is still there. It just does not make us feel guilty, nor does it require us to be perfect.
If you are feeling overwhelmed and your team can not take more delegation, how will you find a different way of doing things?
P.S. – This was hard for me too. Interestingly, the one place where from the beginning I vowed to stay away from perfection was this blog. I hit publish many times when I could have reviewed it more, I hit send many times on newsletters that ended up with typos. I explored topics that created reflection but were not yet fully thought through. I say this because maybe you can’t do it to the entirety of your business yet, but perhaps you can do it in a small business area first. So you can get comfortable with the feeling of knowing you have done a great job, even if you could have done better.
Photo by Polina Zimmerman: