What To Do When Good Enough Is Not Good Enough

Sometimes good enough is, indeed, good enough. But there are sometimes when you just can’t settle or compromise. The short answer is: 1) Never compromise culturally or on brand fundamentals; 2) Be intentional about what can be good enough strategically so you can focus resources on what really matters; 3) Flex your tactics in line with cultural, strategic, and operational direction and guidelines.

This all fits within the framework for nested leadership described in an earlier article.

• Cultural leadership: Who you are and what you stand for
• Strategic leadership: Arranging resources before deployment
• Operational leadership: Campaign management
• Tactical leadership: Deploying and adjusting resources in real time

Never Compromise Culturally or on Brand Fundamentals

As I wrote earlier, culture is the collective character of the individuals in an organization. Character, in turn, is the “core ethical nature and the qualities that define them as an individual, particularly in terms of morality, integrity, and how they conduct themselves in challenging situations.”

When Robert Goldstein was VP of Advertising at P&G he said, “Principles are only principles when they hurt.” Not living up to your principles in challenging situations, is but saying, in other words, that those are not your real principles.

Any time you compromise on a cultural plank, you devalue that plank. Any time you cut an important corner on what your brand stands for to save a little money, you dilute your brand. Any time you do something merely good enough that’s important to you, you say it’s not really that important after all.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re going to do some things good enough. You’re going to settle. Just don’t do it on your core ethical nature and qualities.

Unfortunately, we’re all seeing the results of decades of Boeing compromising on its core product quality. The recent crashes are less the result of basic mistakes made in the past couple of years as they are of the slow, steady, abandonment of its core ethical nature and qualities over an extended period of time.

Good Enough is an Important Strategic Choice

Strategy is about the creation and allocation of the right resources to the right place in the right way at the right time over time. That means there are wrong resources, places, ways, and times. Being good at everything is not a strategy. Strategy is choosing where to play and how to win. That means choosing where to be:

• Predominant/top 1%
• Superior/top 10%
• Strong/top 25%
• Above average/top 50%
• Good enough/scaled/bottom 50%
• Outsourced or not do at all

This is straight out of Garrison Keiler’s Lake Wobegon where “all the children are above average.” Mathematically impossible. While no one wants to be below average – in the bottom 50%, someone must be below average if others are going to be above average.

This plays out in things like allocating a bonus pool. If the overall pool is 10% of people’s base salaries, you can only give your high performers more than 10% of their base salary if you give others less than 10% of their base salaries.

Embrace good enough as a strategy, not because good enough is good enough, but because it frees up resources like attention and funds to invest where you choose to be predominant, superior or strong.

Flex Tactics in Line with Cultural, Strategic, and Operational Guidelines

Getting to and communicating clarity on your cultural planks and strategic choices free up your tactical leaders to focus on getting their jobs done and flexing however they need to within those guidelines. You don’t want your tactical leaders pondering or debating culture, strategy, or operational guidelines. You want those ingrained in them so they can focus on delivery.

This gets to the art of delegation. Give people inspiring direction, enabling resources, empowering authority, credible accountability and then get out of the way and let them do their jobs. They should deliver predominant, superior, or strong results where it matters and should be just above average or good enough at the rest.

You don’t care how they manage the rest. If you did, you’d have put it in a cultural guiding principle or strategic mandate. Requiring superior performance on everything all the time is a recipe for disaster. You think you’re caring. They think you’re micro-managing and will, eventually, quit, collapse, or burn out. And then you won’t even be good enough anymore.

Click here for a categorized list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #954)