Best is the Enemy of Good
We all have heard that Good is the enemy of Great. However, I read something very different while surfing a chapter in James Clear’s Atomic Habit.
James says, “The best is the enemy of the good. If we aim for the best in the first shot, we will not end up even near where we want to be. To build effective good habits, we should start small, add some gratification, and then build upon it. They cannot be embedded overnight. It is a continuous process. We make consistent progress of at least 1%; and then because of the compounding effect, unbelievable results are produced.
This makes sense. I’ve experienced this. In my college days, I wanted to have a good physique, and to achieve that I’ve got to do some exercise. On Day 0, I did try my best and couldn’t do more than 25. However, these 25 caused so much fatigue to me that I never tried them again. Recently, I’ve restarted workouts to do 5. I will do 5 per day for a month and then will make a gradual increase till I reach 50.
To aim high is not a bad thing. It is the best to do. It is our nature to aim high. However, just aiming high is like being in motion. We’ve created big, massive plans in our mind to fix our future, we make announcements for the same and feel happy. Whereas the whole point of creating good habits is to take action. This journey from being in motion to taking action define our success rate. We all have experienced unrealistic new year resolutions, then forget about them. Those who tried to keep, most of them dropped off in between because of wrong technique.
Like this, organizations who aspire to be or sustain a Great Workplace needs to develop habits. The good habits that improve the workplace culture at least 1% every day (or every week). Then because of the compounding effect, these improvements add to each other and create a robust workplace culture immune to crisis.
Organizations who aspire to be or sustain a Great Workplace needs to develop habits
For example, at Airbnb, the organization had to innovate overnight on how they can run their business in a pandemic. The entire organization came together and worked as a single unit to overhaul its product and its offering. As a result, when the world is re-opening, they have more products and line-of-businesses that generate profit.
So how can an organization start if they want to build this habit of continuous improvement? They can start by listening and acting on byte size information from their people continuously. The annual employee feedback survey is a helpful diagnostic tool, but you, as a leader, cannot rely on annual reports about your people are feeling in this dynamic world. Any CXO would like to power their people so that they can give their personal best at work. And this cannot happen by just listening to them once a year. Great Workplace culture is not an incident that happened once, it is a good habit that has been created, followed, and nurtured by the leaders over time.
Lissen.io provides a solution that facilitates this good habit-building process. They have products that can be tailored as per your business context and empower you to listen and improve on your culture.
A Great Workplace Leader doesn’t make action plans, the leader takes actions, small, incremental, and positive actions that reinforce each other and contributes to building great workplace culture.
My subsequent articles will cover details on how this habit of listening can be formed and ingrained in an organization’s DNA.
Note: Views expressed are personal.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
