Don't let great be the enemy of good

The moral of this story I'm about to tell you is don't let great be the enemy of good.

Working with a leadership team, and they were reviewing their their numbers for the quarter their key performance indicators, their measures of success.

And they weren't the right numbers.

No one was really taking accountability for those numbers. There was no real action for the numbers, they were just kind of reading off a bunch of numbers. So I confronted them on that and help them realize that they needed to do some work there. And they decided that right in that meeting, they were going to do some work on accountabilities and make sure we knew who is accountable for each of those numbers.

I then suggested that post that meeting, they go off and create something called a job scorecard, which I learned from a methodology called "Top grading" and a book called "Top grading".

I suggest that they go off and create jobs, scorecards to help them better understand for each function, who was accountable, what the mission was, what the measures of success were, roles and responsibilities and competencies, that that would help them better align around accountabilities. And an offshoot of that is they do a much better job of making sure they were measuring the right things, holding the right people accountable, and then taking the right action versus just reading through a whole bunch of numbers.

Excellent.

They came back 90 days later. And they were still just rattling off a bunch of numbers. And what I asked them why, they said they hadn't quite completed the job scorecards yet. But they were making good progress.

Okay, 90 days later, I come back and they had created the job scorecards at this level, but realized, to really get them right, they needed to cascade them down. One more level.

90 days later, the excuse was, we've got all the numbers. But some of them aren't accurate yet. And we want to make sure all the numbers are accurate, before we start reporting them. And by the way, we're working on a really cool dashboard, some new technology we haven't used before. So we're going to be able to see graphs and red, yellow, green, and it's going to be beautiful. And a year later, they still hadn't gotten those numbers, right.

Building a business, building a team, is not a linear sequential set of actions.

When you build your company, when you build your business, when you build your team, it's having the ability to do a number of things and incrementally move them forward, step by step by step, what's the next right thing for us to do?

To solve one problem, we do not need to solve all of our problems.

And I see so many leaders, so many leadership teams fall into that trap of believing they've got to get everything right before they can get this one thing right.

And then it's literally a year or two later, and they can't do something simple. Like have their measures of success identified with the right person accountable with the right actions as a result of whatever the numbers are, that they're looking at.

You know, we can't get better in our hiring process, until we fully overhaul the entire hiring process. We can't fix our onboarding until we bring on this brand-new training organization that's going to do these 157 things right.

Take the next right step. Don't let great be the enemy of good. Think of your business as a number of things. A number of fronts you're working on all at the same time, and move them forward, one right step at a time.