Building Layers of Excellence
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I dedicated one of my earliest podcast episodes, well over five years ago, to the core principle of Excellence Over Perfection. If you haven’t yet listened to it, I highly recommend you do for two reasons: First, because this is a prerequisite to superior leadership performance; and, secondly, because my delivery was so sh!t in those early episodes that you’ll enjoy the contrast.
The concept that perfectionism is good is complete rubbish. Even though the quest for perfection sounds really noble, in reality, it’s mostly driven by fear of failure – pure and simple! It adds an enormous amount of time, cost, stress, and complexity to any piece of work, without any material improvement in the outcome.
People go way beyond the point of diminishing returns, because they’re afraid of getting it wrong. They freeze. Think of it as being the equivalent of spending 1 hour to build and install a door, and then 10 hours polishing the doorknob.
A quest for excellence is infinitely more useful. Be smart, make good decisions, and keep moving.
Momentum is greatly undervalued as a driver of performance, but let’s face it, there are some things you want to make sure are pretty right.
In these cases instead of perfectionism, you’re way better off deploying layers of excellence.
When a result needs to be as close to 100% as you can make it, individuals with perfectionist mindsets won’t do it. But layers of highly expert people who review and provide assurance, will!
I like to use the example of financial reporting to demonstrate this point.
As the former CEO of a major business, I wanted to keep my finger on the pulse of the company’s financial performance. So, every Friday afternoon, the financial controller would generate what we called a flash report.
It was rough — just enough to give me an idea of the performance over the previous week. For that report, I was really happy for it to be maybe 80% accurate. It was just a ballpark look at the numbers to give me some idea of how we were tracking.
But for the monthly board report, I wanted the numbers to be much more reliable. I wanted that report to have a degree of accuracy of maybe 90 to 95%, so the numbers had to undergo way more scrutiny. So, instead of sending that report directly to the board from the financial controller, it was reviewed and interrogated by the CFO, who then passed it onto me.
Once I was happy, I signed it off to go into the board pack.
Taking this a step further, when we produced the official annual report, where the statutory financial results were published, the accuracy had to be even higher. We had to get it as close to 100% as we could.
The extra layers for this came from the fierce, independent scrutiny of external auditors, who thoroughly stress-tested everything in the company’s financial reports, and provided their opinion on the veracity and accuracy of the financials.
Here’s the thing: the same person (the financial controller) generated the data for the weekly flash report, the monthly board report, and the formal annual report. But instead of expecting this key individual to become increasingly more accurate, depending on the purpose of the numbers, we put layers of expert review and assurance between the financial controller and the board, and between the board and our external stakeholders.
That’s the layering of excellence that brings you as close as possible to a perfect outcome. Putting more pressure on the financial controller to get something perfect is futile, costly, and counterproductive.