7 Proven Ways to Achieve Excellence at Work
If you were to ask anyone, achieving excellence is probably the number one priority. No one wants to be just average at what they do; we want to achieve greater. Every day is another opportunity to be our best selves and bring on the best energy possible to work.
With that being said, in whatever you do, there are some essentially fundamental rules and measures that, if practiced and implemented, do help you achieve excellence in your work.
This article is a great insider on how you can achieve excellence in what you do. Experts have preached some items on the list below for a long time, but it is up to you to actually put them into practice. Are you ready for it?
1. Provide a persuasive and optimistic vision
To achieve excellence, it’s essential to have clear goals. I can’t tell you how many people I have come across that cannot clearly explain what they do or where they are going. Or if they can explain, their team sure can’t. When your entire team is working towards a common ambition, the ride becomes a lot more fun. And when your team is having fun, the results show in your end product. Companies with high scores have a positive vision and propagate persuasive ambitions.
2. Develop creativity, not robots
To ensure excellence, it’s important that both you and whoever is on your team prioritize creative thinking and unique skill sets. For everything that you’re doing, ask yourself the questions, is this an automatable task? In the software world, we have a phrase called “toil”. According to the Google Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) book, “toil is the kind of work ... that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.” This doesn’t just apply to SREs, but for your operations work, ask yourself how much of it is:
A manual process: humans are performing data entry or creating reports themselves
Repetitive: the same task is being performed month after month or week after week
Automable: you can create an automation to perform this
Tactical: as opposed to strategic; it solves short-term problems instead of building you up for the long-term
Devoid of enduring value: This work will not matter two years from now
Scales linearly: If your customers or team grows, the amount of this work will grow in proportion to that
Your goal is to minimize this as much as possible so that you can save your team for the creative and strategic things that humans are so good at doing.
3. Create an Excellent Team Atmosphere
Create an environment that is welcoming and appreciative of the risk-takers, experimentalists, and unique perspectives. In order to attract that talent, you need to build a culture that invites them in. We call this the attraction-selection-retention model. It is your job as a leader to promote a culture that encourages your key values. Once that happens:
You’ll attract individuals who have similar personalities, traits, and values
You’ll select those individuals who display this culture, and
Those that don’t fit in will leave through attrition.
By culture, I don’t mean that we all like the same food or t.v. shows. I mean that we all, for example, have a value of failing quickly, seeking critical feedback, digging into the root causes of issues. Developing a culture is hard, but it is necessary to form an excellent team.
4. Solve Problems
Being excellent also requires that you solve problems. This may seem like an obvious point, but I have met too many leaders who do not know what problem they are solving; they’re just doing. I’ve met other leaders who would prefer to sweep problems under the rug. These leaders want to pretend that the problems that are identified are not happening or aren’t as big of a deal as people are making them out to be. As a leader who preaches excellence, it is up to you and your team to solve issues and to mitigate risks before they become issues. It’s a four-step process:
Identify: You should empower everyone in the organization to identify risks and issues
Assess: A subject matter expert (someone on the ground) should assess the impact that this risk will have on the business or project
Plan: The team should prioritize and create mitigation plans for the highest level risks
Mitigate: Implement the mitigation plan
Reassess: Gauge the success of the plan. Did it work? Is the issue gone, or the risk lessened?
Do not linger too long on your risks or issues. One problem might give rise to ten more, so getting rid of them should be the priority before continuing on with your work.
5. Communicate the right thing at the right time
As a leader, you always want to make sure that you are communicating the right information at the right time. Think about not only the content that you want to say but also the way you present it, who you present it to, and when you present it. Ask yourself the 5 W’s.
Who: Who needs to hear this information? Who can make the biggest impact on this problem? Who probably shouldn’t hear the information?
What: What is the biggest point I’m trying to get across? How much detail does this audience need? What does this audience care about the most?
When: When will the audience be most receptive to this information?
Where: Where should you communicate the information? A meeting? Email? Slack?
Why: Why is it so important that you share this information?
Every piece of information, good or bad, has a right time to be communicated. So before announcing the next round of changes, recognize the right time to break the silence.
6. Create Collaborative Teams
Collaboration is the key feature in the success of organizations. No one does it by themselves. One thing that I love to watch are documentaries on the production of a movie or show. When you watch these documentaries, you see that there are often several writers in a room bouncing ideas off of each other, laughing and crying together. They work together to iron out the details of the script.
Good ideas are made in teams, and you cannot create these good ideas if your team does not collaborate. They need to feel safe enough to speak up, take part and accept criticism with no offense.
7. Appreciate Excellent Performance
Finally, you need to appreciate and openly celebrate whenever someone does something excellent. This includes yourself. Deliver a kind gesture or provide open recognition for both your team members and yourself to show how the work and effort matters for the organization. This act of appreciation becomes a driving force for anyone to want to do even better.