Working Not To Fail vs. Seeking Excellence

As I noted in one of my first posts here, this blog is about seeking excellence in all areas of our lives.  I firmly believe that if you want to achieve excellence in your work you must focus on maximizing your talents, be willing to take calculated risks, put in the time and effort needed to learn as much as you can, and not get stuck chasing perfection or being obsessed with the possibility of failure.

If you work with a primary focus of avoiding failure, you will never reach excellence.  Your best case scenario for success when trying to avoid failure is not screwing up too much or too badly.  You will still make mistakes and they will likely be done in an effort to do something unimpressive or unimportant.  You will successfully be nearly flawless at being average or mediocre.

There are some employers and supervisor who do not want excellence from their employees.  They want people to be as mistake free as possible in executing the limited and specific functions of their work.  I think there some occupations where this makes sense, but I am not sure it fully takes advantage of the contributions and talents of each employee.

I have come to understand that there is an important footnote to this excellence seeking philosophical approach.  Failure is measured differently depending on who you are.  As a white male, if I fail the odds that I will be given a second, third, and fourth chance are high.  When a woman or person of color fails in the workplace, they can not trust that this will be true and often have personal evidence to back up this feeling.  For all of the pride people have about the progress made around gender and race (as well as other identities), much of which is warranted, the differences in experiences in these areas is still significant.  For individuals with certain identities, in order to succeed, a higher premium must be placed on the avoidance of failure, but if that approach becomes the driving force behind their work, then excellence will likely be out of reach.  Unfortunately, any increased focus on avoiding failure likely limits the full contributions of those individuals and sets up the need to work longer and harder than others to try and achieve excellence.

In coaching people looking for work I strongly encourage them to consider the work culture and supervisory approach to excellence, mistakes, and risk taking.  A good organization and supervisor can help mitigate the legitimate cultural concern of failure that weigh down some people and give them the space to work from a perspective of seeking excellence.  In this type of environment both the employee and organization have the opportunity to thrive and mutually benefit each other.  That is the type of work experience everyone deserves and should be looking for.