Our Core Values: Make it Better
This post is a message that I wrote for our team to provide additional clarity and meaning into our core values and is a part of a series that was started with our article Establishing Core Values that Actually Impact Your Business.
“Always strive to improve, take risks, fail forward, and leave things better than you found them.”
That’s the quote from when we originally introduced this value as one of our core four. Seems like such a simple thing to do. Strive to improve? Check. Take risks? Check. Fail forward? Sort of check. Leave things better than I found them? Check.
But here’s the problem. Making it better isn’t a simple checklist. In many ways it’s more of an attitude you cultivate than a thing you do. It’s an attitude of ownership and never saying, “that’s not my job. Before we dive into why this value is important, please humor me as I walk us through its parts.
Make
to bring into existence by shaping or changing material, combining parts, etc.
It
whatever you may be interacting with at the moment. Whether that be a thing, idea, procedure, policy, conversation, or whatever else tangible or intangible.
Better
by some measure, more impactful, complete, efficient, effective, clearer, valuable, faster, or in any other way improved because of your interaction.
Better is an Opportunity
I say this often, but one of my favorite things that came out of our experiment years ago with Holocracy is the idea of tensions. If you haven’t heard me talk about tensions before, let me explain the concept as I have adopted it as a part of my philosophy here.
A tension is the realization of the gap between the way things are and the way they could be. It’s neither good nor bad. This is what is now and this is what’s possible later. This is a bad thing, but it could be a good thing. This is a good thing, but it could be a great thing. We might label a tension a “problem” that needs to be fixed or we might label it an “opportunity” to lay hold of. Again, a tension is the perception of a specific gap between current realty and a sensed potential.
Every day as you engage your work you feel these tensions. No matter what your role, there are signals and warnings that you bump into throughout your work and life They may be bugs in products. They may be suboptimal processes. They may be conversations that don’t quite get all the way to the heart of the matter. They may be features that don’t fulfill their full potential. They may even be concepts or ideas that lack clarity and substance. It may even be something that is working amazingly well, but you see a specific gap between where we are and where we could be. Whatever the thing, these are tensions you are experiencing. One of the keys here is that YOU see the gap.
Every single one of them is an opportunity for Saturday Drive to be a better version of itself or you to be a better version of yourself. But one person can’t do it all. No one person experiences all of the tensions. Only you can raise the tensions you discover. Only you can write that pitch, fix that document, patch that bug, or raise that concern. If not you, who?
Better is an opportunity that can only be realized if you’re willing to say, “that IS my job.”
Better is a Process
Things don’t get better overnight. Not big things or small things. Change always takes time. It takes deliberate and consistent attention to small details that when added up, amount to a huge impact over time.
Perhaps you have heard it said that every overnight success was 7 years in the making. I don’t know if that’s true for every overnight success, but I certainly believe that’s true for any great business AND any great person for that matter. The specific amount of time isn’t important. The fact that great things become great over time is.
The path to greatness is usually a slow and deliberate one, but it’s not just time spent waiting for something to happen. It’s an active pursuit, taking daily small steps with an ultimate goal in mind. Can it be tedious? Absolutely. No on ever said better was easy.
Better is Sustainable
Why aim to just being better when we could aim at being the best?
Because best is an illusion. There is always someone faster, stronger, smarter, or whatever else you are aiming for. The question is really only when you lose the title of best and to whom.
The battle to be the best is full of wins and losses. You simply can’t always be the best. You can, however, always be better. You can be better every single day. That’s a fight you can win every time. And by focusing on being better every day, sometime you’ll end up being the best without even knowing it or having to stress to protect it. That’s the real win.
**Because best keeps us focused outward and not inward. **Being the best is a lot of pressure. You spend all your time looking at everyone as competitors and watching what they are doing. A little of that is healthy. A lot of that will cause you stress and and probably lead to disaster. You’ll drive yourself right into a wall if you spend all your time looking behind you.
Better, on the other hand, keeps us focused forward towards the goal and inward towards what really matters. Best assumes the solution while better asks more questions. Best talks most of the time while better spends more time listening and understanding. Best sees competition as a threat while better sees them as a challenge and an opportunity to grow.
When Better isn’t Worth It… At Least Not Now
This may shock you to hear me say this, but there is a point when better is no longer worth it. We call this the point of diminishing returns. It’s the point when the benefit of better is less than the energy or cost to accomplish it.
There is also the moments when one tension might be more important or valuable to tackle than another. This can many times be subjective. One of the nice lessons from ShapeUp is that there is always more work than we can possibly do. It’s freeing to embrace that realization and just focus on what you choose to keep in front of you. That is why in many ways, pitches are thoughtful write-ups of shaped tensions. They may all be great, but we can only do so many in a specific cycle of work. That might be a tension in and of itself, or it could be liberating.
In the end, you spend a significant part of your day and life tackling the issues that we face together here at Saturday Drive. There are generally two attitudes one can take when faced with all the tensions they come in contact with each and every day.
- Become complacent and eventually frustrated by not engaging with these tensions, but instead just go through the motions and hope you survive the tedium.
- Bring those gaps to the surface, solve what you can, and make your work better today than it was yesterday. Make customers happier than they were yesterday. Make team members feel more fulfilled than they did yesterday. Make product better than they were yesterday. Make Saturday Drive stronger than it was yesterday. Make yourself better than you were yesterday.
Only one of these attitudes belongs at Saturday Drive. Make it Better or Why Bother?