Three Minute Wisdom Knowledge is not enough. True leadership is informed by wisdom. The ideas presented here are intended to arouse your curiosity, provoke your thinking and encourage insightful action to help you achieve the things that matter.
The twin aims of every business are to sustain long term excellence and create deep personal satisfaction. A business that is able to achieve these aims will thrive while those that cannot will fail.
Wait a minute. I thought the aim of every business was to make a profit. Don’t excellence and satisfaction rank as lower priorities than making money?
In a word – no. In fact, pursuing profit directly without achieving these two aims will greatly erode the long term effectiveness of your organization.
Profit is Not the Goal Don’t get me wrong, profit is important, in fact, it is essential. No business can justify its existence unless it generates revenue beyond its expenses. But profit is not an end in itself, it is a measurement of the success of the business. Profit is not the goal, it is the natural result of achieving the twin aims of sustained excellence and deep satisfaction. (When you think about it, there are lots of things that are essential to running a business – furniture, office space, an accounting system, a website – that are not the reason the business exits.)
This principle holds true for government agencies and non-profits too, whose value is not measured in profit but in the public benefit they provide.
It is a paradox of life that those things we cherish most cannot be pursued directly. Take, for instance, things like love or respect. You know what happens when someone sets out determinedly to “win” another person’s love or respect. They create the drama of pop songs and soap operas. The person actually undermines the very thing they are striving to get. This is because love and respect are not derived solely by one’s individual perseverance – they are generated in concert with others. They are the result of what we put into our relationships and how we interact with people over time.
So it is with profit. Like the other important things in life, profit is maximized over the long term when it is not pursued directly. We actually obtain more of it when we view profit as the natural by-product, not the main product, of a value-creating engine, and instead spend our energy building and refining that engine.
When it is pursued directly, profit usually comes at the expense of long term profitability. If you cut costs by failing to invest in research, you degrade your ability to develop new products. If your salaries and benefits do not keep pace with the market, you are not able to recruit new talent. If you don’t spend time developing and inspiring your people, they can’t produce sustainable, superior results. We have all seen examples where short-sighted management allowed the drive for immediate cost savings and profits to corrode the long term stability of a company.
Use the Twin Aims as a Useful Frame The twin aims of business are a useful frame for viewing your actions as a leader for two reasons. First, without it, the daily press of business demands will continuously fill your day with urgent short term activities. There is never a shortage of deadlines and crises, all of which may be legitimately important. But unless a leader makes the twin aims a priority, there will be no countervailing force that advocates for them. The aims of long term excellence and deep personal satisfaction play for a longer arc, and their long term payoff can never match the urgency of today’s burning platform.
Second, holding these aims co-equally in your mind along with short term realities generates creative tension that builds ever deepening levels of skill and wisdom. It is not easy to manage for the short term, and manage for the long term, and pay the daily bills, and also build a workforce that sustains excellence and feels deep satisfaction. To be a leader in these times is to perform a juggling act, on a high wire, with the wind on the rise. It is a juggling act that will never fully resolve. Without an anchor to compass you forward toward a compelling future, the daily grind of urgencies will force you toward false trade-offs, make you cut corners, and will eventually eat you alive. The twin aims of excellence and satisfaction provide that countervailing anchor.
Using this frame, a leader’s primary job is to create the conditions for long term excellence and deep personal satisfaction. The good news is that these twin aims are interdependent and mutually reinforcing: you can’t really have one without the other, and getting more of one helps you get more of the other. People do their best work when they feel inspired by a challenge and developing long term skills creates internal rewards.
Application Ideas There are many paths to excellence and satisfaction. Here are some ideas to explore.
- Increase the decision-making autonomy of staff and teams that have shown they can achieve results
- Encourage curiosity and life-long learning (through formal training and classes, but also through life experiences)
- Assign people to be team members, or lead, on cross-functional work groups, ad hoc task forces or standing committees
- Allow your people to schedule time on their schedules for reflection or strategic thinking
- Delegate others to attend important meetings in your place
- Have seasoned employees mentor newer ones, formally or informally
- Encourage employees to volunteer for civic organizations or professional associations that build transferable skills
- Create special projects for motivated staff (or better yet, allow staff to create them)
- Allow job rotations between units
- Commit to having after-action-reviews after all major projects attended by people from multiple levels.
- Hold quarterly all-staff meetings to gather ideas for how to foster excellence and create satisfaction
- Give staff targeted job assignments linked to areas identified in their annual development plan
- Get to know the individual preferences and aspirations of your people and tailor assignments to what energizes them
- Develop a recognition system to show appreciation for individual and group accomplishments; include staff as rotating administrators of the program
- Act as a model, striving for excellence and deep satisfaction in your own work
Browse this list and see if any of them arouse your curiosity. Better yet, share it with your team and see if it creates an engaging discussion. If you can successfully implement even one of these ideas, you will be one step further down the road of your leadership journey.
Share the wisdom. If you found this useful, pass it on to others.