- Mar 29, 2024
High performers shouldn’t over-optimize
- Spencer Fry
- 1 comment
When you’re good at your job, and care about what you’re working on, it’s human nature to look for ways to improve.
When you do this, you also risk overcorrecting and losing the magic in the messiness.
Hiccups are healthy, break up the monotony of the day, and bring people together.
Before you jump into process creation mode and turn everyone into checklist robots, take a step back and look at your team’s performance. If you’re already achieving your goals, you should stop trying to over-optimize everything.
If you’re not achieving your goals, that’s a different issue.
We all get frustrated when something goes wrong, or when we see somewhere we can improve things. But focus your energy on solving the problem at hand, not simply adding new processes to solve future problems that may or may not arise.
1 comment
This is powerful, Spencer. To me, it gets at a few things that are important to building a healthy culture. First is that you, as CEO, are giving people permission to be messy and to make mistakes. This creates amazing psychological safety and as you alluded to, makes work more fun and challenging. Second is the bias for action. Too many leaders get stuck in strategy, over-thinking rather than experimenting and incremental change. This is why Podia is exceptional. 👏
Occasional blogger, never on social
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This section once listed the startups I’d founded and other accomplishments, but that stuff doesn’t mean much to me anymore (maybe I’m just old?). These days I’m just focused on making Podia better every day and spending time with my wife, dog, and the people who matter.
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