The Hard Truth About Professional Excellence

I’m going to give you the hard truth (and the big key) to professional excellence in the next few hundred words. Even better, it isn’t just the key to professional excellence but excellence in any part of your life. And even if you don’t strive for excellence, but just want to get good at something, the same hard truth is required.

Here's the truth:

If you want to get excellent at something – even good at something – you have to be willing to be bad at it first.

And that is true for everyone.

Even the people who seem to have the magic touch.

If you read any autobiography you will read about people who failed before they succeeded.

Stephen King has written 65 novels and 5 nonfiction books and sold over 400 million copies of those books. And his debut novel Carrie was rejected by 30 publishers.

Comedians practice in small clubs – and get booed a lot – as they hone their craft.

Entrepreneurs have pasts filled with failed companies, projects, and products.

If you want to build professional excellence, the path starts with sucking, not succeeding.

It isn’t easy to fail or fumble when you are doing something for yourself – but it is even harder when you know your mistakes and missteps are at work and in public.

So far, I haven’t told you much you didn’t know, but you needed to be reminded. But knowing isn’t enough. So, let’s translate this to our real working lives…

Building Your Professional Excellence

1. Know what you want to be excellent at. We can’t build professional excellence in everything, at least not all at once. Decide and focus on your skill target.
2. Be prepared to be bad. Remember the point of this article. Grant yourself some grace and be patient.
3. Start small. Pick part of the skill to work on. You don’t have to and can’t get excellent at everything at once. Starting small helps you get past the bad and limits your risk too.
4. Stay the course. Remember, the key is to embrace the bad tries to get to the better (and better) ones. Patience is your secret success tool.
5. Ask for help. You can’t do it alone. Reach out to those who have gotten past being bad. And rely too on people who believe in you. Both of those kinds of people will help you succeed after the suck.

Coaching Others to Professional Excellence

As leaders, we are on the journey to professional excellence ourselves, but we know we have a role in helping others on their path too. Here are some of the things you need to do.

1. Share your belief. Your belief in others matters more than you might realize. Especially if people are scared to try or have lost their confidence when they are especially bad as they are getting started.
2. Provide a safety net. One reason people don’t want to try (and fail) is they feel like a mistake will be career limiting. Give people a safety net so they feel they can keep trying.
3. Be encouraging. Remember what it feels like when you are a beginner and someone encourages you. Be that for others. Often.
4. Promote persistence. Believing and encouraging is important. But people who are struggling to grow also need someone to support them and expect them to be persistent and resilient.

Transforming Professional Excellence to Organizational Excellence

1. Set high expectations. High expectations are important to organizational health. If you hire people you believe can grow and succeed, high expectations are needed to help them get there.
2. Make learning a key piece of your strategy. If you want people to grow and achieve professional excellence, you need to support learning – formal and informal – in every way you can.
3. Promote psychological safety. If you want people to be consistently moving through the learning process at work (including being bad at things for a while), you must create a culture of psychological safety. Here are five places to start.
4. Create organizational patience. We know at a personal level that learning something requires patience. But organizations aren’t always best at patience. If you want to cultivate wide scale professional excellence, people must see patience.

The truth is hard – that to get good at anything we have to be bad at it first.

When we remember that fact and embrace it – for ourselves for others and across our organizations – we have a chance to create far more excellence than we might even imagine. And if you want some more good news…

Since doing this work individually and organizationally is hard, not everyone will try, or stay the course. Which means if you keep swinging, keep trying and keep learning, you will soon surpass most others - because they won’t be willing to do what you will do.