Workplace Pace, Getting Things Right Before Fast
Are you moving at the appropriate workplace pace? Is time part of the metric you’ve grown to love, or love to hate?
Time matters to everyone. It especially matters for the work that you do.
The business needs the metric of time to calculate and anticipate revenue, production, and quality.
Are you doing things fast or are you doing them with the highest quality? Do you measure quality first or speed?
Many people will quickly express quality comes first, yet, in practice if you sacrifice speed for quality the measurement of performance is suggested to decline.
Which way is it?
Time vs Perfection
A pastry chef creates a masterful wedding cake. From the nearby table it looks absolutely perfect. On the back side there is an icing patch, a place where the icing spatula slipped. Hard to see unless the lighting is just right and you look very closely.
The carpenter does amazing work. The house looks perfectly square. If you look closer and measure corner to corner you notice it is off by an inch on one side.
An author grinds out a book. The work is published. Twenty-five thousand words. The perfectionist notices two typo’s and some questionable grammar.
All of these scenarios share something in common. The closer you look the more problems you find.
You may also suggest that given enough time all imperfections may be able to be removed or eliminated.
There is an intersection with quality and time.
Workplace Pace
Everything you do, and especially the things you do well may be up for critique.
There are times when everything needs to be perfect. There is also what we call tolerance. An acceptable balance between perfect and trash.
In your job, whatever you are building, creating, or especially replicating, it is a race against time.
Time matters and there is a deadline because the quest for perfection followed by replication seemingly never stops.
Think more about what you’re able to accomplish within the dimensions of tolerance and time.
That is the pace you’re racing against.
-DEG
Dennis E. Gilbert is a business consultant, speaker (CSPTM), and culture expert. He is a five-time author and the founder of Appreciative Strategies, LLC. His business focuses on positive human performance improvement solutions through Appreciative Strategies®. Reach him through his website at Dennis-Gilbert.com or by calling +1 646.546.5553.
