Managing the Gap

"Ordinary people are capable of acommplishing extraordinary things."  

Barack Obama

After reviewing the concepts of An Excellence Agenda with one of my clients, she said;  "Francis, this is all great, but we are not excellent."  What my wonderful client was missing was the concept of The Gap.   The Gap is one of the basic tools for managing An Excellence Agenda.

If you have ever been frustrated, anxious, worried, angry or upset, it is probably because you are experiencing a Gap in your life.  The Gap is the difference between your expectations and your performance.  The greater the gap between your expectations and performance, the higher the level of frustration, anxiety etc.  Motivation comes when the Gap is very small - we then feel that with some additional effort, we can meet our expectations, and our performance and expectations will be aligned.

Gaps are built into our system as human beings.  We cannot get rid of the gaps, we can only manage them.   In managing An Excellence Agenda, we need to manage the gaps between our expectation:  what we believe Excellence is and the performance we see in front of us.  

There are three ways to manage the gap:

• lower our expectations
• raise the level of performance
• let go of our expectations - and work with the performance only

Lowering our expectations

  

This is often called compromise or making do, which many people resist.  There is, however, another side to this.  In a series of interviews with business leaders, virtually every business leader felt that that they were above average in abilities, decision making and accomplishments.  Our natural self regard puts us in a high achievement category.  We are, each of us, legends in our own minds.  The problem is that it isn't true, all of us are excellent in a several areas, average in others and downright dangerous in others.  Don't ask me to do brain surgery !  

One of the key ways we frustrate people as colleagues, managers and leaders, is that we believe that our personal performance is close to 100%, and we expect those around us to be at a similar level.  After all, if we can do it, so can they.  Our actual performance is actually probably closer to 80 - 90%. If we lower our personal expectation to 85% and set our acceptable performance standards at 75% we will see a huge positive impact on both ourselves and those in communities of excellence around us.  One of the keys to promoting environments in which excellence can happen is to lower our expectation levels slightly, and then celebrate like heck when those around us perform at levels that are more average.  

The result of the positive feedback is that those communities of excellence will start to perform at higher and higher levels and the accomplishment cycle goes through the roof.  

It's worth a try.

Raising performance

See note above.

Eliminating Expectations

There is another way to build excellence capacity.  That is to let go of expectations.  In Eastern Philosophy, this is seen as a key way to achieve a sense of peace and accomplishment.  By letting go of expectations, you eliminate the Gap and can free yourself up to enjoy what you are doing right now - today's current performance.  In this way you give yourself permission to be as excellent today as you can be.  Some days are really high performance days, other days are less high performance days.  The key is to let go and let excellence emerge. 

If we truly believe that everyone in our COEs, comes to the table desiring to be excellent, then we can let go and let each of them be excellent.  Where performance is suffering, then we need to understand the gap in the performance (resources, capacity, expectations, other blocks) and either accept them, or eliminate them.  Sometimes our expectations cannot be fulfilled because the environment just will not allow it.  Letting go is the only solution.

I decided several years ago that I no longer have problems in my life - only Gaps.  What gaps are you experiencing today?  Are you willing to lower your expectation?  Can you enhance performance?  What would happen if you lived in the moment and let the expectation go?

In managing An Excellence Agenda if we look at managing the Gaps, we get to let people around us be excellent in their own way.  The result is enhanced Communities of Excellence and unbelievable performance.