How do you get too excellent in a service business?

Good is a commodity and is the base line customers expect, but excellence will make you stand out in a crowded market.

It’s about making sure your team feel they can take risks, without the fear of reprisals if something goes wrong.

In team meetings we all talk about moments of excellence, the things that have gone well.

What we should do, is talk about the failures too. Why it failed, could we have done it better or in different way?

Excellence takes risk, and you’re not taking enough risks if you’re not learning anything by making a mistake.

For risks to work, for your team to take risks, it needs to be ok to fail.

No one wants to admit failure, and no one wants to look bad in front of their peers. That’s natural.

Failure is tough to talk about, and too many organisations punish people for mistakes without extracting the valuable lessons contained within them.

To go from good to excellent on an individual and organisation level, we need to acknowledge our performance failures.

…which need to be shared with the whole team, so we can all learn from them together.