Why Encouraging B+ Work Helps Make A+ Employees

It might sound crazy, but encouraging a lower standard of work from your team is actually more productive than requiring perfection.

Think about when you clean your room — picking up clothes and making your bed are fast actions with a big impact. Some people would stop there. But others, looking to do a “perfect” job, will spend hours scrubbing floorboards and whitewashing the walls.

The amount of work it takes to get from nothing to “good,” in this example, is considerably less than it takes to get from “good” to “perfect.” And when you look at what you get back from doing “good,” the return on investment for “perfect” isn’t worth it.

This is why I often encourage B+ work in my employees instead of A+. By accepting work from my employees that isn’t perfect, we avoid the massive diminishing returns that come from pushing constantly for perfection. This isn’t to say that perfection isn’t sometimes required, but most of the time it’s not.

Ironically, your employees won’t immediately leap at the chance to turn in imperfect work. You have to ease them into it.

First, know your employees’ backgrounds.

In order to help employees break their perfection habit, you have to know why they still expect to produce at that level.

When I was working at Lofty, an online arts and collectibles marketplace, we hired a lot of freshly graduated art history majors. In college, all of their work had to be perfect because it was graded as individual projects added up together. That’s what got them to graduation. So when they entered the real world, their understanding was that everything else functions the same way. But really, we as employers wanted to see the overarching amount of output from an employee — the more, the better.

The students we hired worked slowly at first. They were used to having control over every detail, and didn’t release anything until they thought it was perfect. This meant all of the art inspections, client recommendations, reports, and calls they had to complete in a day didn’t add up to much because they were hyper-focused on everything being perfect.

By helping them break free of this idea that the only acceptable work is A+, we helped them to accomplish more.

Since then, I’ve found it incredibly productive to encourage the production of B+ work. Here’s how:

You can push employees to let go of imperfect work by assigning them impossible deadlines.

The idea is to push your employees to complete a task as best they can in the window allotted. They may only have two hours to write a report instead of all day, which forces them to let go of perfection.

At Lofty, I would ask an employee for five art recommendations in 30 minutes. They’d panic a little, but they’d do it. And when they gave it to me they’d preface it with, “This is probably wrong but…” which allowed them an “out” from any expectations. But then we’d talk through the work. I’d tell them, “This is great! It’s exactly what I was looking for!” which helped them understand what they’d done in a shorter amount of time was actually quite good.

We essentially created a new standard for them to meet, even if the work could use some improvement.

Which brings us to a secondary benefit of B+ work — feedback. Mistakes are necessary for growth, and a company can’t grow if everyone is clinging to things until they’re perfect.

And everyone makes mistakes — even you.

As the boss, you set the example for everyone in the company to follow. Imagine what could happen if you publicly shared your mistakes.

Don’t panic — sharing your goofs with staff is a good thing.

Some CEOs and managers think they have to demonstrate perfection to their employees. They assume that leading by example involves only showing successful work that demonstrates proper protocol and an attention to detail. But the more you expose your own mistakes, the more you promote an environment where others can mess up and learn.

I used to do this once a week in meetings. I generally opened by saying, “As a reminder, we’re here to move quickly and break things. Here are the things that I broke. And here are the things that I messed up this week. I’m telling you this because I want you to move quickly and be effective and I’m okay with you making mistakes.”

It’s explicit, straightforward, and encouraging. It also makes B+ work a positive goal for the entire company, destigmatizing it as something “lesser.”

Ultimately, you want a professional space in which people are encouraged to accomplish their goals quickly and effectively based only on what is needed, not perfectly.