I want to wrap up here with an idea that’s not just about being a good manager, but about being a good human. It starts with this quote:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
The version of reasonableness Shaw is talking about here isn’t the kind that refers to getting along with people or respecting your coworkers or handling the daily challenge of internal politics and bosses. He’s not suggesting you become unreasonable to all of those people. You need to keep working with them. It would be a huge mistake.
Shaw is suggesting, quite logically, that achieving something better—a better product, a better team environment, a better company—means setting a much higher bar than the bar you have now and then relentlessly working toward it.
There’s a certain amount of stubbornness in the idea, and necessarily so, but I doubt Shaw is suggesting you become difficult to work with, the kind of person who digs your heels in and clenches your face muscles and glares at people, refusing to budge. I think he’s suggesting we sort out how to make other people want to get to the new place as much as we want to get there ourselves.
This isn’t about being difficult. It’s about believing in something and striving for it, even when—especially when—no one else can imagine it.
This is how companies are born. It’s how products are invented. It’s how laws are enacted. It’s what allows teams to do great work. A bold vision for a better future and an unreasonable dedication to achieving it is how all real progress is made.
Without this kind of dedication to worthwhile beliefs, we wouldn’t have the Internet. We wouldn’t have space shuttles. We wouldn’t have seat belts. The United States wouldn’t exist; it was formed, after all, in resistance to British rule. Few things demonstrate more unreasonableness than forming an entirely new country in pursuit of better government.
On a day-to-day level, as managers, unreasonableness is what can drive us to form, run, and treat our teams with a higher regard than a mere schedule-pusher, task-assigner, project-runner. It’s what can make us better.
It also happens to have a few great benefits. Because being unreasonable means having high standards, and high standards make all sorts of things happen.
One of the biggest obstacles to great work—the kind you can be proud of, the kind that actually does let you go home feeling good about yourself—is low standards. It’s easy to be run-of-the-mill. To be mediocre. To do just enough. And when you do all that, you never really achieve great work.
Mediocrity is nothing you want to put your name on, nothing you’ll be remembered for achieving.
High standards, on the other hand, help you to get past obstacles, like people and politics (more on this in a minute). They help drive you to become better. They help drive you to the people who can help get you into better situations and projects.
This happens in three simple ways.
Earlier, I described the benefits of skill overlap, and the benefits of having some level of expertise in at least one subject. I described how this helps your team and how it helps them respect you as a manager.
Assuming you’ve internalized this idea and now want to make it a goal of yours, high standards are the trick to getting there. The reason?
A devotion to high standards is a powerful force. It will push you past the typical lessons and drive you to relearn the meaning of quality.
It works in a process.
Early in your career, everything is new and interesting, so anything that even resembles your view of quality looks like something you should aspire to. And achieving that level of quality is really difficult, because you have little skill, little knowledge. You’re a long ways off from being able to do the great work that inspires you about other people.
Slowly, you learn more, you do more, and you gain context, and insight, and start to form opinions. You also start to see that what you thought was amazing before is in fact fairly routine and typical, and the really great stuff is actually much more advanced and requires much more skill and experience. In other words, your target for greatness moves further away. Rather than leaving you disheartened, though, this fact motivates you.
As you build up skill and gain experience, you slowly become competent. Perhaps not much more than that for a while, but at least competent. If you have a certain knack for whatever it is you’re doing, maybe you evolve more quickly. Still, it takes time to gain any level of real mastery. (Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink (Back Bay Books, 2007), posits that mastery takes something around 10,000 hours. Talent can speed that along, I think, but it’s not as common as you’d think; talent is often another word for years of practice.)
Eventually, your standards go way up. And up again.
Assuming you care about the work you’re doing, the target will keep moving, but each time, your commitment to quality will move you forward. It will be the thing that gets you to ask questions, to envision something better, to try to achieve it.
As a result of all this, while you aren’t even looking, you’ll gain more skill than you ever thought you’d have. At each step, you’ll have learned more, done more, and become more adept. High standards lead to prowess.
As a human and as a manager, you’ll feel better about yourself and your work, and your team will recognize both.
Another way high standards help is by making you more persuasive.
Internal politics can bury you on any project, and politics can come in so many forms that you don’t always even know which direction they’re coming from. You might need to deal with a stakeholder who’s always trying to “manage up” to his boss. You might encounter an exec whose whims are treated as more important than good, well-researched decisions. You might encounter a peer trying to take over one of your projects and introducing a lot of bad ideas in the process.
Sticking to your guns—committing to high standards—means you’ll find ways to work through the situation. Having such standards will compel you to ask more questions, do more research, and show more evidence, all in the interest of producing a better outcome.
Couple that drive with the advice in the Debate School chapter, and you’ll become a driving force, able to take any great idea from concept to completion.
And finally.
You know those people who are really great at their work and who inspire you with their intelligence, cunning, insight, all that great stuff?
High standards lead you to them. And this is arguably the most exciting effect of being unreasonable.
In the beginning of your career (presumably long before becoming a manager), your high standards can hinder you. The tendency for a lot of people is to see what’s possible but have no idea how to achieve it other than to wave their arms and complain a lot. This doesn’t get anyone anywhere. If anything, it just makes people resent you. I can’t begin to count how many managers I’ve met who’ve uttered the words, “Bring me solutions, not problems.” They say this because they’ve all met more than their share of newbie professionals who only know how to complain. It takes a while to sort out how to have high standards and lead people to pursue them along with you rather than getting grouchy when they don’t. It takes experience and skill and knowledge. As you gain those things, high standards start to become a positive.
Eventually, you start to have good ideas. You start to share them, to learn to speak up without stepping on toes, to work toward solutions.
Eventually, people start to ask for your opinions more frequently. You become the person whose thoughts matter most on a particular subject, someone who knows the most about it and has a track record for handling it well.
Keep that up and you’ll get recommended for things.
Those people you respect will hear about you on their own. You’ll end up working with them. You’ll become one of them.
This happened in my career. I started as a complainer, a guy who could spot a design problem from a mile away, but who had no idea how to make it better. As I learned, I built up a record of successes. I began to write about them. This led me to conferences, which led me to all the people I respected and admired most. In the years that followed, I got to work with many of the best minds in my industry. I got to have long conversations with them about their approaches and their experiences and their insights.
It’s that simple. High standards move you toward other people with high standards, and they attract people who have high standards right back to you.
Can you see why this would matter in a managerial context?
Passion like this is contagious. Your belief in better can make people want to come along with you, to be part of the better.
When they are part of the better, they feel more motivated. When they are more motivated, they do better work. When they do better work, they feel better about their lives and their work.
This is what it means to lead by example.
Have passion, get passion.
Long-term, this will put you and your team in high demand. It will make you successful.
Embrace the highest standard you can imagine and aim for it. If you do, your career could be wilder than you ever expected.