One of the best leadership tips I’ve given in a while, came out by accident when I told a friend, “Weird gets worse.”
At the time my friend was telling me about how he had recently run into a former girlfriend. The woman, he noted, had gone downhill but not in terms of appearance. Instead, he found that her little eccentric habits had gotten worse over time.
“What was once cute and slightly strange about her had gotten really weird,” he said. As you might guess, he was now relieved that the relationship had ended.
This was when I blurted out, “Weird gets worse.”
The same principle applies to leadership. Little problems, with your team, will get worse over time. It’s easy to overlook these issues and consider them to be part of someone’s quirks. But what they’re doing is metaphorically walking around with a grenade in their hand that has no pin. Eventually, an explosion is going to happen.
- The person who thinks that good customer service doesn’t really apply to them will one day upset a critical mass of customers. At this point, you become someone’s last choice for business.
- The person who likes to curse at coworkers and make sexual jokes in front of them will one day make your top performers decide to find work elsewhere.
- The person who never addressed bad grammar will write a proposal that is laughed out of the room by a potential client.
- And the person who decided learning about technology wasn’t an important part of the job will end up telling you why your competitors can do the same work for less because they took the time to learn something new.
These problems are like weeds in that they start small and end up growing very large. Why tolerate something that can grow so big?
In business, when weird gets worse, business gets bad.
If you like this concept, then you’ll enjoy the chapter called, The Mediocrity Slide, in my book, Stuck on Yellow.
