Do You Reward Overpreparation? - Thoughts from Kevin

0:00Do you reward over preparation? Hi, I'm Kevin Eikenberry, and I'm here to help you reach your potential as a leader and a human being. Welcome to Remarkable TV and the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Make sure you hit the subscribe button wherever you're watching or listening so you don't miss any future episodes. Are you ready? Let's get started. So you ask someone for an update and they hand you a 20 slide PowerPoint deck. It's impressive, it's overkill, and it's probably late. So did that extra preparation help us or slow us down? Here's what I know. What gets rewarded gets done, and if we're rewarding preparation, we'll get more of it. The question is, how much do we need?

1:01Now this is a personal question for us to think about, how much are we preparing? But it's also an organizational question. Like how are we rewarding and what are we rewarding and is it what we really want? So I've got four things for us to talk about here and let's go for it. Now number one, we reward what we praise and what we tolerate. Like if we focus on progress more than polish, we will be moving forward. If we think about our meetings, if you think about this organizationally, we think about our meetings, are you recognizing insight when people can clarify something or are you recognizing volume, which means people probably did a lot of preparation to have a lot of things to say, do you want insight or do you want volume? Do you want progress or do you want polish? Every preparation is often fear in disguise. The fear of being wrong, the fear of being judged, let's face it, the fear of not having

2:03the answers. As an organization, we need to think about normalizing rough draft thinking. We don't have to have perfect thinking at every stage. We can move in the direction of what we need as opposed to half to having the right answers. But more preparation doesn't necessarily mean better decisions. Now in a world that was more stable and consistent than it is today, maybe that was true, but today speed may be more important than delay. And we have to remember that uncertainty will always exist. So if we're trying to prepare to get passed uncertainty, it's probably a losing battle. It's important for us organization here to clarify the standards of what we're looking for, because in a world of uncertainty, best answer, best decision might not even exist. So are we preparing for something that we can't even get to?

3:05And lastly, leaders set the pace and the expectations. If you expect progress, you get momentum. If you expect perfection, you get hesitation. And if you're overpreparated preparing, if you're having your people to lean into preparation too much, you're going to get too much hesitation. Remember that it's in most cases or in many cases, it's okay to have some iteration for us to move closer and closer to what we want to do rather than trying to get to a perfect answer by having so much preparation. Let me close with today's remarkable reminder. When we reward over preparation, we may slow down the results we say we want. The results that you want every day is to have a remarkable day, right? So every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I send a newsletter out called your remarkable day. It's free. It's short. It should be in your inbox. You can take care of that by going to KevinIconVary.com slash newsletters.

4:07I hope you'll do that. And I hope to see you next week on another episode of remarkable TV and the remarkable leadership podcast.