I tried my best

Some time ago I overheard one of my managers trying to cheer up his sales staff, who just lost a big order. His words: ‘‘Never mind, you have tried your best.’’ I thought ‘Excuse me!’ and called my manager for a meeting and asked: ‘‘How would you rate a sales staff who is trying their best, but never gets an order? How do you think I would rate you if your team is really trying their best, but never achieve their target?’’ The answer is obvious. The truth is, nobody is being paid for trying their best. We are all paid to perform.

Let’s look at it step by step. It does happen that we give our best effort, but fail. Sometimes, we fail because of inexperience, mistakes, sometimes, because of outside factors. In any case, if a failure is commented with ‘Never mind, you tried your best’ the person gets the message that it is okay and is put at ease. How can this be the case? I prefer to approach failure, and let me repeat again, it happens to all of us, in a different manner. After failure, a de-brief must take place. First of all, the situation needs to be recognized as a failure or under-achievement. Then we need to ask questions like ‘What went wrong?’ ‘What did I learn from this?’ ‘What will I do differently in a similar situation in future?’ With constant reviewing and relearning, we will be able to do better in the future. With the ‘Never mind I tried my best’ approach this re-learning and improvement will not take place.

Another story. During her high school days my daughter received a very bad score for an exam. The poor girl cried and was still crying when I came home from work. We talked about the bad score and my wife said to her: ‘‘It is okay, you tried your best.’’ I said: ‘‘Well, with grades like this you will never make it to university. That will save me a lot of money. Good for me.’’ Of course, the poor girl cried more and my wife became very angry with me. After cooling down I asked my daughter: ‘‘What grades do you want to achieve?’’ (In her school 7 was the best, 1 the worse) She said: ‘‘4 maybe 5.’’ I said: ‘‘What about gunning for a 7 for every subject?’’ She was scared: ‘‘What if I don’t get it? Then I will be very disappointed.’’ I said: ‘‘Never mind. It is also not forbidden that you aim high. Let’s rather discuss what you should do in order to achieve these grades.’’ And she came up with sensible suggestions like; if I don’t understand something, ask the teacher one more time; when I come home do my home work first before playing, show the homework to daddy in the evening, for longer term projects start early and avoid cramming at the end. My answer was: ‘‘Okay, let’s do exactly what you said.’’ I asked her to write down our little plan. The end of the story, with a few encouraging reviews in between: Her grades improved by 1.5 almost instantly. For the final year she achieved a 7 in two subject, mainly 6’s in the others, able to qualify for a top uni in the UK and recently finished her degree with honours. So much for ‘Trying your best’.