Living Our Values: Excellence
This is the fifth in a series of posts about S&C’s values, and the third in which we explore each of them individually and what they mean to us and our work. Read the others: Overview, Curiosity, Humanity, and Courage.
In this series of posts, we’re exploring how all of our values are related. Curiosity gets us sitting up and paying attention with an open mind. Humanity reminds us to center people in our work. Courage helps us take action, even when it’s uncomfortable. (And directness, which will be the last in this series, is a challenge to face ourselves and each other with clarity so that we do not waste each other’s time and energy.) Excellence, the topic of this post, is the standard we hold ourselves to.
Excellence isn’t a value of ours just because we want to create polished, beautiful things (though of course we do). It’s about effectiveness. Humanity reminds us that the things we do and make have stakes, so we want to serve the people who will use them with excellent work. So we focus on the details and require great work of ourselves.
What Excellence Means to Us
Our clients are wonderful, caring humans, and they smell great. They are advocates for their own people in many ways, but as we’ve learned, telling your own story is really hard. We tend to forget that others might not know what we do or why. We always assume people appreciate being guided.
So the concept of excellence, as communications professionals, means thinking about the client’s goals at the same time as we’re thinking about what the audience needs and where they’re coming from. The work must satisfy both sets of goals and needs. This isn’t as easy as you might think. Many consultants work in a deliverable-centered mindset. But we never build something for the sake of the product itself. We operate, therefore, from an audience-centered mindset.
Excellence isn’t a value of ours just because we want to create polished, beautiful things. It’s about effectiveness.
A beautiful website that doesn’t serve its end users isn’t excellent. A brand identity that makes the board happy but confuses the community is not an excellent brand. And our clients are audience members too. If the guidelines, content management systems, and other tools we create aren’t eminently useful without hand-holding, then we are not creating excellent work.
Another part of excellence is how we do that work. We decided several years ago that if our engagements with clients and teams feel good, then we’ll have done excellent work. The process is part of the product. How we feel is just as important as what something looks like. If we deliver something beautiful but misery reigned throughout the process, we will not have done excellent work. That’s fumbling the engagement.
And, of course, the deliverable has to be excellent. We want to put things into the world that we’re proud to stand behind. Still, to us, that’s the bare minimum.
Excellence in Practice
Being the advocate for the audience means that sometimes we disagree with our clients — that’s where courage and directness, two of our other values, come in.
Our clients know their audiences best. It doesn’t happen very often, but occasionally a client’s perspective compromises the effectiveness of the work. Since we see ourselves as partners (not vendors), we are duty-bound to address it directly and offer a new perspective, in the interest of the mission. These can be uncomfortable conversations, which is why this kind of directness takes courage. We make that commitment to our clients, and luckily our clients are wonderful, caring human people who smell great and hired us for what we do, so they listen.
Part of excellence, to us, is building enough trust that we can disagree with each other and actually deepen the relationship.
We always need to think about the budget, and sometimes the budget isn’t big enough to deliver the fanciest of feature sets. Still, the value of excellence means that we see budget or timeline limitations as creative constraints. They are not excuses for not caring or diluting effectiveness.
Excellence gives us a north star for being able to make things in a dynamic, creative environment, and every project is a dynamic environment. The question is always, what is the best version of this that we can make given the current reality?
What Excellence Asks of Us
Excellence means always caring about both the tiny details and big moves, which can be exhausting at times. Good enough is always sitting right there. Excellence requires that we look at our own work and our own behaviors in a critical light and consistently center this high standard of care, which goes beyond the contract.
This connects back to courage, the ability to be uncomfortable. If you’ve done your best and you have to face up to the fact that it’s not where you want it to be, or if you’re tempted to let something through and you have to face that — that takes guts, especially when there are deadlines and expectations on the line.
Excellence means managing the tension between pushing ourselves and maintaining a humane process. We’re not asking people to work super long hours. It’s not how we do things. Real excellence means holding the standard high across all aspects of the work, while holding the people doing the work with care. Those aren’t competing commitments, they are further constraints that require solutions. We can always figure it out.
The question is always, what is the best version of this that we can make given the current reality?
In a sense, excellence is what the other values produce when they’re working together. Curiosity finds the right problem. Humanity keeps us focused on the people the work is for. Courage and directness let us protect the work when it’s under pressure.
We don’t value excellence because clients demand it. We value it because we can’t imagine doing this any other way.
