Do the best we can

in #motivation6 years ago

Is doing the best we can always the best answer at work? We hear people saying about it all the time.

Yes, it’s true that as long as you have done your best, the result is not up to you to decide. You should not feel guilty about it. It always holds true. I can picture all different scenes with people patting on your shoulder saying “do the best you can”. Or “you’ve done your best”.

We do need encourages in life, esp when you are in setbacks. “I’ve done the best I can” is like a chicken soup. It keeps you positive and gives you a reason not to blame yourself for something that you didn’t do well, or didn’t achieve as expected/planned.

I’ve been thinking about this phrase a lot recently, as I’ve heard this all the time at work, and even myself saying it few times a day now. This is not a good sign as you can tell. Also knowing that there is solution for it, but nothing we can do, the phrase is more or less to comfort and find excuses for mistakes/lateness we deliver. Then, is this phrase still the best answer?

I work in the listed company, we used to own one brand, but as a result of company strategy, the brand is licensed out. as you can image, the direct impact to employee is losing jobs as company had to cut people. We now have a very tight and lean team. Everybody works their butt off in order to deliver the business goal.

However, the fact is that we don’t have enough people to take on the remaining work, esp when we have aggressive growth plan. We’ve been seen some misses and delays in the process due to lack of hands. But as the business hasn’t taken off, it’s hard for the company to hire more people, this is why, whenever we have exceptional workload or late add/changes, leaders can only tell everybody in the team that you just have to do the best!

The result is still to the satisfaction in terms of hitting business plan, however, people’s been complaining about it, on one hand, the situation keeps the team closer as we have to cover for each other, on the other hand, the place is going further and further off from the goal of the company to building it into a place where everyone wants to work in and enjoys.

From long term perspective, this is not a very healthy situation. We’ve seen people leaving, and the momentum is starting to fade. As a leader, what can they do to bring back the confidence of their employees? I understand the limitation of the resources and budget from company perspective, but it will always be late to fix it when some big mistakes/delays happened as a result, the loss could be even bigger.

I believe this is not a new story for most of the people at work force. Every company has their own problems. But people is always the best asset of each company, What company needs to do to retain the talents and keep innovation and momentum going? Without the right talent, the company will suffer and won’t survive… Sometimes the answer is simple, give the right amount of headcount based on the real business need. Doing the best you can would eventually hurt the business if it’s not taken care off in time.

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"Best" means a stop, better is always better.
I am sure whenever we say we did our best but the result was not satisfying, it is frustrating. Maybe, it is truth for today. However, I really hope (for myself) that I could improves even for 0.1% tomorrow, so I could get it done better. Same for businesses, technologies/competencies keep improving . Something unsolvable today may have solution tomorrow.

Agreed!! If you are passionate about your work then you will never stop after best. Cheers