Anything worth doing is worth doing badly: A chapter from Wisdom in Leadership

The things you do and the things you’re responsible for are important. If they weren’t, you wouldn’t waste your time doing them. They matter and they need to be done well. Quality is important. We worship a God of excellence and we strive to do our best—not to earn his favour or salvation but because we already have it in Christ.

The tension of training

So quality is a high value. But as a leader you also need to raise up and train new leaders who can take on important tasks, multiply the ministry, and free you up to focus on other areas or to develop new important tasks.

Doing things well and developing new leaders are both valuable and necessary objectives. The trouble is that these two agendas often clash. Training someone up means, almost by definition, that in the beginning they won’t be particularly good at whatever it is they’re learning to do. And they almost certainly won’t be as good at it as you are. If you’re training someone, then there will often be a predictable drop in quality while the new leader learns the skills and makes their mistakes.

How can you remove this tension? One solution is to refuse to pursue quality. Decide to settle instead for mediocrity or even poor quality. If you do this, people who are still in training and who aren’t yet very good at what they do will fit in perfectly.

The other way of removing the tension is to stop training people and do everything yourself. Or you could ask only very talented, experienced people to do things for you. The upside is that you know things will continue to be done well and you’ll ensure consistent high quality. The downside is that you fail a key task as a leader in not multiplying yourself by releasing others. You stop adding value to the people in your team and you severely restrict the impact you could have by hindering the multiplication of effort. This particular path means you have high quality in the short term but big problems in the long term. The experienced, accomplished people who are here today won’t be here forever. And when they leave you’ll have no-one to step into their roles.

The reality of quality

The simple truth is that, when you train people and multiply yourself, there will be a dip in quality. But this dip will be temporary, because over time the people you’ve trained will get a handle on the tasks and the quality will begin to rise and sometimes even surpass your own level of expertise. You’ll end up with not just a quantity increase, but with a quality increase as well. But in order to get there you’ll have to be able to cope with a dip in overall quality along the way.

So that’s why I say that if the task is worth doing then it’s worth doing badly in order to train people.

Imagine what would happen if you simply did not have enough time to do everything you wanted to do. Perhaps this is not that hard to imagine. Imagine that the lists of things you wanted to do, wanted to preach, wanted to start, and the people you wanted to care for, was too long for you to do all by yourself. In this completely imaginary world certain tasks either get cut from that list and so don’t get done at all, or you hand them on to someone else who you know isn’t as competent as you are but who you know will see that they get accomplished. Which do you choose?

Let me ask the question a different way. What if there were ten people who needed to be cared for and discipled. And imagine you only had time to meet with two of them. And imagine also that there was another person who had the potential, with a bit of help and training, to meet up and care for people. That person had enough time to care for five people, but the care they would be able to give would be lower quality than the care you could give. What should you do? You could either care for two people and leave eight uncared for, or you could care for one yourself and use the rest of your time to meet with this other potential caregiver to equip them to care for five people. So in the end six people would be cared for, though not as well as they possibly could have been.

If it’s a task worth doing, then it’s a task worth doing badly. In the above scenario an extra four people receive care—this care might not be perfect, but at least it will be genuine.

Just because the task won’t be done as well when someone else does it shouldn’t stop you from enlisting that other person’s help. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

If you enjoyed this chapter, then check out the rest of Wisdom in Leadership.