Throughout my career in advertising and marketing, I’ve often heard the phrases “good enough isn’t” and “that’ll do won’t”. Certainly, I’ve never found coasting to be a particularly effective strategy, and achieving the outcome you want, whether it’s winning that new client or getting a new idea out of the door, always requires significant amounts of effort.
But it’s also true that in professional services, potential and existing partners can tell when you’re desperate for a particular result, and subconsciously or not use it to their advantage. In some ways, it can feel like there’s an unfair inverse relationship between perceived effort and end result. I’m sure many of us have been there at some point, when those we work alongside interpret our intensity as desperation. And that always ends badly, in life as well as in business.
There’s plenty of scientific evidence to show that too much effort can actually be unproductive. The difficulty is identifying the sweet spot. As I delved deeper into the subject, five common themes emerged that indicate you’ve gone beyond ‘peak focus’.
1. Losing sight of the essence that got you and your company to where they are in the first place. Clearly, if we want to achieve something new it will demand some kind of change from us. But when we dramatically change the essence of who we are in order to feel worthy of achieving better outcomes, it’s highly likely that we’ll have lost the sense of position or competitive advantage to keep us there.
2. Compromising your company’s character hoping the ends justify the means. Character matters. In professional services, it’s always the company’s the most valuable asset, and that requires sticking to key values and principles. If you can’t be proud in how you win something, you shouldn’t be proud of winning it. If you are compromising your beliefs, you are trying too hard.
3. Failing to see the context of the situation. It’s easy to get bogged down in process and striving for the perfect solution, meaning we lose sight of the bigger picture. So much so that the single outcome becomes all-encompassing, and we can’t eat, sleep, or rest without thinking about it. We believe our business will be dramatically hindered if we don’t get the outcome we desire, and stop thinking about all the other projects and clients that we used to cherish.
4. Focusing on yourself rather than your clients. If every thought, plan and response is primarily concerned with ourselves, it’s unlikely we will get to the levels of client partnership and co-operation all professional service businesses desire. A similar thing happens with personal friendships when we can’t feel happy for others because we are too focused on ourselves. Both scenarios demonstrate we are likely trying too hard to fit in or be liked. If you can avoid taking outcomes too personally, it’s likely you’ll be able to create better ones in the future.
5. Not saying what you actually think or feel. Advertising is littered with apocryphal stories of ‘over-sharing’, but if you constantly find yourself wanting to say “no” but say “yes” instead, you are trying too hard. We don’t have to share every opinion, but when we find ourselves hiding our true selves, something is wrong. We are handing control of our lives to other people just so we can get what we want, and pretending to be something that we aren’t. You might get away with it once or twice, but in the long run it just isn’t worth it.
So what we do about all that then? Recognising the signs of trying too hard is the first thing, but I’m not for a moment saying the answer is to slack off a little. Winning has always required intense focus and effort, but also context, variety and character. Trying too hard is obviously not laziness, nor a lack of ambition, but a failure to be true to the personal and professional values that have served us well so far.