The question isn’t what makes excellence possible during challenging times like the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather, it’s how would excellence be possible at all without challenging times? Excited to share with you some wonderful news from the GO-VA tribe.
We received confirmation last week that GO-VA made it to the Circle of Excellence in the Asia CEO Awards’ category for SME Company of the Year.
For the second year in a row.
We heard about this 2 days after the announcement of the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, where GO-VA won a silver award in the Innovative Management for Business Products and Services category.
Yes, it was that kind of week. Full of back-to-back meetings and knotty challenges yet also deeply rewarding. It’s a bit like hiking up a steep hill wondering if you’re ever going to get to the summit without passing outーand then getting a quick and reviving look at how far you’ve trekked.
It’s more than enough to keep you going.
Innovation is clearly about change and motion. Something we’ve been reminded of by these 2 honours is that at its core, so is excellence. Excellence is not a fixed point. People and the organisations they belong to don’t just “become excellent” (and it doesn’t happen overnight) and then stay that way for good. Excellence isn’t about perfection either.
First: Excellence takes sustained effort.
We looked up the origins of the word “excellence” and discovered that it comes from the Latin for “to surpass.” In other words, to exceed.
If you’ve heard us talk about GO-VA’s purpose before, you’ll understand why we love this idea. Our purpose is to help businesses to scale and be a catalyst for people to exceed.
And the stakes for doing that have never been greater than they are this year.
On the same day we heard from the Asia CEO Awards organisers, the International Labour Organization announced that they expected total working hours in the last quarter of 2020 to be 8.6 percent less than what it was in the last quarter of 2019. That’s the equivalent of 245 million full-time jobs worldwide!
Back in the second quarter of this year, when the Covid-19 lockdowns were strictest, working-hour losses amounted to 17.3 percent. That’s the equivalent of 495 million full-time jobs.
During the strictest lockdown here in Cebu City last April, one of our internal team exclaimed during a particularly tough day, “It never stops, does it?”
Now we see that that’s a good thing.
Each time we help solve a client’s problem or adapt to a change in regulations or connect a remarkable candidate with a great job or just get through a challenging day, we get stronger. We may not always see it in the moment, yet we are getting stronger.
And then, we can reflect on what went wrong or what worked. What made that possible? What can we do better next time? We recharge and then we keep on going, a bit more confident because of what our clients trusted us to do or what our team members accomplished the day before.
It never stops. Excellence isn’t about flashes of brilliance or talent. It’s showing up every chance we get and doing our best, which is hard work even on a good day.
Second: Excellence grows in hard times, not easy ones.
Now, our clients who have been with us from the beginning know that we differentiated our business by emphasising the benefits of an office environment.
My brother Matt, who started GO-VA in 2014, likes to say that you can “unleash so much more potential when you get a group of people together with a common language, frameworks, and culture.”
This year’s challenge has been making that culture stronger even when nearly all of our interactions take place online.
Back in March, some of us worried that working from home would not be as effective as working in the office. That there would be too many competing bids for our attention or that our roles (as a parent and as a business leader, for example) would clash.
Across the board, though, our productivity trackers don’t just look as good as they did before the pandemic. They are, in many cases, better. Some flexibility has helped, I think. Feeling accountable to the team also plays a big part.
Author and psychologist Angela Duckworth has written that people who show grit draw from four common psychological assets. Three of these are interest, practice, and purpose. They genuinely love what they do, are committed to getting better at it every day, and do so because their work improves the well-being of others.
“And, finally, hope,” she wrote in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. “Hope is a rising-to-the-occasion kind of perseverance.”
Third: To make excellence possible, protect your energy.
In the first three months of 2020, the Internal Team and I began a series of sessions on creating a stronger mindset and building more productive habits. We met 3 to 4 times each week, for no more than 20 minutes each time.
In some sessions, we meditated or did breathing exercises. In most sessions, we spent a few minutes writing in our journals. We repeatedly encouraged one another to take the stairs to the office (we are on the 9th floor) and on most days, we actually took our own advice and walked up! We learned things about one another and about ourselves that we hadn’t known before.
In one memorable session, we watched a video where the author and motivational speaker Robin Sharma talked about how to start each day by devoting an entire hour to exercise, learning, and reflection.
I’d like to believe those sessions have helped all of us these past 7 months. That they gave us the tools we needed to adapt to this pandemic with our confidence, gratitude, and sense of humour intact.
Each individual decides on a game plan for getting through these challenging times. You just need to figure that out based on your needs and particular conditions. That’s one of the powerful choices we get to make.
Another is choosing where our time and attention go.
There is a real temptation to try to do everything by ourselves when the times are tough and there’s an always-growing list of things to get done. (“But it’s faster if I do it myself!”) Yet that would be a poor use of our energy, at a time when we need to focus it on our highest priorities.
On behalf of the GO-VA tribe, thank you to the organisers of the Asia CEO Awards and the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards. You inspire us. Not just to excel. To exceed!
