Getting Better is Hard – Staying Better is Really, Really Hard

I just came back from the grocery store.  You know, the place where when you stand in line, you see all the magazines and tabloids about people and their struggles/scandals/successes.  On the cover of one was a picture of a celebrity with a weight battle.  A big weight battle. No, I won’t name the celebrity.  But I thought of a picture I saw recently of Jared (the Subway spokesman/success story) that definitely made it appear that he has put on a few of those pounds he lost.  And I thought of the new “drive-thru diet” campaign with Christine  trumpeting the health benefits of Taco Bell (at the same time that Taco Bell is advertising their new 86 layers of cheese (ok – maybe just three or four layers) burrito).

Here’s the lesson.  Getting better is tough.  Staying better is really, really tough.

This is the essence pf the soft skills challenge.  It is relatively easy to learn a hard skill.  You can learn to use a spreadsheet; to read a spreadsheet; to produce a set of PowerPoint presentation slides.  But learning how to treat an employee, to treat a player (ask Mike Leach) is a little tougher.  And once you learn, to stay “better’ requires perpetual diligence.

Many of the business books are about getting better – better at leadership, better at employee engagement, better at customer service.  We all seem to know that it would be good to get better in such ways.  But it takes as much effort to stay better as it does to get better.

It never ends!