Second Rate Excellence: Why Smart Leaders Prefer to Be Excellent Than First

Let's start with an easy name recognition exercise. What do these five internationally known athletes have in common?

Ivan Basso
Andreas Klöden
Jan Ullrich
Joseba Beloki
Alex Zülle

At some time, all came in second to Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France. None of these men are 'first place' cyclists. But are they 'excellent'?

In this article, I claim that there is a critical distinction between 'first place' and 'excellence.' To be effective, any leader (or manager) must recognize the difference in her team. Further, I show that failing to make this distinction actually frustrates the success of an organization. Finally, I suggest that there is such a thing as second-rate excellence and that this quality is essential to gaining 'first place' status.

It is usually reasonable to include 'first place' with 'excellence.' That's what 'first place' means. In a fair competition, the first place person by definition is also the excellent person.

But from this reasonable, generally true identity assertion we can all too easily fall into a terrible conceptual error. The error isn't that we judge the first place people to be excellent but that we fail to acknowledge the excellence of the second and third and thirtieth place people. Even worse, poor leaders all too often go even further and judge that second or third place people don't exemplify excellence at all.

None of the athletes in our name recognition exercise bested Lance Armstrong. All of them, however, are excellent cyclists and athletes. There is a correct inclusion assertion between 'first place' and 'excellence' but there is no reliable exclusion assertion between the two terms. We can restate this relationship with a clumsy but logically precise and accurate statement: All 'first place' people are 'excellent' people but not all 'excellent' people are 'first place people.'

So there are two critical errors at work here, an error of omission and one of commission. The error of omission is that a poor leader fails to recognize excellence when she should. The error of commission occurs when she overtly rejects the possibility of excellence absent a 'first place' grading.

If we make a clear distinction between the fundamentally different terms 'first place' and 'excellence,' then we can eliminate both errors and accept, correctly, that there is such a thing as 'second-rate excellence.' At this point, the strong leader can begin to use the excellence she has available to her to gain a 'first place' status. And if she does not have sufficient quanta of excellence, then she can focus her leadership efforts toward the goal of gaining excellence rather than getting into first place.

Although I refer to second-place athletes and second-rate excellence, the commentary that follows applies equally to second-place or thirtieth place. The job at hand is to find the distinction between 'first place' and 'excellence.'

There are two typical responses that bad leaders exhibit when they focus on 'not-first-place' performance. The first is the "Hyperactive Response." The second is "Willful Blindness."

You've heard it before: "The crowd goes wild!" Emphasis on 'wild.' You've sung, "We Are the Champions of the World" before, haven't you? The problem with the Hyperactive Response is that we end up losing the very thing we've won. In our frenzy over first-place, the winners and by extension their supporters and leaders, become greater than the excellence of the accomplishment itself. But if we lose the excellence, if we hyper-celebrate the event instead of the quality of the people who created the event, then we abandon the formative experiences that led to the first-place victory from the outset.

The Hyperactive Response makes the trophy more important than the excellence necessary to win it. The sales goal we win takes on an importance far greater than the human excellence that was prerequisite to reaching the sales goal. The trophy that symbolizes success becomes greater than the excellence it took to attain it. This is dangerous to organizations because it causes leaders and employees to focus on the symbol rather than the substance of success.

There's good evidence for this 'losing of the event' phenomenon from sports. We've all heard interviews with the first-place people. They say things like "it's been a really tough haul" and "we had to overcome a lot of adversity to get here today."

As spectators, we roll our eyes and moan about empty sports clichés. But wait just a minute. Aren't overcoming adversity through hard work and discipline, showing tenacity during tough times, and persevering especially through dark spells exactly the behaviors and attitudes of excellence that lead us regardless of what place we finish in?

Hard work, discipline, tenacity and perseverance are hardly trite qualities. But the Hyperactive Response certainly causes them to look pale in comparison to the rabid drooling over a first-place finish--unless we reorient ourselves from a 'first-place' cheer to a focus on 'excellence.'

Larry Csonka said, "Toughness is doing the things you hate to do and doing them with the same enthusiasm you have for the things you like doing." He's not talking about putting on a Super Bowl ring or celebrating coloring in the last bit of red on your corporate thermometer.

He's talking about doing sit ups, running wind sprints, taping your ankles, all the day-to-day activities that parallel the grunt work we all do in our jobs and our lives, the things we don't really like doing, but the very things that make us excellent, if we do them excellently.

William Rieth, the world-renowned fencing master, says it this way: "Practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes improvement." By 'perfect' he means 'excellent.' Take a moment to think about all the things that you hate to do, but you do them well and enthusiastically because that's what it takes to be excellent. They are exactly the things you do, and do excellently, long before you fall into first-place.

When we roll our eyes at sports clichés as a result of our devotion to the Hyperactive Response, we're effectively eliminating the value of the things that made the first-place finish matter at all.

In business and other professional settings, we often list the dozen richest men and women in the world and pretty much dissociate them entirely from just what it is they do that makes them rich? In many of these cases, the world's richest people don't work for money; they don't need any more money. They don't work to be rated number one by Forbes or USA Today. They work to be excellent without regard for their ranking. And with rare exception they worked to be excellent for long decades before they became the first-place person in their field.

The Hyperactive Response simply removes us from the very attribute we're celebrating by supplanting 'excellence' with 'first-place' as the valuable human quality.

The second common response to the second-place person is "Willful Blindness." The Hyperactive Response can be forgiven, at least for a short while, because there's nothing wrong with celebrating success. But the Willful Blindness response is far worse because it is pre-meditated and deliberate. In the Willful Blindness response the poor leader simply pretends that anyone who finishes second (or third or thirtieth) no longer exists whatsoever. If you don't think that second-place people cease to exist, look back over the names on that name recognition game that began this article. Willful Blindness means we won't even think about whether the second-place person is excellent. She ceased to exist upon failing first-place and no one can think about nothing.

Willful Blindness makes it impossible for a good leader to ask, "Is there such a thing as second-rate excellence?" because we decline to even acknowledge everyone except the first-place winner. This creates the same kind of dissociation from reality that the Hyperactive Response does; in this case, it manifests as a self-inflicted wound. If we deny the existence of the second-place finishers, we abandon the relevance of the first place position at all.

Let us consider the leader, exhibiting Willful Blindness, at the moment she finds out her team has earned second-place. She cannot reward her team for the excellence that earned them their position (a position that is, after all, better than third or thirtieth). In her mind, only the first-place people have value, so neither she nor her own team can have value. It is absolutely impossible for someone to deny their own existence, so the Willfully Blind leader must reject her own team-and it's successes-in order to preserve her own position.

So we might summarize the Hyperactive and Willful Blindness responses as the All and Nothing At All measurements of success, carefully bearing in mind that neither measures excellence. We can forgive, temporarily, the 'All.' However the 'Nothing At All' response is doubly vicious in an organization. It first diminishes the very value of the winner herself. 'Whom did I defeat?' we must ask ourselves. Secondly, it denies everything to the non-first-place people, regardless of their demonstrated excellence. 'Oh, those bums,' we say. 'Those nobodies. All that matters is that I won.' Ultimately, we're left with nothing more than a substance-empty celebration, an unfounded exuberance, and a kind of self-induced anxiety disorder.

The fundamental error to both responses is that we fail to see the excellence of the second-place people, so we haven't anything to hang the excellence of the first place person on. First-place successes in the hands of poor leaders are at risk of meaninglessness. And that means we have to strip these attitudes out of our interpersonal practices.

There's one more, rather selfish but completely justifiable, reason to abandon these two bad responses. Take a moment to think about your own successes. How many times have you been in first-place compared to the times you've been in some place other than first? If you're like most people, including me, you don't find yourself in first-place very often at all. If you're one of those rare souls who always finish first, then you're either a saint or you are taking on very significant challenges.

Moreover, it's simply false that we all can be in first-place. Certainly we can't all be in first-place at the same time and it's pretty common that we rarely ever find ourselves in first. None of these facts have anything to do with our efforts toward excellence.

As leaders, we need to remember that first-place is a measurement of excellence, one among many. And we need to worry less about measuring excellence in one first-place person and a lot more about encouraging it in all our coworkers.

There are three steps a good leader will take. First, refocus yourself away from 'place' and unwaveringly onto 'excellence.' Second, create the conditions for excellence for your coworkers. Finally, accept excellence as leading quality and 'first-place' as only one measurement of that quality.

When we recenter ourselves onto building a state of excellence in our work and our relationships, we succeed. Excellence is a pervasive quality; people who focus themselves on excellence improve all the areas of their lives, not merely their professional lives. 'First place' is a limiting quality; people who focus themselves on place are either constantly on a self-defined losing spiral (when they are not first) or on a self-induced throne of paranoia waiting to be knocked down (when they are first).

On the other hand, the leader who vigilantly identifies the excellence in the work of others is equally adept at finding it in herself. Your ability to see that a coworker efficiently uses company resources is the same alert recognition that you efficiently use your personal resources. A good leader establishes the conditions for improvement of her own performance as well as that of her coworkers and teammates. Creating an excellence environment immediately creates an unconstrained environment, one that supports the entrepreneurial spirit, a sense of job ownership among employees and an 'everyone wins' work atmosphere that vitalizes the entire organization.

First place is a ceiling. Excellence has no ceiling. First place offers us nowhere to go but down. Excellence offers us constant and ever-expanding growth opportunities.

First place requires losers. Excellence requires winners. First place requires that we become bitter. Excellent requires that we become better.

First place is a dead end; there's no more 'firster' than first. Excellence is an endless horizon of opportunity because it is largely internally motivated and validated.

So the next time you look for a blue ribbon moment in one of your team members, take the time instead to look for the excellence in all of them. Be the excellence environment leader instead.

And don't forget to find excellence in yourself while you're at it. You'll need it in buckets long before you ever get to first-because it is only excellence that 'firs-place' measures.