Tullman: Let me spell it out for you
Today’s workers often don’t care if their presentations are free
from spelling mistakes or improper grammar. But they shouldn’t assume
that meaning is more important than wording. It’s
not. Both are part of the vital process of building a corporate culture that
sets high standards and gets the details right.
By Howard Tullman
19-May-19 – Certain stories and events, triumphs and
disappointments, loves and losses stay with us for a lifetime. Because even as
the details disappear, their messages and morals never lose their instructive
impact and probative power.
And when we ourselves become educators or parents – just as the
GEICO commercials suggest – we find to our amazement and amusement that we’re
sedately mouthing old expressions and pithy pronouncements as if they were
written on sacred stone tablets. This is one critical part of the age-old
mystery of how our parents seemed so stupid when we were teens and became so
much wiser as we aged.
We all have our own instances of these life lessons and,
while they’re more powerful if we’ve lived through them ourselves, the fact is
that sometimes even just a word or two – said in praise, haste, or anger – from
a parent, coach, professor, or peer can be just as instructive and meaningful
and stick with us for decades thereafter.
Other valuable lessons can come as readily from observation and
education as from direct experience. People around us can be great behavioral
examples or horrible warnings of exactly what not to do. One
instance that I’ve never forgotten – and have explained to generations of
employees – seemed trivial and maybe a little picky at the time, but the
fundamental idea has stayed with me.
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My high school daughter brought home a paper that she proudly
noted was inscribed with an ‘A.’ She insisted that I read it immediately and
so I tried to do just that. But there was a word misspelled in the first
paragraph.
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I soldiered on but soon tripped over two more spelling errors. I
lost my train of thought and honestly much of my interest in continuing.
Ordinarily, we process meaning before details, but not when the
intake process and our concentration are interrupted. I was, sadly, left to my
own devices. Giving in to my worst lawyerly instincts, I grabbed a pen and
circled the mistakes. And then I tried to finish the essay. But the thrill was
gone, and I found myself wondering what kind of crappy teacher awards an ‘A’
for a paper full of spelling errors without even noting the mistakes?
My daughter wasn’t overly pleased with my persnickety approach and
told me that, according to her teacher, “it was the thought that counts.”
I suddenly felt obliged, on behalf of all of us who believe that
correct spelling and good grammar aren’t really editorial “choices,” to take
issue with her teacher’s approach, which actually sounded more like an excuse
for laziness on her part than any educational strategy or philosophy.
Proofreading – painstaking but important
Even the best writers – and I don’t claim to be one of them – and
editors – ditto – make mistakes. Maybe you’ll find some in this column. But the
point is we try to minimize them by proofreading. It’s one of those tasks
that’s painstaking but important. You must pay attention and, of course, it
helps to know how to spell. In the case of my daughter’s teacher, I wasn’t so
sure she did either.
Keep in mind that these were the pre-spellcheck days, although I’m
not sure that attempting to automate our shortcomings has really improved the
situation too terribly much. Letting the machine do the heavy lifting and
assume the blame for errors is just another excuse for our own lack of focus.
Tightly focused attention is what ultimately facilitates real learning. When
you concentrate on your work – regardless of how ordinary or repetitive the
tasks may be – you enrich the effort and your actions take on new forms. You
notice and attend to different things. Where the focus goes, energy flows.
The experience is very much like the first time that a beginning
runner learns to manage and control her breathing and incorporates that
behavior into her training. A new state of awareness is achieved and
performance, as well as endurance, immediately improves. It’s a Zen-like state
and all about the flow.
Massage and fondle the details
This awareness rarely happens by accident. It’s always a matter of
application. I wanted my daughter to love writing as much as I did, and good
writing is all about massaging and fondling the details – the individual words,
the pace, and pauses – and then melding the ultimate accumulation of all those
bits and pieces into a good story.
There’s a joy in the creative process and a satisfaction and pride
in the result that is almost indescribable. But the best art in any form is
always bound by constraints, and in writing, the precision and exactitude of
the language are crucial.
The premise of the teacher’s suggestion was that the substance of
the essay is more important than the form. Telling kids that the details don’t
matter is as unhelpful and counterproductive to their education as anything I
can imagine. Pretending that spelling and grammar are irrelevant in school and,
more important, in the real world is flat-out foolish if not fraudulent. And
it’s leading whole generations of kids down the wrong path.
This isn’t just a problem in high school. What’s scarier is that I
see the same inattention in our colleges and in the workplace. Blaming the
problems on technology such as autofill or autocorrect is no answer. And
claiming that you don’t have the time to do things carefully and well is the
worst excuse of all.
Apparently, most of the
world is just too busy to worry about whether the proper word is hear/here,
wear/where or their/there. We’re all consumed by busy-ness instead of taking
care of business.
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‘Good enough’ on a slippery, sloppy slope
Once you start to accept the idea that “almost right” is as good
as it’s going to get, you are on a very slippery and sloppy slope. And that
attitude is contagious. If “good enough” is the best you can expect from your
people and becomes the standard, then pretty much anything goes. People figure
there’s no reason to show up on time, pick up after themselves, do their
homework or the research necessary to know what they’re talking about,
carefully document their code and their transactions, or basically care that
much about anything in the business. That would be asking way too much.
And slowly, your company’s culture crumbles. Values don’t break
abruptly, they deteriorate unless you put a sharp stop to the process. And
creating these values starts with sweating the small stuff because that’s the
foundation of everything else that follows.
Do what must be done. When it must be done. As well as it can be
done. Do it that way every day. For tasks large and small – important and
seemingly insignificant as well.
You need to tell your people what’s expected of them in terms of
day-in and day-out execution and then stick to your guns and demand compliance.
Or you might as well pack it in. There’s never been a shortcut that was a good
long-term investment in building a business. And, you’ll find that sticking to
100 percent of your principles and values is easier than sticking to 99
percent, because when you make the first exceptions and compromises, the cracks
in the culture start to appear.
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Now, this is not a simple black-and-white process, and sometimes
the hardest thing to do is to reconcile your company’s conflicting goals and
objectives. We want our people to move quickly, to make decisions on the
front line, to exercise good judgment and initiative when necessary, and so
on and so forth.
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But we also expect them to be careful and thoughtful, to make
sound decisions based on data and not emotions or outside pressures, and to
always act first in the best interests of the customer.
The smartest thing that a confused newbie can do in a startup,
where things are moving a mile a minute, is to ask someone for the right
answer. The worst thing he or she can do is to guess – albeit guessing is
quicker, easier, and less embarrassing – and then when things blow up, to blame
the mistake on the desire to show initiative. Even if a particular guess turns
out okay for the moment, adhering to the protocols and making the proper
preparation is the right way to go in the long run.
Bottom line: everything starts with you. People pay far more
attention to what you do than to what you say. They’ll all take their own
behavioral cues from the ways you act and just how much attention you pay to
the little things in the business that actually – cumulatively – matter the
most.
Let me repeat: sweating the small stuff is worth the suffering.
Cultures and values are fragile things – especially in startups – and they
morph and are challenged daily. Life is easy when things are going well and
much more difficult when the time comes for the toughest decisions and the buck
stops with you.
If you don’t stick to your values in every instance when they’re
tested – large and small – they aren’t really values. They’re hobbies.
