Excellence is Counter-Cultural
In church ministry and in small business the way to stand out and make a unique impression is to do everything you do with excellence. As I have been looking around lately I have concluded that the pursuit of excellence is counter cultural. To strive for excellence may be the goal of some but if you look at our culture in North America, striving for excellence is no longer the norm.
Overloaded Workplace
In business, employers seek to get as much work as possible out of employees. Personnel is stripped down to bare bones and staff end up doing the workload of two or three. The company wants to run lean on costs but high on production. Does this empower a culture of excellence? Of course not! How can any person strive for excellence on any task when they are completely spread thin and overloaded with work?
Get-By Education
If you look at the culture in education, whether secondary or post secondary, the culture is to strive to get through by doing the least amount of work possible. It is more about play, fun, and enjoyment than striving for excellence.
Mediocre Ministry
Churches use excuses like not having enough money to do things with excellence. The pervasive culture often is that if you are doing the best you can it will be good enough for God. Ministries choose to accept mediocrity…to take a viewpoint that God will bless and make anything He wants prosper. That however is not a representation of God at all. Look around you – look at all He created…is any of it mediocre? Absolutely not!
Strive for Excellence
I want to encourage you towards the pursuit of excellence in all you do. This will motivate you, excite you, and give you a real sense of accomplishment - that you have done the very best you could with your gifts, talents, skills, and resources. Striving for excellence does not mean striving for perfection. It simply is you, me, and our teams giving our very best to accomplish great things for our organizations and for our customers. When we do this, we will stand out in the culture around us and the experience for all we interact with will be second to none.
What do you think about our culture of excellence. What has been your experience in business or in ministry?
Picture from Flickr: untitledprojects’
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