Anticipate Incompetence

A long time ago, way back in 1991 when I was in the first grade, a motivational speaker came to the school. I remember him well because he told us to call him Dan, and when you're six you love to call grown ups by their first name. Anyway, at an assembly Dan told us to "Expect Excellence." I was totally into alliteration back then, so I latched on to this neat phrase. Then in the second grade, our principal came to our class and wrote this same phrase on the chalkboard.

"Huh," my little naive mind thought. "Maybe he knows Dan."

But of course "Expect Excellence" is one of those catch phrases popular with managers and educators everywhere. Because, apparently, you can't get excellence unless you expect it. This is why you never hear "Accept Mediocrity," even though it is just as catchy and probably more accurate in our lives. If everyone was excellent then we would all be mediocre.

But this won't stop people from expecting excellence. A Google search for "expect excellence" turns up over 90,000 results. But let's face it, if you are expecting excellence from coworkers there is a good chance you're unemployed or about to be. Excellence is the bright blue light that draws you in before reality zaps the crap out of you and leaves your dried carcass clinging to a metal cage. I'm not saying you are dumber than a moth if you expect excellence from the people you work with--just more gullible.

I prefer the contrapuntal theme, "Expect Incompetence." A Google search for this phrase yields slightly more than 500 entries. Most of them refer to the Bush administration. However, if you go around the office espousing this decidedly negative phrase, you'll be labeled as a loner, a demotivational antagonist who saps energy from the workplace. You'll be fired faster than your chipper "Expect Excellence" coworkers.

What's the workaround? Anticipate incompetence. Know exactly when your coworkers will screw you and beat them to it. You are still expecting incompetence, but now you are proactive about it.

For instance, I work at a base that has a Pass Office staffed mostly by people who decided to work for the government because they lacked the attention span to complete an application at Wendy's. They will only accept pass requests via fax. I had a contractor who called me on Friday saying he needed to get on base on Monday. Okay. I filled out all the necessary paperwork and faxed it (twice to the pass office). I printed out confirmation reports and called the pass office to verify they received the fax. I told the contractor to write down my cell phone number, get to the pass office early, and call me if anything went wrong (you see the anticipation). I brought all the paperwork home with me and left it in the car.

Sure enough, as soon as I was done with PT on Monday morning, the contractor called me and said the pass office didn't have any of the paperwork. I stopped by the pass office on the way into work, gave them the paperwork and the fax confirmation reports, and after establishing my identity twice (I was also in uniform) they gave the contractor a pass.

You may notice that my anticipation shielded the pass office from their own incompetence. This is an unwanted consequence; however, it is unavoidable. If incompetence is the black hole that sucks in everything it touches, then excellence is like an umbrella that protects the incompetent when the Feces o' Failure (yeah, I still like alliteration) hit the fan. You can rarely get away with pointing out the incompetent without seeming petty, but at least you can make the choice not to depend on them.

The goal is that eventually your customers/clients will be so impressed by your work that they fill out a comment card or send an email to your boss that praises you while viciously attacking everyone else. The Mother of All Praise would be something like this: "I was so frustrated by the ineptitude of (your organization) that if it wasn't for (your name)'s help I would have set fire to the building."

This post has gone on long enough. The moral to this post, folks, is that the incompetent expect excellence from coworkers to succeed, and those who succeed anticipate incompetence from coworkers.