How Can Employees at All Levels Show They Are Being the Best Possible?

A discussion article. Part of The Thinking Upgrade.

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The success of an organisation depends heavily on the contribution of its people. From those joining their first team to those leading the entire organisation, every employee influences what becomes possible through the quality of their thinking, conversations, decisions and actions.

Yet how many people could confidently explain what being the best possible actually means in their role? And how many could show, with meaningful evidence and honest feedback, how closely their everyday contribution matches that ambition?

Working hard, being experienced and completing a long list of tasks all matter. But they leave important questions unanswered. Are those the right tasks? Are they being done well? Are they helping others succeed? Are they creating benefits worth the time, money, energy and resources they consume?

What if every employee could explain the value they are trying to create, how they are working to create it, how they affect others, and what they are learning to do better?

Being the best possible needs a humane and practical definition. People have different capabilities, disabilities, health conditions, responsibilities and circumstances. Nobody has unlimited time, energy or knowledge. An expectation of constant exceptional performance would be neither realistic nor fair.

A more useful ambition is to make the best contribution reasonably possible within those realities, while developing the capabilities and conditions that could make a better contribution possible tomorrow. It includes knowing when to seek help, challenge an unreasonable demand, admit uncertainty or protect the capacity to work well over time.

Employees are whole people with whole lives. Their worth is greater than their output. An organisation that understands this can still set clear standards, expect responsibility and address poor performance. Humanity and accountability belong together.

The starting point is purpose. What is my role here to achieve? Who benefits from my work? What does a good outcome look like for them? How does that contribute to the organisation’s success, wellbeing and positive impact?

A job description alone is unlikely to answer all these questions. Each role contains different responsibilities, relationships, tasks and activities. Someone might be an excellent technical specialist while struggling to explain their work, support colleagues or recognise the consequences of their decisions. A manager might achieve a target while leaving their team exhausted and other departments dealing with preventable problems.

We therefore need a richer conversation about contribution: what we achieve, how we achieve it, what it costs, and what it enables or prevents elsewhere.

That conversation should begin with thinking. Before responding to a problem, do I take time to understand it? Can I distinguish what I know from what I assume? Do I seek different perspectives, question my first interpretation and recognise the limits of my expertise? Do I consider the wider system and longer term consequences, as well as the immediate task?

Being a good thinker also means choosing an appropriate depth of thinking. A routine, reversible decision rarely needs the same investigation as a decision affecting people’s safety or the organisation’s future. Overcomplicating a simple task can waste resources just as rushing a consequential decision can create harm.

Conversations make much of our thinking visible. Do I listen to understand? Ask useful questions? Explain clearly? Make it easier for others to contribute? Can colleagues disagree with me without being dismissed or embarrassed? Do I check that we have reached a shared understanding before we leave the room?

Every employee can consider whether they help create an atmosphere in which people can think well together. A dismissive remark, an unexplained instruction or a meeting dominated by one voice can hinder work far beyond the conversation itself. Equally, a thoughtful question or a respectful challenge can prevent a costly mistake.

Decisions provide another test. Can I explain the outcome I am seeking, the options I considered and the reasons for my choice? Have I involved those with relevant knowledge and those who will live with the consequences? Is it clear who has authority to decide? What would make us reconsider?

Actions then test whether intentions translate into a useful contribution. Do I deliver what I agreed? Check the quality? Communicate emerging difficulties early? Adapt when circumstances change? Take responsibility for putting things right? Do I examine whether the action actually helped?

A good outcome does not automatically prove good judgement, and a disappointing outcome does not automatically prove poor judgement. Luck, uncertainty and other people’s actions matter. We need to examine both the quality of the approach and its results.

This becomes particularly important when we look at how employees affect one another.

Work moves upstream, downstream and across stream. Upstream are the people whose information, decisions, materials or services we depend on. Downstream are those who depend on what we produce. Across stream are colleagues and teams working alongside us, often sharing customers, systems, expertise or resources.

An employee may receive a vague request, spend hours interpreting it, pass on an incomplete answer and leave someone else to correct the gaps. Each person can appear busy. Each team can claim to have completed its part. Yet the organisation absorbs avoidable delays, frustration and rework.

Consider a salesperson who agrees an unusual customer requirement without consulting the delivery team. The sale might look successful, but colleagues may inherit an unrealistic deadline, unplanned costs and a promise they cannot reliably fulfil. Equally, a delivery team that never explains its constraints may make it unnecessarily difficult for sales colleagues to serve customers well. Improvement requires both sides to understand and change their contribution.

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What if colleagues regularly asked one another: What do you need from me to do your work well? What do I provide that helps? What do I do that creates unnecessary work? What do I need from you? What could we change together?

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Those conversations can produce explicit agreements about the information required, expected quality, timing, ownership, decision rights and how exceptions will be handled. They should also establish when work is genuinely complete from the recipient’s perspective.

The aim is to improve the whole journey. Saving ten minutes in one team has little value if it creates two hours of avoidable work in another. Employees should be recognised for making others more effective, including contributions that are less visible than an individual target.

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We can bring this same curiosity to every significant or recurring task.

Before asking how to do it better, ask why it needs to be done. What purpose does it serve? Who uses the result? What decision, service or outcome does it support? What would happen if we stopped, simplified it or did it less frequently? Does it fulfil a genuine obligation, or have we mistaken an inherited convention for a requirement?

A report may be beautifully produced yet rarely used. A meeting may continue because it has always occupied the diary. An approval may duplicate another check. Automating such work could make unnecessary activity happen faster while leaving its purpose unexamined.

Necessary safeguards also deserve thoughtful review, but employees need to understand their purpose and obtain the appropriate agreement before changing them. Something that appears inconvenient locally may protect people or prevent problems elsewhere.

Once a task’s purpose is clear, we can ask what ‘best’ could look like. Which aspects matter: accuracy, usefulness, accessibility, reliability, speed, cost, safety, environmental impact or the experience of the people involved? Where are the trade-offs? What standard is sufficient for this purpose, and where would extra effort add real value?

Employees should not have to discover this alone. They can learn from colleagues with demonstrated expertise, recipients of the work, relevant professional guidance, training, examples from other organisations and small, carefully evaluated experiments. Looking outside one’s own team or industry can help reveal assumptions that have become invisible through familiarity.

AI Partners could help generate alternatives, identify questions, compare approaches and support reflection. Their suggestions still need checking against reliable information and the realities of the task. A confident answer is not evidence that an approach is appropriate.

‘Best’ should remain open to revision. A method suited to yesterday’s technology, customer needs or operating conditions may no longer be suitable. Equally, something new is not automatically better. The question is what evidence justifies continuing or changing the approach.

What if important recurring tasks had a simple, living record of their purpose, intended recipients, quality criteria, current method, owner and last review? For a straightforward task, this might take only a few lines. More consequential work would need greater care. The record should make the work easier to understand and improve, with the effort of maintaining it proportionate to its value.

This would give employees something concrete to examine when asking whether they are following outdated practices, habits and routines. When did we last question this? What has changed since then? Which recurring errors, workarounds or complaints suggest the process needs attention? Who knows a better way?

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Showing that we are being the best possible should also be proportionate.

‍We do not need to document every thought or turn every interaction into a performance assessment. We need enough evidence to support an honest conversation.

An employee could bring a few examples: a task they improved, a decision and its reasoning, a commitment they delivered, feedback from someone who depends on their work, a mistake they addressed, and a capability they are developing. Useful measures might include quality, reliability, avoidable rework, recipient experience and the time or resources saved across the whole process.

Self-assessment should sit alongside the experiences of others. “I think I communicate clearly” becomes more meaningful when colleagues can say whether they receive what they need, understand the message and feel able to ask questions. Feedback should be specific and open to discussion; popularity and confidence are imperfect measures of contribution.

A regular conversation could then ask: Where am I contributing well? Where am I unintentionally hindering others? What could I improve? What support or decisions do I need? What will I try next, and how will we know whether it helped?

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However, none of this works well if people do not care, or feel that caring makes little difference.

Care cannot simply be demanded. Employees need to understand why their contribution matters and experience an organisation that takes their contribution seriously. That includes fair treatment, appropriate reward, useful development, manageable expectations and a meaningful voice in how work is done.

Willingness can grow when people see the human consequences of their work: the customer whose problem is solved, the colleague spared unnecessary frustration, the community better served. It can also grow through pride in developing a craft, belonging to a supportive team and having enough autonomy to improve the work they know best.

Leaders should ask what happens when someone cares enough to challenge an ineffective practice. Are they listened to? Given time to investigate? Helped to test an improvement? Or dismissed as difficult and told to get back to work?

What happens when improvement saves time? Is some of that capacity used to improve quality, learning and wellbeing, or does it simply trigger another increase in demands? What behaviour does the organisation actually reward: preventing problems and helping others, or looking heroic when preventable problems become crises?

A person who appears unwilling may be unclear about expectations, short of skills, overwhelmed, discouraged or operating within conflicting priorities. Understanding the cause makes a better response possible. Where someone has clarity, support and reasonable expectations but repeatedly avoids their responsibilities, an honest accountability conversation is also necessary.

Being the best possible must be a reciprocal commitment between employees and the organisation.

Employees take responsibility for their contribution. Leaders take responsibility for the purpose, systems, resources, incentives and working conditions that shape it.

The most senior people should make their own contribution open to the same examination. How well do their decisions help others think and work? Which demands create unnecessary activity? Where do they delay progress, discourage challenge or reward the wrong things? What are they personally changing?

Imagine an organisation where people at every level could say: “I understand the value I am here to create. I know who depends on me and who I depend on. I can explain my approach, show evidence of its impact and listen to where I am falling short. I question practices that no longer serve us. I help others succeed, and I keep developing what I can contribute.”

That would give ‘being the best possible’ practical meaning in everyday working life.

So, how confidently could each of us make that statement today? And what would we need to change, individually and together, to make it more true tomorrow?

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Thanks for reading.

Best,

Rob

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Developed by Rob Frost from his thinking and ideas, with drafting and refinement support from his AI Partner.

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