By Caroline M. Cole

A beautifully plated appetizer, justifying a chef’s reputation or a restaurant’s multi-star rating. An elegantly designed smart phone or tablet that prompts consumers to wait in line for hours or even days. An impeccably executed pas de deux in which dancers—intricately and seamlessly intertwined—mesmerize observers. An aria that brings audience members to tears, or a masterpiece that attracts crowds from around the world. A car with both aesthetic appeal and mechanical precision, prompting envy from others on the road. Each product or performance is not perfect, as evident in the myriad reviews, critiques, and testimonies that will inevitably follow each use of or experience with any of them. Nevertheless, each is an example of excellence, offering lessons for our own approach to communication.

Whereas perfection is the constant if not compulsive pursuit of the unobtainable, excellence focuses on the highest quality outcome in light of the context and its available resources. As such, unlike perfection that is rigid and unforgiving toward any deviation of predefined expectations, excellence is malleable, adaptive, and progressive. It is a sustained, purposeful effort to constantly move beyond the ordinary. It is areté in practice. And those who rise to the top of their respective fields understand this difference.

Take Charlie Trotter, who passed away on November 5, 2013, at the age of 54. In 1987, Trotter opened a restaurant bearing his name in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, forever changing the culinary landscape. As Marc Caro summarized in a 2012 Chicago Tribune article the month Trotter closed his restaurant, Trotter can be credited with many of the things we now take for granted in our concepts of fine dining: sourcing high-quality, fresh ingredients from local venues; offering tasting menus; promoting lighter, healthier broths over the traditionally heavy French sauces; incorporating variations of textures, flavors, and food groups on a single plate; and elevating wine and food pairing to unmatched levels by sometimes adjusting dishes to better match the wine. Along the way, Trotter trained and mentored a virtual Who’s Who in the industry—including Grant Achatz (Alinea, Next), Homaro Canu (Moto), Graham Elliot (Graham Elliot), Michelle Gayer (Salty Tart), Matthias Merges (A10, Yusho), Larry Stone (Quintessa Winery), Nori Sugie (Asiate, Nombe)—and raised the bar for countless others.

In various articles about Trotter since his passing, many of the individuals who worked for or with him over the years talk about their experiences with Trotter, and the adjectives that emerge from these discussions run the gamut. While some describe Trotter as creative, inspiring, intense, masterful, and innovative, others have called him tumultuous, manic, apoplectic, merciless, and crushing. Yet regardless of the experiences these individuals may have had with Trotter professionally or personally, everyone agrees that he was unyielding in his pursuit of excellence.

Some might argue that Trotter’s hard-to-please nature seems more like perfectionist tendencies, but his willingness to tweak, change, or do away with things all together actually suggests he pursued excellence, rather than perfection. As Caro writes, “to Trotter, excellence is something more fluid and ever-changing than perfection. Dishes, no matter how awesome, should not become menu fixtures; they should never be repeated from day to day. Variations per plate are okay, desirable even, as long as certain standards are maintained. With Trotter, that standard just happens to be astronomically high.” And the results made Charlie Trotter’s a destination for foodies around the globe for a quarter century.

Steve Jobs, another visionary with a micro-precise eye for detail, also pursued excellence in all he produced. Ousted in 1985 from the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniack, he returned to Apple in 1996 and helped revamp the company by focusing on a handful of products that taught the world to “Think Different.” In doing so, Jobs helped Apple become one of the most recognized brands and most profitable companies in the world.

In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes in that “some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture; others do so by mastering the details. Jobs did both relentlessly,” so it is little wonder that, like Trotter, Jobs was described with a spectrum of adjectives. Frequently called inventive, magical, visionary, brilliant, genius, and pioneering, Jobs has likewise been referred to as aggressive, demanding, stubborn, tyrannical, controlling, belittling, and ruthless. And yet no one questions the excellence Jobs pursued. As Jobs himself said, “be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected,” and these expectations set standards that continue to drive product development in the technology sector and beyond.

George Balanchine, one of the foremost choreographers in contemporary ballet, offers another model of excellence. Born in St. Petersburg, Balanchine danced for the Imperial Russian Ballet (more commonly known as the Kirov Ballet) and served as a choreographer for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe before moving to America. Dissatisfied with the quality of dancers in the States, Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet, which trained students in the techniques and style of classical ballet as preparation for joining the company he founded, the Ballet Society, which ultimately became the New York City Ballet.

Over the years, Balanchine is credited with having created over 400 works, but he is, perhaps, best known for bringing an exceptional standard of quality and excellence to American ballet. A champion of evolution and innovation, Balanchine adapted basic moves from the Russian ballet’s repertoire in ways that emphasized speed, balance, control, sharpness, precision, and fluidity—characteristics embodied in the dancers he launched into stardom, including Maria Tallchief, Diana Adams, Allegra Kent, Suzanne Farrell, and Gelsey Kirkland.

Wanting to know how Balanchine was able to instill such excellence in his dancers, a 2012 panel of current and former New York City Ballet students discussed what made Balanchine so special. Panel members report that Balanchine had high expectations and pushed them hard, but he also encouraged them to find their own answers and style by working out things for themselves in the studio. It was the love and admiration they had for Balanchine as a master of his craft, panel members said, that helped “inspire their incredible devotion to excellence.”

The world of communication also offers touchstones of excellence, and while it might be easy to suggest that these models are exclusive to published authors, professional speechwriters, social media gurus, and other language experts, all of us can strive for excellence in our communication. Below are strategies for doing so.

• Master the basics. To excel, we must start with the underlying structures of the activity or task we aim to master. In the culinary arts, the basics might include knife skills, food preparation, and cooking techniques. In dance, the basics may entail particular steps and movements. For sports, it may involve an awareness of the various players and their positions, the equipment, the field of play, and rules of the games. Like these and other activities, communication is most effective when people understand the basics.

Phonology (sound system), vocabulary, and grammar are the basic building blocks of most languages, but learning the underlying structures of a language involves more than simply memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules. As explained in “To Understand Why Everyone Should ‘Do Grammar,’ Look to Ancient Greece,” we should work to understand the various constructions, forms, and uses of words so we can create and select combinations that are most effective for the purpose, audience, and context of our message. Moreover, we should be attentive to any additional elements that might signal our credibility or “right” to contribute to a given conversation—including but not limited to an awareness of and proficiency in the genres, styles, conventions, and registers valued by those with whom we aim to connect.

By developing a proficiency in the basic structures of communication—however they may be defined by the forums and fields we aim to enter—we establish a foundation for excellence in our own messages.

• Understand when, how, and why deviations may be possible. Learning the prescriptive uses of a language is the starting point for expert performance, and yet excellence requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach to any given endeavor; we must be able to adjust our practice when necessary to accommodate situational factors.

Consider, for example, a master chef who is able to improvise a meal in light of the ingredients that are on hand. Or think of golfers who learn to adjust their stroke according to the course, weather conditions, and even other players. In the same ways, we must learn where and how to purposefully alter our approach to communication in order to reach our audience in the most effective, efficient manner.

We might, for example, modify the structure, or alter the focus, or change the framing, or adopt a different register. The key, however, is that alterations and deviations must be deliberate. After all, audiences will tend to respond more favorably to those who are knowingly and strategically violating communication conventions than they will to writers and speakers who seem oblivious to these conventions’ existence.

By learning to adapt our communication styles and approaches to different circumstances, we can increase the likelihood that our messages will be heard and received by the people we aim to reach, regardless of the situation.

• Practice deliberately. Writing and speaking in various contexts can help us become more comfortable with and competent in communicating, but it is not enough to aimlessly engage in communication acts if we want to excel. Improvement requires deliberate, systematic practice.

In his research on expertise, psychologist and scholar K. Anders Ericsson argues that “experts and aspiring experts rely on deliberate practice to counteract complete automatization and to promote the development and refinement of representations.” In other words, we must do more than go through the motions or simply participate in an activity, even for extended periods of time; we must systematically develop particular elements of our craft if we are to strengthen our overall performance.

By identifying specific places our communication can be stronger and by purposefully devoting time to work on each area, we develop a greater awareness of and expertise in the communicative strategies that can help us achieve our goals.

• Continue to raise the bar. The measure of effective communication is whether we achieve the goals we intend, yet even when we succeed in our efforts, we should consider how our communication could have been more effective, more efficient, and more audience-appropriate. In doing so, we move beyond the notion that something is, or will remain “good enough.”

We may never achieve perfection in our communication, but by conscientiously examining where and how we could be even more effective, we push ourselves toward better choices and practices in our later interactions.

* * *

Excellence is never whimsical or haphazard. Rather, it is a purposeful, sustained practice that allows us maintain above-average standards even as we continue to identify ways to improve our efforts. We may not aspire to be professional writers or speakers, but we can be more conscientious in making sure all of our messages represent our ideas, and of ourselves in the best possible way. In doing so, we push ourselves to reach beyond the commonplace, and in this pursuit of excellence, we discover more ways to demonstrate our mastery.

Working toward Areté…
What are your strategies for pursing excellence in communication? Share your ideas in the space below.