In this Day 27 monologue of the 30/30 Career Transformation Challenge, Margaret Spence, founder of the Employee to CEO Project and the 10X Leadership Academy for Women, challenges women leaders to rethink their definition of excellence. She explains that many women equate excellence with perfectionism, using it as a barrier to promotion, whereas men often pursue advancement without waiting for perfection. Spence distinguishes between competence (being able to do the job), mastery (performing effortlessly), and an over‑inflated notion of excellence that becomes an albatross. She urges viewers to lower the excellence bar, focus on competence and mastery, and assess whether their pursuit of perfection is stalling their career progress. The talk concludes with a call to share the video, access the full 30/30 series, and use the accompanying workbook.
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Day 27 of the 30/30 Career Transformation Challenge. We are almost at the end. Hi, my name is Margaret Spence, and I'm the founder of the Employee to CEO Project and the 10X Leadership Academy for Women. Thank you for joining me on this 30-day journey to empowering you to retool and reconnect with your career. Career. Today's bold question: What is your definition of excellence? What is your definition of career excellence? The reason I'm asking you the question around excellence is that that could be the stopping point or the pivotal point that stops us dead in our tracks. Excellence can be defined as, "I want to be good at what I'm doing." Excellence could be defined as, "I'm a perfectionist and I want everything to be perfect before I make a move." Excellence could be defined as, "I will not pursue anything else until, until I think I'm good enough in the current role and with the current duties that I have right now." Here's the challenge with excellence: men don't wait to be excellent to pursue a promotion. The only people who pursue excellence to the point of their own detriment are women. We often feel that we must check every single box, even the minute invisible boxes, We want to check them off before we make a move towards a promotion or towards career advancement. Being excellent can be your detriment to moving ahead. You have to understand that there is a competency level, there is a mastery level, but there's not an excellence level that's such a high bar that it prevents you from accepting that you're good enough to move on from the role you're in. Excellence can be an albatross, a weight that keeps you stuck because you want perfection and excellence. And if you don't get perfection and excellence, you don't feel that you're good enough or ready enough to move forward. I'm asking you to lower the excellence bar and increase the competency bar. I'm competent to do this job. I've excelled at the role, but I don't need to use excellence as the definition for whether I'm ready to move forward with my career. Excellence is not a defining bar. The defining bar is competence, and the defining bar is mastery. Mastery means that you could do the skills with your eyes closed. Excellence is your own gremlins in the back of your head telling you that you're not good enough. Excellence is about you. It's that ingrained thing that was taught to us when we were children. The second we entered school, We were told that there's poor, there's good, and there's excellent. And some of us latched on to excellent and we've never let it go, while others recognize that when they're good and when they've mastered the skill, it's time to move on. So I'm asking you to evaluate where excellence is stopping you from moving forward in your career? Are you too excellent to excel? Is a key question. So how are you defining career excellence is today's question, and is excellence stopping you from moving forward when you have already mastered the skills necessary and you've already checked off the box to be qualified for the advanced role. Thank you for joining me on the 30/30 Challenge. I appreciate your being here. If you enjoy the video, please share it so that other people can be empowered by the video. I've also included a link to the YouTube channel that has all the entire series of the 30/30 Challenge. As well as a link to the workbook in this post. Thank you for joining me. We're almost at the end.
