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Setting and Maintaining High Standards
Your team's values slide says you hold each other accountable. Last month the same person missed the same weekly deadline for the third time, and nobody said a word, including you. Their work is good when it arrives, and everyone likes them. Everyone on the team also noticed, and each of them now has a slightly different idea of what the deadline really means.
Figure 1. Setting and Maintaining High Standards
What it is
Setting and Maintaining High Standards is a two-by-two for looking at a team. One axis is the standard of results, meaning what the team delivers. The other is the standard of behavior, meaning how people treat each other while they deliver it. The four combinations give four quadrants, High Performing Team, Potentially Toxic Team, Low Performing Nice Team and Country Club.
Most leaders manage the results bar and assume the behavior bar will look after itself. The model asks you to keep both high, and it places a team by what its leader tolerates rather than by what the leader has announced. Setting the two standards is the easier part, so most of the work is in what you do when someone falls short of one.
How it works
High Performing Team
Are we delivering what we promised, and treating each other the way we agreed while we do it?
This is the quadrant the model treats as the goal, because each bar supports the other. Strong results give people confidence, and good behavior builds the trust that keeps the results coming. A team here still needs you to act on small slips, because both bars drift down when a leader stops paying attention.
Potentially Toxic Team
Who on this team delivers the numbers while treating people in a way we would stop anyone else from doing?
This is the hardest quadrant to act on, because the results give you a reason to look away. The cost tends to show up somewhere else, as conflict, burnout and the quiet departure of good people. Name the behavior, the standard it breaks and what has to change, and handle the person the way you would handle anyone else who broke it. Everyone on the team is watching what you do next.
Low Performing Nice Team
Are people pleasant and supportive with each other while the work keeps arriving late or short?
Kindness without a results bar turns into comfort, and these teams are often well liked while the rest of the organization quietly carries them. Make each result concrete enough to check, with a date, the quality needed and an owner. Then raise a miss when it happens, and keep the relationship intact while you do it.
Country Club
Has anyone ever said what this team is expected to deliver or how its people should work together?
A team in this quadrant usually has standards that were never set, more often than standards that slipped. Start by writing both lists with the team, results first and behaviors second. Make each standard specific enough that a new hire could tell whether the team met it this week.
When to reach for it
Your strongest performer treats colleagues in a way you would not accept from anyone else
A team everyone likes keeps missing its commitments, and nobody wants to be the one to say so
You have just taken over a team and want to know which standards are actually in force before you change anything
“When you tolerate C-player performance, the A players on your team see it.”
A worked example
Ashgrove Dental Supply is a fictional distributor. Its top regional sales manager brought in more revenue than anyone else on the team. Customer service had complained twice that he shouted at them on calls when an order was late, and two of its people had asked to move to other regions. His director had raised neither complaint with him, because his numbers were the best in the company.
When the director placed the sales team on the matrix, she put it in High Performing Team at first. Then she looked at what she had tolerated. The team's written standards said people raise problems with each other calmly and directly, and she had let one person break that standard for six months. She moved the team to Potentially Toxic Team, and she noticed that other people in sales had started to speak to customer service the way he did.
She met him that week. She described the two calls, named the standard they broke and said what needed to change, which was that he would take a late order to the customer service lead calmly, in person or in writing. She asked what was making the late orders so hard for him, and he told her two of his largest customers had been promised delivery dates the warehouse could not meet. She agreed to sort out those dates with the warehouse manager, and they set a review for the end of the month.
She acted on the behavior despite his numbers because other people in sales were already copying it, and her silence had told them it was acceptable.
Try it this week
Pick one team you lead. By the end of the week you'll know which quadrant it sits in, judged by what you have tolerated, and you'll have one standard written down with an owner and a review date.
Write two short lists, the team's standards for results and its standards for behavior, as specifically as you can.
Next to each standard, write down the last time someone fell short of it and what you did about it.
Place the team in one of the four quadrants using what you did in step 2, since that is the standard the team actually works to.
Pick the one standard you have let slide most often and rewrite it so a new hire could tell whether the team met it this week.
Raise it with the person or the team this week, and agree who owns it and the date you will review it together.
Try it with AI
Copy this prompt into ChatGPT, Claude or any AI assistant and fill in the part in square brackets. It will walk you through the model one step at a time, using your own situation.
Prompt
I lead this team: [describe the team, what it delivers, and a recent moment when someone fell short on results or on behavior].
If you can open links, read https://www.colincox.com/library/high-standards first. It explains Setting and Maintaining High Standards, a two-by-two of the standard of results against the standard of behavior, with four quadrants called High Performing Team, Potentially Toxic Team, Low Performing Nice Team and Country Club.
Work through it one part at a time. Ask me one or two questions about the results standard and wait for my answers, then do the same for the behavior standard. Then ask what I actually did the last few times someone fell short of each one, and use my answers to place the team in a quadrant. Push back if I describe a standard vaguely, or if I judge the team by what we say instead of by what I tolerate.
Finish by helping me choose the one standard to act on first. Ask me what I will say, who owns it, and the date we will review it.
Leave out names and anything confidential before you paste in your situation.
From Colin's work
I'm a recovering conflict avoider. I managed a junior member of my team who was a great guy. He was really nice, really personable, had a great attitude and was liked by everybody on the team, but he was not strong technically. At the time I believed you had to give people something like nine pieces of positive feedback for every negative one, which I now think is hogwash. So for a year I praised all the trivial things he did well, and I never really told him where he stood or what he needed to work on. I didn't want to upset him, and I didn't want conflict.
Then we did a round of promotions on the team, and he didn't get one. He asked me, "Colin, why didn't I get that?" The honest answer would have been that I had let him down. I didn't challenge him, I didn't raise the bar for him, and I didn't tell him where he wasn't meeting it. I just focused on the trivial things he did well and left him to drown.
I've learned something else since then. When you tolerate C-player performance, the A players on your team see it. They often won't tell you, because they don't think it's their place, but behind your back they are wondering why their leader is tolerating it.
