Setting and Maintaining High Standards

A team performs to the standard its leader maintains

Standards run on two dimensions at once. There is the standard of results, meaning what the team delivers, and the standard of behaviors, meaning how people treat each other while delivering it. Most leaders manage the first attentively and leave the second to look after itself.

Setting the bar is the easy half, and maintaining it is where the work actually is. A standard that is announced and then not enforced does more damage than never setting one, because it teaches people that what you say about standards is decorative. The bar is set by what you tolerate rather than by what you declare.

High performing

This team scores high on results and high on behaviors, and the two reinforce each other, because strong delivery builds the confidence to be candid and strong behavior builds the trust that keeps delivery honest. This is the only quadrant that holds up over time.

Potentially toxic

Here the results are high and the behaviors are not. The team delivers, and it costs people something to be on it. Performance covers the damage for a while, and the bill arrives later as conflict, burnout, and the quiet departure of people you could not afford to lose.

This is the quadrant that tests a leader most, because the results argue for looking away and the argument is a good one. What you do about a high performer who treats people badly is the single clearest statement you will ever make about your actual standards. Everyone is already watching, and they will draw their conclusion whether or not you intend to give them one.

Low performing and nice

Here the behaviors are high and the results are not. These teams are supportive and pleasant to be part of, they are well liked, and they are usually being carried by other parts of the organization, which delays the reckoning.

The failure mode here is that kindness without a results bar becomes comfort, and comfort quietly becomes the standard. Teams that are proud of their culture are the ones most able to use the behaviors bar as an argument against the results bar, which is worth watching for in yourself before you go looking for it in the team.

Country club

This team is low on both bars, relaxed on the surface and directionless underneath. It is usually the product of standards that were never set rather than standards that slipped, which makes it more tractable than it looks, because nobody has to be talked out of a position they never took.

Placing the team honestly

The diagnostic only works if you place the team by what is actually tolerated rather than by what is written down or intended. Leaders are reliably one quadrant more generous about their own team than the team is, which is worth knowing before you decide you are in the top right.

Whichever quadrant you are in, the move is the same. Raise the low bar, say plainly that you are raising it, and then enforce it somewhere visible early on. The enforcement is the part that does the work, because a team reads the first instance of it as the real answer to what you will tolerate.

One thing to try this week

Write two lists before you look at the matrix again. What are this team's standards for results, and what are its standards for behavior. Write them as specifically as you can.

The gap between the two lists, in length and in specificity, is usually the finding. Most leaders produce a detailed results list and a behaviors list made of adjectives.

Then take the vaguest item on the behaviors list and make it concrete enough to enforce, which means writing down what it looks like when someone falls short of it. Put both lists somewhere the team can see them, in a charter or an equivalent, and review them on a rhythm rather than after the next incident.