Setting and Maintaining High Standards

Make the standard clear enough to act on

If someone delivers strong results while treating colleagues badly, address the behavior. If a supportive team keeps missing its commitments, address the results. As the leader, you're responsible for maintaining both standards.

The framework I teach puts results and behaviors on separate axes. It helps you ask what the team delivers and how people work together while delivering it. You need a clear expectation for each, followed by decisions that show you mean it.

Start with something specific. Choose one result that keeps falling short or one behavior you've been excusing. Describe what needs to change, check that the person has what they need and agree how you'll follow up.

At a glance

• The framework separates the standard you set for results from the standard you set for behavior, and as the leader you're responsible for maintaining both.
• How you respond when a commitment is missed or someone behaves poorly tells your team more about the real standard than anything written on the wall.
• Write each standard as something people can observe, agree what happens when it slips and review it on a set date.

Understand what the framework is asking you to assess

This is the results-and-behaviors matrix used in my leadership teaching. Its practical purpose is to make expectations and tolerated behavior discussable. The four quadrants describe combinations you can examine in your own team.

That last label needs care. Blake and Mouton's earlier Managerial Grid uses Country Club for high concern for people and low concern for production. Here, the axes concern the standards you maintain for results and behavior. Use the definitions shown in this diagram when you discuss it with your team.

Place the team using recent examples. Look at what happened when a commitment was missed or someone behaved poorly. Your response gives you more useful evidence than the values written on the wall.

Deal with the high performer whose behavior causes harm

This is the difficult case because the person's contribution is visible and the costs may sit elsewhere. Before you accept the trade-off, look at what other people have to do to work around the behavior.

Do colleagues avoid asking for information? Does someone else repair client relationships? Are managers spending time resolving repeated conflict? Get concrete examples and give the person a fair chance to respond.

Michael Housman and Dylan Minor's November 2015 working paper examined more than 50,000 workers across 11 firms and found that avoiding a worker terminated for serious misconduct could produce larger estimated savings than replacing an average worker with a superstar, within their dataset and cost assumptions. The paper uses a specific misconduct definition and company records, so apply the lesson with that scope in mind.

I would address the behavior directly while preserving a fair process. State what happened, the standard it fell short of and what must change. Agree the support, review period and response if the behavior continues. Get the appropriate management or HR help for the seriousness of the issue.

Make the standard visible without making the person's private situation public. Your team needs to see consistent expectations and action. The details of an individual performance process should stay with the people responsible for it.

Keep supportive teams accountable for delivery

A team can care about each other and still need a much clearer results standard. Look at the work before deciding the problem is effort.

Are the outcomes specific? Does someone own each one? Do people know which priority takes precedence when commitments conflict? Have you committed the team to more work than it can complete?

Make the required result concrete enough to review. Include the deadline, the quality needed and who accepts the work. If you want a recommendation, say which decision it needs to support. If you want a completed handoff, define what the receiving team needs.

Then ask what is preventing delivery. You may need to remove a dependency, make a decision, train someone or reset capacity. Once those conditions are clear, hold people to the agreement and discuss a miss promptly.

Support includes helping someone meet the standard and telling them when they're falling short.

Avoid letting a comfortable relationship postpone that conversation until the consequences are much harder to manage.

Write behavioral expectations as actions

Words such as respectful, collaborative and accountable need examples. Your team should be able to recognize when the standard is being met and when it needs attention.

Here's a hypothetical example.

A leadership team wants better collaboration between sales and delivery. It agrees that a proposal requiring unusual work gets reviewed by the delivery owner before the client receives it. If the review will delay the response, the owners agree a revised client commitment together.

Now the standard can be used. You can check whether the review happened, whether the right person had authority and whether the client was kept informed. If someone bypasses it, you can discuss that specific choice.

Use the same approach for meeting behavior. Agree how concerns are raised, how decisions are challenged and how people communicate after a decision. Keep the expectations short enough to remember and specific enough to apply.

Make it safe to raise a miss

People need a way to tell you that a commitment is at risk. Ask for early notice, the likely effect and a proposed response. If you punish the early warning, you'll make it harder to manage the underlying problem.

Amy Edmondson's 1999 field study linked psychological safety with learning behavior in 51 teams at one manufacturing company, with the observational setting limiting causal conclusions. That supports paying attention to whether people can discuss errors and ask for help while you maintain demanding expectations.

When someone raises a problem, first understand it. Decide what needs to happen now and who needs to know. Then address the cause, including any accountability issue. Keep the warning and the original decision clear in your own thinking so you respond fairly to each.

The same standard applies to you. If your late decision caused the miss, say so and change how you'll handle the next one. Ask the team to hold you to the commitments you make in the review.

Review the whole job before changing the target

A missed result deserves investigation. Check whether the target was realistic given the agreed resources and the other work you required. If you changed the priorities, update the commitments that depended on the earlier plan.

You can maintain high standards while changing a deadline for a sound reason. Explain the trade-off and who bears the consequence. An unexplained exception leaves other people uncertain about what still applies.

Be especially careful with targets that encourage people to transfer costs to another team. If speed improves while rework grows, review the full process. Make quality, handoffs and customer consequences part of the discussion.

After a problem is corrected, recognize the change. Be specific about what improved and what you expect to continue. People should understand how to succeed under the standard as clearly as they understand what happens when they miss it.

Write a team charter

A team charter is a one-page document where your team writes down the standards it has agreed to hold. It covers the standard for results, meaning what the team delivers and to what level, and the standard for behavior, meaning how people work together while delivering it. It also records what happens when someone falls short of a standard and how often the team will review the document.

The agreement about what happens when a standard slips is the part teams most often leave out. Without it, the charter lists good intentions and the team has to work out a response the first time someone misses. When the response is agreed in advance, the conversation about a slip starts from something everyone signed.

Each standard needs to be observable. I use a simple test: could a new hire tell whether the team met it this week? "We communicate well" fails that test, and "We respond to each other within 24 hours" passes it.

Example charter

Here's a hypothetical example for a regional operations leadership team of five.

Our standards for results

1. Each site publishes its weekly operating numbers by 10am every Monday.
2. Customer orders ship within two business days of confirmation, and the customer hears from us before an order is late.
3. Every safety incident is reported to the team the same day, and the site manager presents the corrective action at the next weekly meeting.
4. Each of us brings a written plan to the monthly review for any site that missed its target the previous month.

Our standards for behaviors

1. We respond to each other within 24 hours, even when the answer is that we need more time.
2. When a commitment is at risk, the owner tells the people affected as soon as they know, with the likely effect and a proposed response.
3. We raise disagreement in the meeting where the decision is made, and once it's made we support it in front of our own teams.
4. We take a concern about a colleague to that colleague before we take it to anyone else.

When a standard slips

Whoever sees the slip raises it with the person directly and privately within two business days, using the specific example. If the same standard slips again, either of them puts it on the agenda for the next leadership meeting. The regional director is held to this agreement too, and anyone on the team can raise a slip with them.

How we keep it alive

We re-read the charter at the first leadership meeting of each quarter and ask what we tolerated that we said we would not. We change any standard that no longer fits the work, and everyone signs the current version, the director included.

Template

Our standards for results

• Result standard 1: [what we deliver, to what level, by when]
• Result standard 2: ______
• Result standard 3: ______

Our standards for behaviors

• Behavior standard 1: [what someone would see us do]
• Behavior standard 2: ______
• Behavior standard 3: ______

When a standard slips

• Who raises it: ______
• How they raise it: ______
• How quickly: ______
• What happens if it slips again: ______

How we keep it alive

• Review date: ______
• Review question: What did we tolerate that we said we would not?
• Signed by: ______

Build the charter with your team rather than drafting it yourself and presenting it. If you rewrite the list yourself, people will treat it as your document and stop using it. Your own standards go through the same steps as everyone else's.

1. Ask each person to write two lists on their own, about five minutes each: our standards for results and our standards for behaviors.
2. Combine the lists and remove duplicates without editing anything yet.
3. Rewrite each standard until a new hire could tell whether the team met it this week.
4. Keep five or fewer for each list, choosing the standards the team is willing to be held to.
5. Agree in writing who raises a slip, how they raise it and how quickly.
6. Have everyone sign it, yourself included, and book the first review for no later than a quarter from now.

If you run short of time, shorten the lists and keep the agreement about what happens when a standard slips.

Reset one standard this week

Try this

Ask your team to write down its most important results and behavioral expectations separately. Compare the descriptions before showing them your own. Look for differences that could explain recent frustration.

Use these questions to make the discussion practical:

• Which result do we need to define more clearly?
• Which behavior have we allowed despite saying it matters?
• What resources or decisions does the team need to meet the expectation?
• Who needs an early warning when a commitment is at risk?
• How will we review progress without waiting for another incident?

Choose one expectation to clarify now. Write the observable standard, agree who owns it and set a review date. In two weeks, look at the actual work together and decide what needs further attention.

When you're ready to cover more than one expectation, use your answers as the first draft of the team charter.

Sources

• The Managerial Grid

  Robert R. Blake and Jane Srygley Mouton, Gulf Publishing, 1964. Original diagram reprinted with permission in The Pfeiffer Library, volume 26, second edition, 1998, page 166; hosted by Southern Nazarene University.

• Toxic Workers

  Michael Housman and Dylan Minor, Harvard Business School Working Paper 16-057, November 2015 version.

• Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams

  Amy Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly, June 1999. Original article hosted by MIT.