Your team’s performance will average around the leader’s standards. It is far too easy to say the team members are not performing to the standard, or they are poorly trained, or the supervisors are bad. But before any of that is evaluated, the leader must be looked at. When you are assessing the performance of a team the first place to start is the leader.
As the leader of a team or organization, your standard is the foundation for how the others will measure themselves and others. As you deploy your standards, the rest of the team will average around those standards. The leader needs to consistently evaluate themselves and ensure they never lower their standards just to make sure people can easily achieve them. But you must also be humble enough that you can admit it if your standards are too high. As I’ve written about previously, Perfection is dumb, and not a sustainable standard to expect. If you expect perfection, you can almost guarantee you need to adjust it. And it needs to be corrected quickly because the longer this expectation is allowed, the more demoralizing it becomes.
You will know if your standards are right when you have a few people that are not quite meeting them all the time, the majority meeting them consistently and a few others exceeding them regularly. As you get to this stage, you can increase the standards to move the team to a higher average. You will also want to decide if those not meeting the standard consistently are worth keeping around.
Once the leader has established robust standards, he or she needs to evaluate the rest of the team. The leader needs to inspire the supervisors to hold high standards. The supervisors are the most important piece to this puzzle. They will be expected to take the leader’s standards and hold that line with the rest of the employees. When the supervisors are empowered and taken care of, they will perform to the leader’s expectations. Micromanaging them will only get them to do enough to not be fired.
The bottom line here is to know that your people will average around your standards, so if you have low standards, so will your people. Also, understand there will never be a time that everyone will always meet the standard, but you must hold him or her accountable and keep the standard high.
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You are absolutely right. Perfection is dumb because it is an unrealistic expectation of oneself and others. I also love what you said about standard performance. One of the best pieces of advice I received was always exceed the standard because when you fail at something you won’t fall below the standard, you will still meet it.
Great point my friend! All it does is leave us frustrated!
A leader’so standard is what they tolerate. The acceptance of mediocrity is maddening.