THE GUT CHECK SERIES · Failure · No. 1
One leadership question, examined. A new one every Tuesday.

Do you (and they) know the standard?

I have corrected good people for missing a mark I never showed them. It is one of the quieter ways a leader fails, because it never feels like failure in the moment. It feels like enforcing standards. The person fell short, you noticed, you said so. Only later, if you are honest, do you realize they were aiming at a target you kept in your own head.

A standard nobody can see is not a standard. It is a trap. You cannot hold someone to a line you never drew, and the fact that the line is obvious to you is exactly the problem: the clearer it is in your mind, the easier it is to forget you never said it out loud. Experience does this to all of us. The things we know coldest are the things we stop explaining.

The question asks about both of you on purpose. Do you, and do they. Two failures hide in there and they look the same from the outside. Sometimes the standard was never set, and the team is improvising against a moving target. Sometimes it was set once, a year ago, in a room half of them weren’t in, and everyone has been quietly guessing ever since. Either way the result is the same: people working hard in slightly different directions, each one certain they know what “good” means, none of them actually aligned.

This is why setting the standard is a context-delivery job, not a paperwork job. When you make the standard visible, you are not lowering a hammer. You are handing your people the one thing that lets them check their own work before you ever see it. A team that knows the standard can self-correct. A team that doesn’t has to wait for you to be in the room, which means you have made yourself the bottleneck and called it leadership.

In practice the fix is cheap and slightly humbling. Say the standard before the work, not after the miss. Make it concrete enough to picture: not “be professional,” but “the client never hears about our internal problems.” Show an example of the line being met, and an example of it being missed, because people calibrate off contrast faster than off description. And then test the most uncomfortable question of all, which is whether you could state the standard cleanly if someone asked. If you can’t, the failure was never theirs.

The best leaders I served under made the standard so plain that falling short was a real choice, not an accident of guessing. That clarity is not softness. It is respect. You are telling your people you would rather they succeed than that you catch them failing.

Gut check: the last time someone fell short of your expectations, ask the harder question: had you actually shown them the line, or only assumed they could see it?

Row Well and Live.

Next in the series: The WHY Is the Work. The Gut Check series runs every Tuesday. See every question so far.