No matter how big your company is, no matter how experienced or informed you are, no matter how savvy you believe your team is, no matter how well people do their jobs, no matter how high your standards currently are…
Keep raising them.
It’s one of the core principles we talk about at Junto: raise your standards and lower your expectations. Better yet, replace expectations with standards.
Expectations are dangerous territory. They’re personal, subjective, rarely met and, therefore, often lead to negative emotions.
Standards, however, are different. They’re impersonal, objective, and with training and repetition, can often be met if not exceeded. As a result, they typically don’t lead to negative emotions.
In our new world order, when it’s tempting to come up with reasons why we can’t do the quality work we used to, it’s easy to lower our expectations and to lower our standards.
But if you truly believe that we have an unlimited capacity to excel at our work, to lead our teams, and to flourish as humans and organizations, then do the opposite: raise your standards.
