Do your standards scale?

I had coffee this week with a founder I've known for years. He's built a cracking business, and we were comparing notes over a quintessentially Melbourne Magic. We covered a lot of ground, but one thing came up that's really stuck with me:

The ability to grow any kind of business comes down to your capacity to articulate, very simply, what “excellent” actually looks like. Simple enough that others in your team can understand and buy into it. Then emulate and strengthen it. Perhaps even go beyond it. 

But most importantly, they need to be able to hold themselves and each other accountable to that standard – something I wrote about a few weeks back – without needing you in the room as supervisor every step of the way.

I reckon one of the biggest mistakes leaders make, particularly if they come from a technical background themselves, is keeping themselves as an essential part of the success equation. No one can do this job better than me, so I'd better have my eye on it at all times. That's wonderful for the ego. But it's a terrible mindset if your actual job is to grow or scale something... a team, an organisation, a product, a function, a whole business.

For as long as you keep yourself at the ‘centre of excellence’, you're not really growing anything. You're just maxing yourself out. You become, as Jim Collins put it, the genius with a thousand helpers.

The real job of growing anything isn't building the perfect product or perfect service offering. It's building a team who, between them, can be fierce custodians of the standards that got you here in the first place. Custodians of excellence. And then equipping the team to not just pursue those standards, but to hold themselves accountable to them... to ask for feedback, take it on board, call it out when someone hasn't quite got there, and give each other that feedback honestly. What Kim Scott might call a culture of radical candour.

Standards don't scale by accident. They scale because someone kept saying the quiet part out loud, long after people stopped asking.

Here's what I'm sitting with this week, and you might be too: if a new person joined your team tomorrow, how long would it take before they could tell you, in specific terms, what your standard of excellence actually is? Or is that just something you know when you see it, and lives in the work you quietly redo yourself?

Until next time,
Simon