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The First Move Great Leaders Make to Ignite High-Performance.

“He’s a nice guy, but I’m not sure he’s up to the job.” This is what the VP of Construction told the CEO about his main rival on the executive team, the COO.

The VP of Construction and the COO were equals on the org chart and both reported to the CEO. However, it irked the VP Construction immensely when outsiders assumed he reported to the COO, so he aimed to get him fired.

For over a year, the VP subtly undermined the COO in private conversations with the CEO and others. The executive team split into warring factions, backing whichever leader they believed would best serve their interests. Meanwhile, the CEO avoided intervening, preferring they resolve the conflict themselves.

Eventually, the CEO sided with the VP’s narrative and fired the COO, who, despite being well-liked, was less politically savvy.

This was my first encounter with office politics as a new HR manager. This experience, and many others like it, inspired me to help organizations rid themselves of this type of behavior and instead build a culture of accountability and excellence.

After over a decade of consulting with management teams, I’ve identified a few powerful leadership practices that significantly improve teamwork and operational outcomes in any team. One of the first things great leaders do to create a high-performance culture is set behavior standards.

Why We Need Behavior Standards

Many organizations offer similar products and services, but what sets them apart is how they deliver them. Effective leaders set clear guidelines on expected behaviors to align employee actions with the organization’s goals to proactively shape culture and influence results.

When team members understand how they are expected to act in various situations, they can confidently take initiative without consulting their manager on every decision. Additionally, if behavior expectations are not articulated, leaders cannot reasonably hold others accountable for actions they find unacceptable. Standards of conduct should provide the framework for discussions about performance and development.

Addressing unacceptable conduct becomes much easier when you can point to the related standard that everybody understands and has agreed to.

For instance, the CEO in the story above could have prevented the turmoil in his executive team and the resulting tremendous waste of time and energy if he had set this expectation and had the courage to enforce it:

“We don’t badmouth others. We address concerns directly and respectfully, without gossiping or involving others unnecessarily.”

Types of Behavior Standards

Values

Values are the fundamental beliefs, principles, and standards that guide company decisions and employee behavior.

Your organization’s values should set it apart from others. Generic statements like “integrity,” which could apply to any company, are assumed and don’t add value. Instead, focus on defining principles that uniquely reflect your organization’s culture and purpose.

Values should provide a framework for decision-making at all levels, especially when choices involve trade-offs. For instance, should a call center representative prioritize making a customer feel heard or shorten the call to reduce wait times for others? Should a technician stop an assembly line to investigate a possible flaw in the product? If no defect is found, should they be praised or reprimanded?

Values should answer the questions, “Who belongs here?” and “How should we make decisions?” For example, one of Google’s values is, “Focus on the user, all else will follow.” This helps employees prioritize the user experience over other priorities, such as immediate profitability.

Leadership Competencies

Without clear promotion criteria, organizations risk promoting people who prioritize their own advancement over empowering their teams. That’s because many of the behaviours that get people promoted are the exact opposite behaviours that make great leaders.

Organizational psychologist Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explains that we often promote the wrong people because it’s difficult to distinguish between confidence and competence. We tend to see leadership potential in individuals who are assertive, decisive, and self-promoting—traits that can mask the absence of true leadership qualities. In contrast, truly effective leaders are humble, listen more than they speak, praise others, and frequently invite input, saying, “What do you think?”

To counteract this leadership paradox, it’s essential to establish clear criteria for promotion decisions. I help my clients identify their leadership competencies by reverse-engineering their success stories and pinpointing the key behaviors that facilitated those successes. Leadership competencies answer the question: “Who belongs in leadership positions here?”

After defining leadership competencies, my clients establish a ‘people committee‘ to evaluate potential candidates against these criteria before including them in the succession plan.

Expectation Agreements.

Clear expectations are an employee’s most basic need and clarifying them is an employer’s most basic responsibility. Most conflict at work or otherwise is a result of unmet expectations.

For example, a manager might feel frustrated with a direct report’s work quality, despite never having provided clear guidelines, templates, or examples of what was expected. Similarly, an employee may become impatient with a colleague from another department for not sending the information they need, without having set a deadline or explained the urgency behind the request.

Creating expectation agreements with colleagues is as simple as asking, “Would you be willing to discuss what you need from me and what I need from you to set each other up for success?” After agreeing on your expectations, write them down and ask if you can check in periodically to see how well those expectations are being met. Click HERE for an example of what that could look like.

Expectation agreements answer, “What do we agree to do for one another?” and “What will we do when we feel our expectations are not being met?”

Reinforcing Behavior Standards

Everybody knows that putting a poster of the company’s values on the lunchroom wall won’t change a thing. In fact, doing so will likely create cynicism when executive’s behavior doesn’t align with what’s on the poster. So how do you weave behavior standards into the fabric of the culture?

The success or failure of any corporate standards rests on the shoulders of the CEO and executive team. First, they must do their best to model the company’s values and leadership competencies. When they inevitably slip up, they must have the courage to call each other on it and the humility to accept that feedback and adjust accordingly. When executives fail to do so, CEOs must have the courage to address it face to face (or via video conference if necessary) every time it happens. Failure to do so is failure to lead and will inevitably result in dysfunction and lost value multiplied by every level of the organization and the time it takes to resolve it. Leadership requires courage.

Once an executive team does their best to model behavior standards, they should be woven into every employee-related process. Here are a few ways to do that:

  • Design interview questions that reflect your company’s values and leadership competencies.
  • Include a video or live discussion with executives or long-term employees during new hire onboarding to explain each value, with real examples of how they’re practiced.
  • Base the performance management process on your company’s values and leadership competencies.
  • Align leadership competencies with your values. For instance, if one of your values is “Be Accountable,” a related leadership competency might be “Inspire Accountability in Others.”
  • Give employees who demonstrate the leadership competencies greater decision-making authority and responsibility.
  • Make promotion decisions using leadership competencies as key criteria.
  • Recognize and reward employees who embody the company’s values and leadership competencies during awards ceremonies.
  • Start each meeting with a “values moment,” where someone shares a recent example of an employee demonstrating a company value.

As team building expert Patrick M. Lencioni wrote, “From the first interview to the last day of work, employees should be constantly reminded that core values form the basis for every decision the company makes.”

The Payoff

Great leadership isn’t just about setting the right standards—it’s about striving to live them and having the courage to hold others accountable to do the same. By establishing clear behavior standards and reinforcing them consistently, leaders can transform their teams from dysfunctional or average to high-performance. The first step may seem simple, but when done right, its impact resonates throughout every corner of the organization, driving lasting success and a culture of excellence.

One Response

  1. These are such basic elements that are needed to be established early in the development of a team or nurturing an organizational culture. Many times these elements take a back seat to “performance”, “performance”, “performance”. Why, our monthly and quarterly results become our focus, rather than making sure we take the time to work with our team and clearly communicate our expectations that will allow an easier road to be followed in meeting and exceeding performance metrics. A map will help us get to our destination, and without one we may eventually get there, but at a much higher cost to the business, our employees and customers.

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