Every organization has two standards. There is the one in the handbook, on the wall, in the orientation deck. And there is the operative one, which is the worst behaviour that has been allowed to pass without consequence.
Only the second exists in any meaningful sense. Everyone who works there knows what it is, most of them could state it precisely, and it is almost never the same as the first.
People infer rules from enforcement
Nobody learns what an organization requires by being told. They learn it by watching what happens when somebody falls short, and the lesson from a single instance is disproportionate to anything a statement can accomplish.
A plant with a written rule about lockout procedure has a rule. A plant where a supervisor once skipped it to save forty minutes on a Friday, and nothing happened, has a different rule, and every person who heard about it now holds the real one. The written version continues to exist and continues to be recited, and its only remaining function is to signal that the organization says things it does not mean.
This is why the line is set at the worst permitted case rather than at the average. People are not calculating an expected value. They are identifying the boundary, and the boundary is wherever the last unpunished violation happened to fall.
Most organizations have too many to hold
Here is the failure that produces most of the others, and it looks like diligence while it is happening.
An organization names fifteen values, or twenty behavioural expectations, or a code of conduct running to four pages. No leader can enforce fifteen things consistently. Enforcement therefore becomes selective, and selective enforcement teaches something far more corrosive than any individual lapse: that the operative rule is the leader’s discretion, and the published list is a menu from which items are drawn when convenient.
Three standards that are never negotiable will shape an organization. Fifteen that are aspirational will not shape anything, and their existence actively degrades the credibility of the three that mattered.
Which means the first act of setting standards is subtraction. What are the three or four things that will not be permitted here regardless of who does them, how much revenue is at stake, or what kind of week it has been?
A standard has to be violable
Most stated standards cannot be broken, which is why they never are.
We treat each other with respect. We pursue excellence. We act with integrity. Nobody can identify the moment one of these was breached, which means nobody can be held to any of them, which means they impose no constraint on anything.
A real standard names an observable act. Lockout is performed on every job without exception. Nobody is spoken to that way in front of the crew. Estimates go to the client with the contingency stated, every time. These can be violated unambiguously, which is precisely what makes them capable of doing work.
The test is whether you could be told that it happened and know immediately whether it counted.
Erosion happens by reasonable exception
Standards are rarely abandoned. They are exempted, one defensible case at a time.
The client was too important to lose. The person was going through a divorce. The deadline was genuinely impossible. It was a one-time situation and everybody understood the circumstances. Each of these is true, humane, and correct in isolation, and any leader who refused every one of them would be a machine rather than a manager.
The aggregate is the problem. After four exceptions the organization has learned that the standard applies except when there is a reason, and there is always a reason. What was a boundary has become a starting position in a negotiation, and the people most skilled at constructing reasons now have the most latitude.
The workable response is not refusing all exceptions. It is granting them explicitly, naming them as exceptions, and stating what remains the rule. An exception announced as an exception costs very little. One granted silently rewrites the standard for everyone watching.
Setting one
Four things, in order, and the last is the one that decides whether any of it holds.
Name the behaviour, specifically enough to be checked. Say why it matters, once, in terms of consequence rather than values. Say what happens when it is not met, before it has not been met by anybody in particular. Then be visibly bound by it yourself, in a case where it costs you something and people can see.
That last item is not symbolic. A standard the leader is exempt from is not a standard, it is a rule for other people, and the organization will classify it correctly within about a week. The fastest way to establish one is for the first visible instance of it binding somebody to be an instance of it binding you.
The entries that follow deal with what happens after: why the response to the first breach sets the real rule, how to correct without humiliating, what to do when the person violating the standard is your best performer, and how to end someone’s employment properly when it comes to that.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD