7 Ways to Reset Your Leadership Standard

Episode #389 7 Ways to Reset Your Leadership Standard

Your Team Is Drifting. And It’s Your Fault.

Here’s something that most leaders won’t admit, even to themselves:

If your team isn’t moving forward…improving, delivering, raising the bar…it’s not staying still. It’s going backwards.

And almost every time I’ve seen a team slide? I could trace it directly back to leadership. Not a market downturn. Not a tough economy. Not a run of bad luck with personnel. Leadership.

That’s a hard pill to swallow. But swallowing it is exactly what separates leaders who perform from leaders who plateau.

What Leadership Drift Actually Looks Like

Leadership drift isn’t a dramatic event. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s slow, insidious, and invisible until it’s already cost you six months of momentum.

Here’s what you’ll start to see if drift has set into your team:

Missed deadlines. Not because the targets were unrealistic, but because “near enough” has quietly become acceptable.

Entitlement creeping in. Standards start to feel optional. People expect rewards without earning them.

Blame and excuses. You’ll rarely hear “I didn’t prioritise it”, but you’ll hear a thousand variations of “it wasn’t our fault.”

Broken commitments dressed up as competing priorities. Nobody tells you they couldn’t be bothered. They tell you something more important came up.

Slow decision-making. That sense of urgency you used to have? Gone. And no one’s in a hurry to get it back.

I’ve seen all of this in every team I’ve ever led. Including my own, at times.

Your team is already telling you whether you’re leading them well. They’re just not using words. The behaviours are plain as day, if you’re prepared to read them honestly.

The Confession Most Leaders Won’t Make

My daughter and business partner Em, who runs Your CEO Mentor as CEO, shared something publicly in a recent workshop that I think is worth repeating here.

8 months ago, her team was growing fast. Key people were on leave. Complexity had increased. And Em (one of the best young leaders I know) found herself telling herself: “They’re strong. They’ve got this. I can ease off while I deal with everything else.”

She was right that they were strong. She was wrong that easing off was harmless.

When she finally ran a quick mental check against the basics.

1. Does every person on my team have clarity on what I expect? 
2. How they’re performing? 
3. What their future looks like?

She already knew the answer before she finished the thought.

They didn’t have that clarity. And she’d been so focused on the outputs of the business that she’d let her leadership of the people slide.

Her team wasn’t performing badly. But they weren’t performing to their fullest potential either. And leadership felt harder than it needed to.

That’s drift. It’s quiet. It’s common. And it happens to every leader, at every level, in every industry.

The question isn’t whether you’ll experience it. The question is what you do when you see it.

The Leadership Reset: Where to Start

When I’m asked where to begin with a leadership reset, my answer is always the same.

The tone, the pace, and the standard.

Years ago, at a social event, someone asked me what I actually did as a CEO. I started listing off projects and challenges and milestones. She looked at me blankly. Swahili would have landed better.

That question stuck with me. And what I landed on, after a couple of days of honest reflection, was this:

As the leader, I set the tone. I set the pace. I set the standard. Everything else flows from those three things.

Resetting the Tone

What you tolerate is what you teach.

It’s not the speech you give. It’s the behaviour you walk past without comment. Every time you let something slide…a dismissive remark in a meeting, an excuse dressed up as an explanation, someone staying silent when they should be contributing…you’re telling your whole team that the bar is wherever you let it fall.

To reset the tone:

Call it out. If you’ve been in drift, take accountability for it. Don’t blame the team. Don’t pretend you’ve just discovered their failures. Say clearly: “I haven’t been as deliberate as I need to be. That changes now.”

State the non-negotiables. What behaviours are you absolutely not willing to tolerate? Pick three. Be specific. Be consistent. Not “I want people to be more accountable.” Something concrete: “If you’ve made a commitment to this team, you keep it, or you tell me before it’s broken, not after.”

Stop rewarding effort and start rewarding results. Busy organisations produce a lot of activity. Not a lot of performance. The fastest way to get more of what you want is to stop celebrating the wrong things.

Resetting the Pace

I spent most of my corporate career frustrated by how slowly things moved. And I learned something important: no one moves faster than you. If you want pace, you have to set it. No one’s going to surprise you with speed.

When someone brings me an estimate or a schedule, I always challenge it. Not irrationally. But without fail. The question I ask isn’t “Can you do it faster?” it’s “What would it take to go faster? What would we have to do differently?”

In my experience, 80% of the time there was a way to increase speed without spending more money or committing more resources. People just hadn’t been pushed to think creatively about it.

The other thing I’ll say about pace: you need to kill perfectionism. Excellence over perfection. Faster doesn’t mean sloppier. But sitting on something to polish it past the point of diminishing returns isn’t diligence, it’s a pace problem.

Resetting the Standard

Here’s the phrase that sums this up better than anything I’ve come across:

The standard you walk past is the standard you set.

I can’t trace who said it first, and it doesn’t matter. It’s one of the truest things I know about leadership.

What you say the standard is matters far less than what you allow to happen. If you enforce it, it exists. If you don’t, it’s just words.

Performance standards and behavioural standards are both in play here. Performance is about results, quality, speed, value. Behaviour is about how your team operates, how they communicate, challenge, contribute, hold themselves accountable.

One important distinction I’ve always held:

Performance failure often means capability development is needed. I’ll give people time, coaching, and support to close a performance gap.

But behaviour is a choice. If someone is behaving in a way that’s damaging the team culture, that’s different. That’s a conversation that can’t wait, and it can’t be dressed up in softness. The person has made a choice, and they need to understand what choosing differently looks like.

Seven Rules of Thumb for a Successful Reset

1. Be ambitious.
   No one gets inspired by weak standards. Set the bar high, just make sure it’s achievable.

2. Only set a standard you’ll stand by.
   The first time you back down from a hard decision, you lose all credibility for the reset. Don’t talk it up if you’re not prepared to hold it.

3. No exceptions for individuals.
   I don’t care how long they’ve been there or how much everyone likes them. If you want performance, everyone meets the minimum acceptable standard. When the team sees that you mean it for everyone, that’s when they start to believe you mean it.

4. Communicate relentlessly.
   You can give a speech Martin Luther King Jr. would have been proud of, and two hours later, people are thinking about dinner. You have to say this stuff over and over until you’re sick of the sound of your own voice. That’s when it’s landing.

5. Watch for the phrases that signal drift is still winning.
   “We have to pick our battles.” “That’s just Rob.” “It’s not that big a deal.” “It’s just taking a bit longer than expected.” These are red flags. Call them out when you hear them.

6. Watch the scoreboard.
   If the numbers don’t move, the standard isn’t being met. Don’t let someone talk you into the fact that things are fine when the indicators say otherwise. Show me, don’t tell me.

7. Demonstrate you’re serious.
   If there are no consequences for not meeting the bar, there is no bar. Sometimes you have to make a call, and yes, that includes an up-or-out decision for people who refuse to meet it.

A leadership reset is not an announcement. It’s not an email. It’s not a new set of rules.

It’s the daily discipline of not walking past what you said mattered.

The moment you drift, the bar doesn’t hold where it was. It drops. Every single time. Which means getting it back always requires more effort than keeping it up would have.

If any of this resonates, if you’re sitting there quietly acknowledging that your team might be a bit further into drift than you’d like to admit, that’s the awareness you need to start.

The work starts there.