The Standards Problem

Part One

Standards, for the person who has built a senior career, are rarely just standards. They are the medium through which the person has expressed who she is, and the medium through which the work has earned its reputation. The work was good because the standard was held. The standard was held because of who the person is. The two have become so closely identified, over decades, that asking the standard to flex is, structurally, asking the person to flex.

This is not how it is usually described. From outside, and often from inside, the standards are described as practical requirements of the work. The deck has to be at this level because the client expects it. The product has to be at this level because the market expects it. The decision has to be at this level because the team will follow what is modelled. All of these are true. None of them is the full picture. Underneath the practical requirement is the older fact, which is that the standard is the way the person knows herself, and the way the world has come to know her.

What this means in practice is that the standard cannot be loosened by an act of will. The person who tries to lower the standard by deciding to lower it usually fails, and is usually surprised by the failing. The decision is made on a Monday. By Wednesday the work that has been produced at the looser standard has been quietly redone, and the looser standard has been quietly restored, and the cycle that was meant to be interrupted has resumed. The mind agreed to loosen. Something else did not.

That something else is the self the standard has been expressing. It does not negotiate with the mind on equal terms. It has been running the production for a long time, and it has been validated for it in concrete ways: bonuses, promotions, reputations, the look on a senior person's face when the work landed. The validations are real. They produce, over time, an identity whose felt sense of integrity is built around the standard being held. Asking that identity to flex feels, in the body, like asking the integrity to thin.

What compounds this is that almost everyone around the person agrees with the standard. The team knows that the standard is what the work is. The clients know it. The people at home know it. The standards are not a private quirk. They are part of the contract under which the person is in the room she is in. Loosening them, without anything else to put in the gap, would actually fail the contract. So the loosening, if it is to happen, cannot just be a loosening. It has to be a different arrangement.

Part Two

The different arrangement is rarely the one the person initially proposes. The first proposal is usually a delegation move. Let someone else do the part of the work that does not need me at this standard. This is often the right tactical move and it is rarely the whole answer, because the part of the work that the person is genuinely at the standard about is usually the part she has chosen not to delegate.

The second proposal is usually a redefinition. The standard is described differently, in language that allows for a wider range of executions to count as meeting it. This can work, and it sometimes does. It can also be a way of avoiding the actual question. The actual question is whether the standard, as it has been operating, is still the right standard for the work this person now wants to be doing.

The first reading of that question is that the work itself has changed. The team is larger, the business is larger, the inputs are different, and so the standard that fitted an earlier configuration of the work has to be re-fitted to the current one. This is true and it is not the whole reading. The deeper reading is that the person has changed. The standard was, in part, the language of a self that was at a particular stage of becoming who she now is. The person at the next stage is not, necessarily, the person who would hold the same standard in the same way. The work she would do, at her next stage, may call for a different standard, held differently.

Working out what that different standard might be is the slow, uncomfortable, often initially destabilising part of the work. It is not a strategy session. It is closer to a re-meeting of the self. What has the standard been doing for me. What would I lose if it were not holding the shape it has been holding. What am I genuinely willing to lose. What would I rather lose than carry on the way I have been. These are not questions that yield clean answers in one sitting. They yield partial answers across months, as the work and the life slowly re-arrange around what is becoming visible.

In my own years, the standard I was holding in the role I was performing in banking and the C-suite was a standard that had been right for the version of me at thirty. By forty, when the body finally insisted, it was no longer right. The reconstruction took years and was not, primarily, a logistical reconstruction. It was an identity one, and the standards have changed not because they have been lowered, but because the person they were expressing has changed.

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